Build, Buy, Borrow, or Bot

Building a flexible, multi-component workforce

You need a new skillset on your team. Maybe it’s data analytics. Maybe it’s organizational design or strategic workforce planning. Maybe it’s a critical technology capability that didn’t even exist in your planning horizon a year ago. The mission can’t wait—but your existing pipeline can’t deliver fast enough.

So what do you do?

The way I see it, to get the right workforce you need at the right time, you have four options. The first is you build it within your organization through continuing education and upskilling. The second? You buy it from outside through recruiting and talent acquisition. If you need surge capacity or just a consult, you borrow it through gig work, a contract, or 1099 labor. And sometimes it doesn’t require a person but can be done by a machine, so you bring on the bots.

But when do you need what kind of talent to join your workforce?

Let’s decode it. 🚀

In a world where talent is scarce, work is evolving, and tech is reshaping the nature of contribution, how we acquire capability matters more than ever. Talent strategy is no longer just about hiring. It’s about making deliberate, informed choices across a spectrum of options for getting the job done—each with its own tradeoffs.

Let’s take a look at what this looks like for each of our options:

Buy: Recruit It In

When to Use:

• You have a definable capability gap

• The talent you need exists in the labor market

• The need is enduring enough to justify full-time investment

Considerations:

• Can we attract the right people?

• Do we understand what value they bring?

• Can we onboard and retain them effectively?

Risks:

• High cost of acquisition and potential churn

• Culture misalignment if not managed well

• Misuse of skills post-hire if roles aren’t clearly defined

Recruiting in talent can bring in fresh expertise, but it demands intentional integration. Just bringing someone in isn’t enough; we need to make sure they can succeed within our systems.

Build: Develop Internally

When to Use:

• You already have high-potential people

• The skill is strategic and not widely available externally—and/or knowledge of your business processes and culture is critical

• You want to create sustainable institutional strength

Considerations:

• Is your learning infrastructure mature enough?

• Will development outpace mission urgency?

• Are we ready to deploy and elevate people once they are trained?

Risks:

• Training may not match real-world demands

• Frustration if upskilled people aren’t empowered to use their new skills

• High development costs without guaranteed return

Building talent internally reinforces long-term capability, but requires patience, trust, and follow-through. It’s a long game, but one thing we’ve found as we’ve built teams…is that it’s often easier to teach people who understand your business processes new tech skills than it is to teach technologists all the nuances of your business processes.

Borrow: Bring It In Temporarily

When to Use:

• The work is project-based or time-bound

• The skills are highly specialized or rapidly evolving

• You need outside expertise without long-term commitment

Considerations:

• How will we ensure knowledge transfer?

• Are they embedded with internal teams or siloed?

• How are we managing ethical, compliance, and security concerns?

Risks:

• Loss of knowledge when contractors rotate out

• Cultural fragmentation or friction with internal staff

• Potential overreliance on outsourced expertise

Borrowing talent offers agility, but only works when you can effectively integrate and translate what those experts bring into long-term institutional capability. That isn’t to say you don’t need that specialized expertise, but often it needs to be embedded in the organization in a way that encourages buy-in, cultural understanding, and teamwork.

Bot: Automate or Augment

When to Use:

• The task is repetitive, rules-based, or predictable

• Scale is more important than nuance

• Technology can eliminate burden or free up humans for more valuable work

Considerations:

• Are we automating the right task, or just digitizing bad processes?

• Do we trust the outputs enough to act on them?

• Are we thinking about ethics, inclusion, and human oversight?

Risks:

• Automating broken processes

• Reducing jobs without redesigning meaningful work

• Undermining trust if humans are removed too far from decisions

Automation is not a cure-all, but when used thoughtfully, it amplifies human talent by freeing us from drudgery.

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Here are a couple more resources on deciding what processes to automate:

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Decision Framework

This table gives you some factors to consider when you’re thinking about how to build out your workforce to capture missing capabilities!

Integrating the Options

Let’s be clear—no organization is going to use only one of these options. Even a previously single-entry-point organization like the U.S. Army has had to modernize for skill acquisition by bringing folks in through lateral entry (direct commission, direct accession), by contracting support, and automation. But the key is knowing when and how to use each method and how to sequence them as part of your overall talent strategy.

Sometimes you borrow expertise to stand up a function while building the internal talent pipeline to sustain it. Sometimes you automate the easy stuff so your team can focus on what only humans can do.

It’s all about building an adaptive talent system that can flex, grow, and respond to changing demands. That’s how we get ready for what’s next.

Capability Is the New Currency

We’re all struggling with the same fast pace of change and constrained resources, so we have to be strategic about how we can rapidly bring on and integrate the talent we need and how we decide what work we do. Our most strategic decisions in the space are about capability, and how we acquire the capability is a leadership decision, not just an HR one.

The future of work won’t be owned by the organizations with the longest résumés—it will be won by those that know how to assemble the right capabilities at the right time, for the right mission. Agile and strategic talent management isn’t just nice to have anymore, and it’s not even just about winning—it’s about survival.