Build, Buy, Borrow (and Bot): Choosing a Talent Strategy on Purpose

When I walked into CCMWA, roughly a third of our workforce was eligible to retire. That's not a staffing problem — that's an institutional-knowledge problem wearing a staffing costume. And it forced a question every organization eventually faces, whether it admits it or not: when a skills gap opens up, how are you actually going to close it?

Most organizations never answer that question on purpose. They react to whichever vacancy is loudest, and six months later call the resulting mess "our talent strategy." At SHRM25 I laid out the four real options — and why picking one deliberately beats reacting every time.

The four options

Every talent gap gets closed one of four ways, and each comes with a real trade-off — there's no free option here.

• Build — develop current employees through training, job rotation, special assignments, and action learning. Pro: retention, institutional fit, a visible career path. Con: it's slow, and it only works if people are actually bound to the organization — otherwise you've just trained someone else's next hire.
• Buy — recruit externally. Pro: fresh perspective, new leadership styles, speed when you need a seat filled now. Con: higher upfront cost, competition for the same candidates everyone else wants, and a longer runway to full productivity.
• Borrow — freelancers, consultants, vendor arrangements that transfer skill. Pro: talent on demand with limited long-term investment. Con: training cost, turnover risk, and payroll/legal complexity if you're not careful.
• Bot — automation and AI doing the work instead of a person doing it. The newest option on the list, and increasingly the first one worth checking before you spend on the other three.

What we actually did at CCMWA

We chose Build as our primary strategy — not because it was easiest, but because it was right for a utility where institutional knowledge about this specific system, these specific assets, these specific regulatory relationships is genuinely hard to buy on the open market.

That meant building a real program, not a memo: mentoring, leadership development, and a Career Conversations process covering personal branding, executive presence, and internal interview practice — so people were genuinely ready for the roles they were stepping into, not just hopeful about them.

The research backs the bet: internally promoted employees outperform externally hired peers for their first two years in a role, and cost roughly 18% less to get there. Since we launched the program in 2019, we've filled more than 90% of our open leadership positions internally. We still hire externally when the role calls for it — Build doesn't mean Build-only — but it's no longer the accident.

The takeaway

Build isn't automatically the right call for every organization, every role, every year. But choosing it on purpose — with eyes open about what it costs and what it compounds into — beats discovering your talent strategy by accident during an exit interview.