Build, buy, or borrow: How to choose the right strategy for your organization

Sponsored by

Stop playing the guessing game. LHH can help you make better compensation decisions based on the benchmarks and insights in their Salary Guide. Grab your free copy.

Think you have a skills gap? Maybe. But maybe not.

“When an HR leader says, ‘we have a skills gap,’ what they’re talking about is a gap between the skills they believe that they need to execute the strategic priorities of the business,” Cali Williams Yost, founder and CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group, told HR Brew during an October virtual event. But, she added, “Sometimes it is really something else.”

That something else might be an onboarding process that’s not creating the conditions for new hires to succeed, or a leadership program that’s not properly preparing managers to lead across timezones and technologies. And then there’s the elephant in the room: AI.

“How are you training the domain experts in your organization to be able to apply AI to their jobs? You can hire in that experienced person with the AI skills, but if everybody else is floundering, it’s not going to make much of a difference,” she said, later adding, “These are things beyond the skills gap that have to really be looked at, so that it’s the holistic picture.”

Now, if you have checked these boxes and still think you have a skills gap, put down the job posting and step away from LinkedIn. Williams Yost, drawing on her decades of experience helping organizations build high-performing, engaged workforces, shared with us what HR leaders should consider before they buy, build, or borrow talent.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How can HR leaders get ahead of and spot skills gaps?

I’m always fascinated by how few times, let’s say, hiring or talent groups would go out into the organization…and say, “This is the analysis we’ve done. Do you agree? What have we missed? What more would you suggest that we do? And are these indeed the skills that you see that we need?’ And in that process, you may find that there are people you didn’t even know about that had these skills that you thought you needed to hire in for, and you could get some good intelligence around exactly how you may need to train your people, your existing talent pool, to get those skills.

Is there a practical test for figuring out whether it makes most sense for your organization to build, buy, or borrow talent?

I want to start with buy first, because I think that’s the default…I’m going to go back to my domain expert, experienced hire with the AI capability. Now, there are not a lot of those people…and they’re going to be very expensive. They are not coming into your office five days a week, so your employee value proposition better be really on fire, so they feel they can do what they need to do. You know, it’s not to say you don’t need to hire them, but it’s just know that that is going to come with some costs.

Then we get to build. This, I think, is an area of untapped value and potential. I’m going to again go back to my experienced person, domain expert who needs to adopt AI. So invest in them…It’s not like buying a piece of technology that you can depreciate…it costs money, but you have to look at the return that you’re going to get from it. So where it sort of falls apart is we have to make sure we have the right mix of mediums for training. So sometimes all we do is give them videos and a lunch and learn, and then we’re like, ‘okay, go have at it’...You got to experiment, and you’ve got to iterate…if you give your domain experts that ability, that’s where the magic is.

Sometimes you do have to borrow, and it makes sense…let’s say it’s a very specific part of the job that is episodic, and you don’t need it all the time, or it’s a very sort of time-bound experience where maybe you do have somebody come in with in a particular domain who knows how to use AI and they’re working with that group for a particular period of time. You don’t need to hire that person on.

What move would you urge HR and talent leaders to make this quarter to get ahead of that next skill shift?

Educate yourself on the labor demographic contraction. I am shocked still how few people in leadership positions really are aware of what’s happening.

The second thing I would have you do is just start with the work…but first look at where some of this is systemic and where you have to make some of those changes, and then look at the the new workflows…and all of this can involve your workforce, which really is a wonderful way to engage them and make them feel part of the solution.