You Don’t Have a Talent Shortage Problem–You Have a Talent Visibility Problem

COL Kris Saling is the technology advisor to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs and leads efforts to design better talent management systems for a global organization of 1.1 million people. She is a data scientist, speaker, and storyteller who regularly engages both technical and lay audiences throughout the public and private sector on data analytics and AI in the HR space.

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So many HR leaders cite talent shortages as a critical problem, but often the core problem isn’t a lack of talent, but a lack of visibility.

Chances are pretty good you can’t see the full skills and capabilities of your workforce due to incomplete, outdated, or resume-based talent data. To get better data, you need to better incentivize your employees to provide it. Otherwise, you’re navigating with a paper map in the era of real-time GPS.

I’ve seen this challenge while leading talent innovation inside the Army. We can’t leverage the workforce we have to meet the challenges of the future if we can’t see who we have. But if we can see them, we find that we often have people ready to fill those critical gaps, either immediately or with a little upskilling.

Nearly every organization faces the same systemic issues.

1. Skills data lives in too many systems and…none of them talk to each other. The data is scattered, and no single place tells the full story.

2. Self-reported profiles are incomplete because employees don’t see value in sharing their data. Employees often ask why they should update their skills profiles. Many see it as just extra work that doesn’t provide anything useful.

3. Traditional job descriptions hide more talent than they reveal. Most organizations still fit employees to the job, and once they fit into a role, we only look at them through the lens of the job description only, forgetting what’s left.

4. Managers only know the people directly in front of them. Without system-level visibility, managers develop talent they see. Those who are out of sight are out of mind.

Improving talent visibility fixes both recruitment and retention issues. Roles fill faster when you can leverage internal talent, and retention improves when you show employees growth potential in your organization. Development becomes tangible as people see how to use programs to contribute to their internal mobility. The trick is combining systems that allow employees to see themselves with incentives to use them and share their data.

Imagine millions of drivers who use the Waze app. Why do they willingly share their location, destination, travel habits, and speed? Because the exchange of data gives them value in return in the form of better routes and real-time traffic insights. It’s a mutually beneficial system.

That’s what you need to create for your talent management programs.

If visibility allows employees to get performance insights and organizations get a deeper, richer, more accurate picture of their talent, people are far more likely to contribute useful data.

Creating an Interactive Career Map

The Army is one of the most complex career ecosystems in the world. As part of our talent management reform, we realized that over a million people couldn’t rely on traditional tools. Instead, we built and prototyped an interactive career map, effectively a Waze for careers. It is designed for inter-organization mobility as organizations rapidly identify new roles.

Tools like this help people see where they are. They draw on a person’s complete talent profile: verified skills, credentials, previous jobs, training, assessment data, experiences, and strengths. This data foundation helps them understand where they can go based on required qualifications, potential growth areas, and readiness for future opportunities.

Better than that, it shows people what they need to do to grow into dream roles. Our service members know they have education benefits but struggle to figure out how best to apply them, and your employees may struggle with the same. By sharing tools that help them make informed decisions, they can learn how to leverage these to grow within your organization.

How To Build Your Talent Skills Model

You don’t need to operate on the Army’s scale to create skills visibility that transforms your talent management program. These steps will help you build out your model:

1. Map your talent data sources. Identify where talent data currently live, and where you have gaps. Build collection measures for those gaps in existing systems.

2. Connect your systems. You no longer need to bring everything into a centralized space. Just map it, connect it, bring it together when you need it, and enforce data standards.

3. Build an employee-facing experience that provides value immediately. Ask what value you will provide to your employees and managers, and ensure you deliver right off the bat.

4. Use ethical nudges, recommendations, and transparency to keep the data current. A good system provides helpful reminders and rewards on a regular basis so employees update their data routinely.

5. Tie participation to development, not compliance. Compliance poisons data. If participation is linked to benefits and opportunities, you’re far more likely to get good data.

6. Make managers partners in visibility. Give your managers insights from your system that will help them coach their employees toward growth.

The Future of Data-Driven Talent Management

Every organization is under pressure to do more with the talent they have. Hiring is expensive, turnover is costly, and skills evolve faster than your job descriptions. But inside every workforce is hidden potential waiting to be recognized and energized.

When you build tools that provide visibility and incentivize employees to participate, you unlock a talent pool you may not have considered for their hiring gaps. Beyond the immediate benefits, you also reap the benefits of smarter investments in developmental opportunities, richer succession pipelines, and a more engaged future-ready workforce.

Most efficiency experts tell you, before you buy a lot of new clothes or fancy decor for your house, to shop your house first. The same goes for your workforce. If you have a lot of new emerging requirements or vacancies that you need to fill quickly, shop your own workforce.

From 2019-2026, Saling led the creation of multiple new people analytics and talent management programs for the United States Army, including the establishment of a People Analytics office and predictive recruiting and retention tools. Her book, Data-Driven Talent Management: Using Analytics to Improve Employee Experience, summarizes the research she did to build these programs and provides practical frameworks for establishing these programs in organizations of all sizes.

The information contained in this site is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice on any subject matter.