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.

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