Only five per cent of Canadian hiring managers report having the headcount and skills to complete high-priority projects, according to Robert Half Canada's 2026 survey of 1,500 hiring managers – with 57 per cent reporting active skills gaps in their departments. Those figures are accelerating a shift from vacancy-driven recruitment to proactive talent pipeline management as a core business strategy, according to one senior talent leader.

The solution to building and maintaining an effective talent pipeline within an organization isn’t faster hiring, but a deeper structural change in how organizations build and sustain their workforce over time, says Ray Chaaya, Vice President of Talent and Culture at Zurich Canada in Ottawa. Chaaya has spent more than 20 years working across talent acquisition, development, and organizational culture, and he says when every organization competes for the same pool of experienced professionals, no one actually grows the talent supply.

"If every insurer is competing for the same people, then we're largely just moving the talent around the industry rather than creating new talent," says Chaaya. "We can't really recruit our way out of a structural talent challenge – we also have to just create new talent."

Assessing skills needs first

At Zurich Canada, that conviction has produced a concrete change in how hiring decisions begin, according to Chaaya. Before any role goes to market, the team asks what capabilities the business strategy actually requires and what the most effective path to develop them is. That might mean an external hire, growing internal talent, or identifying candidates with adjacent skills who can build sector expertise over time, he says.

One visible outcome is Zurich Canada's apprenticeship program, developed in partnership with Seneca Polytechnic, a college in Toronto, which allows individuals to earn professional credentials while gaining real work experience inside the organization – creating a structured entry point for those who wouldn’t have found one through the sector's traditional channels. Building non-traditional pathways in is increasingly how forward-looking employers are responding to structural talent shortfalls.

Such partnerships also expose the organization to people who may not have considered the industry at a potential career, widening the pool of potential talent, according to Chaaya.

Building the pipeline, connecting the architecture

The failure Chaaya identifies most consistently is not within individual programs – it’s between them. Talent acquisition, talent development, and talent management are routinely managed as separate functions. Each may operate well independently, but the pipeline breaks at every handoff, he says –leaving the skills gaps reported in the Robert Half Canada survey, 2026 Demand for Skilled Talent: Human Resources.

An outstanding internship program produces graduates with no clear next step. Learning and development investments go unconnected to visible internal opportunities. Succession conversations happen in isolation from recruitment decisions, meaning roles that could have served as internal development moves are instead filled from outside.

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