Build Talent Now

By Olofsson & Company — Published: March 8, 2023

Most companies treat talent like a utility — available on demand, priced by the hour. The ones winning the next decade treat it like infrastructure: built deliberately, maintained continuously, and impossible to replicate overnight. This article covers talent strategy and workforce planning for growth companies — specifically how to build a sustainable talent pipeline before the shortage forces your hand. At Olofsson & Company, our proprietary AI platform and specialist consultants help organisations do exactly that, faster and with higher precision than traditional search ever could.

The Talent Crisis Is Structural, Not Cyclical

Every downturn produces the same comforting myth: wait it out, and talent will come to you. It will not. The forces reshaping the labour market are structural, not cyclical, and they are accelerating.

The retirement wave that demographers warned about for years is now cresting. When this article was first researched in 2023, estimates pointed to tens of millions of experienced professionals exiting the workforce across mature economies — with a significantly smaller Generation X cohort available to replace them.¹ That gap has not closed. It has widened, because the skills the departing generation carried are not the skills the incoming one was trained to develop.

Compounding this, the pace of technological change means the half-life of professional skills has collapsed. Roles that did not exist five years ago — AI engineers, GenAI product leads, blockchain architects, LLM safety specialists — are now among the most contested positions in the global market. The talent pool for these roles is genuinely thin. Unlike other shortages, you cannot solve this one by looking harder or paying more. You solve it by building earlier.

High-performing companies — defined by sustained revenue growth and profitability — consistently fill a far greater proportion of their senior leadership positions from within than their lower-performing counterparts. That pattern is not luck. It is the compounding return on a talent investment made years before the vacancy arose.

The AI Talent Squeeze: A Category of Its Own

If the general talent shortage is a long-burning fire, the AI and emerging technology talent shortage is an accelerant poured on top of it.

Demand for senior professionals in artificial intelligence, generative AI, machine learning infrastructure, and adjacent domains — cybersecurity, distributed systems, data architecture — is outpacing supply by a ratio that no traditional recruiting model is equipped to handle. Universities are producing graduates; they are not producing the seasoned, deployment-ready leaders that growth companies need in roles like Chief AI Officer, Head of MLOps, or VP of Data.

The problem is further distorted by concentration. A disproportionate share of qualified AI talent clusters within a small number of hyperscalers and frontier labs. Attracting these individuals into high-growth companies — where the equity story is real but the brand recognition is lower — demands a different approach. It demands knowing who they are before they are looking, reaching them through the right channels, and making a compelling case that connects to their professional ambitions, not just their salary expectations.

This is precisely what Olofsson & Company's proprietary AI platform is built for. It maps talent landscapes in real time, surfaces passive candidates who are not visible on conventional job boards, and enables our specialist consultants to engage with precision — not volume. The result is a materially shorter time-to-hire for senior technology roles, and a meaningfully higher success rate at the offer stage.

Build vs. Buy: A Strategic Choice, Not an Either/Or

The debate between internal development and external hiring is often framed as a binary. It is not. The most resilient talent strategies combine both — but they are deliberate about the ratio and the conditions under which each lever is pulled.

In practice, a build/buy ratio of 60/40 to 70/30 internal-to-external tends to produce the strongest outcomes for growth companies: enough external infusion to maintain cognitive diversity and access specialist capability, while preserving the cultural coherence and retention economics that come from developing talent from within.

What a Broken Talent Strategy Looks Like

Most organisations do not have a talent problem. They have a talent strategy problem. The symptoms are recognisable, and they compound quickly:

• Reactive hiring only. Vacancies are filled as they arise, not anticipated. Every search starts from zero.
• No dedicated talent ownership. Surveys consistently show that fewer than half of companies have a dedicated talent-management function.² Responsibility diffuses across HR generalists, busy line managers, and the occasional external recruiter.
• Insufficient executive time. In companies without a talent discipline, CEOs and senior leaders spend fewer than nine days a year on talent management. Best-practice companies invest more than 20 days.³ That gap does not show up in next quarter's numbers. It shows up three years from now, when there is no one ready to lead the next phase of growth.
• External dependency in tight markets. When the only response to a gap is to bid up external candidates, you create a dynamic where talent destroys value: candidates overpromise, job-hop to follow the premium, and leave the company no better positioned than before.
• No bridge during search. Senior roles left vacant during prolonged search processes do damage that is rarely quantified — decisions stalled, teams directionless, initiatives deferred.

Building the Talent Asset: Where to Start

A comprehensive talent strategy does not need to be built all at once. The highest-return starting point is usually clarity: understand where your critical talent gaps will be in 18 to 36 months, and work backwards from there.

Specifically, we advise growth company leaders to do three things now:

1. Map your critical roles forward, not backward. Which positions, if left unfilled or filled poorly, would materially impair your strategy in the next two years? For most high-growth technology companies, this list almost certainly includes AI, data, and security leadership. Start there.
2. Invest in internal mobility infrastructure. High-performing companies do not promote from within because they are lucky. They do it because they have built the identification, development, and succession mechanisms to make it possible. This is talent treated as capital — with the same rigour as a capital allocation decision.
3. Use interim leadership as a bridge, not a placeholder. When a critical role is vacant or your permanent pipeline is not yet mature, the right interim leader does more than hold the seat. They build the function, stabilise the team, and — done correctly — help define what permanent success looks like. Olofsson & Company provides interim leadership as part of an integrated model: advisory, interim, and permanent search working together rather than in isolation.

The Olofsson Approach: Precision Over Volume

We are not a generalist recruiter. We work exclusively at the senior end of the technology leadership market — across AI, GenAI, blockchain, and cybersecurity — for startups, scale-ups, and high-growth enterprises, primarily across the Asia-Pacific region with global reach when mandates demand it.

Our proprietary AI platform does what no database of CVs can: it identifies and engages candidates who are not actively looking, maps competitive talent landscapes for clients before a search begins, and enables our consultants to move from brief to shortlist with a speed and precision that traditional search cannot match. But the platform is only part of the story. Our consultants bring genuine domain expertise — the kind of intellectual muscle that goes beyond CV matching to assess leadership potential, cultural fit, and strategic capability in specialist technical roles.

The firms we partner with are not looking for a recruiter. They are looking for an advisor who happens to also be exceptional at finding people. That is the distinction we hold.

Build the Pipeline Before You Need It

The companies that will dominate their markets in five years are not the ones reacting to talent shortages — they are the ones who started building their talent infrastructure two years ago. If you have not started, the second-best time is now.

Talent is not a problem you solve once. It is a capability you build continuously, or you cede the advantage to someone who did.

Sources

1. McKinsey Global Institute — The World at Work: Jobs, Pay, and Skills for 3.5 Billion People; US Bureau of Labor Statistics workforce projection data. Figures cited reflect research available at time of original publication (2023). ↩
2. Boston Consulting Group, "A CEO's Guide to Talent Management Today," April 2018. bcg.com/publications/2018/ceo-guide-talent-management-today ↩
3. Boston Consulting Group, "A CEO's Guide to Talent Management Today," April 2018. Senior executive time on talent management: under nine days annually in typical companies vs. over 20 days in best-practice organisations. bcg.com/publications/2018/ceo-guide-talent-management-today ↩