Buying Talent vs Building Talent

As the labor market evolves, the expectations of employers must too. Far too many talent strategies are outdated and inefficient. Investments in talent that transcend the interests of individual leaders and their departments can help to build a far more sustainable talent ecosystem.

Many organizations have responded by engaging in a war for talent — that is, buying it from the external market rather than growing it from within. As they compete to fill roles, many have been willing to spend a lot of money on recruiting, while reluctant to invest in training and developing their existing workers, perhaps out of fear their competitors will hire those newly attractive employees away.

Other organizations are taking a “build” vs. “buy” approach by nurturing and developing talent from within their own ranks, and providing training and apprenticeships to prepare them for future positions.

At General Consulting Partners, we’ve come up with an approach that we think can be effectively applicable to many organizations – the 3B Ratio, with the 3 B’s being BIT, BET, and Balance. BIT stands for Building Internal Talent, while BET stands for Buying External Talent, and it’s a way of Balancing the pros and cons of both talent methodologies and coming up with a way to determine when to build an internal pipeline of talent, and when to go out into the market and recruit externally, and what a good ratio would be for your organization.