Your talent strategy is bigger than your hiring strategy

What you’ll learn

• Why talent strategy now means designing how work gets delivered, not just hiring people

• How to see what delivery system you’re running (and what most companies don’t realize)

• When to use employees versus contractors versus vendors versus automation

• Why the companies that design this intentionally move faster and adapt better

• How to start with a simple talent inventory that reveals hidden risk

A director of engineering we work with recently described their hiring process this way: “Someone leaves, so we post the job. Work piles up, so we add headcount. Something feels slow, so we hire another person. We never ask whether hiring is the right answer, we just assume it is.”

This is how most companies operate. Hiring becomes the default response to almost every capacity problem, which means critical decisions get made on autopilot. Is this an ongoing need or a temporary project? Could a vendor handle this better? Does this work require a human, or could it be automated? These questions rarely get asked before the job description goes out.

The issue isn’t that hiring is wrong. It’s that treating it as your only lever creates costs you don’t see until much later. You hire a full-time product manager to launch a new feature, but six months after launch there’s not enough strategic work to fill the role. You’re paying $180K for someone managing minor updates. Or you hire a senior engineer locally at $200K when a contract specialist could execute the same migration project in four months for $80K total. Or you build a five-person support team when a vendor could handle tier-one tickets better and cheaper, freeing your team for complex escalations.

The pattern is the same: you default to permanent headcount because it’s familiar, then discover months later you’ve built fixed costs where you needed flexibility.

Talent strategy used to mean hiring strategy. Who should we hire? Where should we find them? How do we evaluate them? Those questions still matter, but they’re no longer sufficient. Today, talent strategy means something broader: designing how work gets delivered across your entire organization.

That includes permanent full-time employees, but it also includes contractors, staff augmentation partners, vendors, freelancers, global remote teams, and automation. Automation means things like software tools or AI doing work that used to require humans. When we say the right talent changes everything, we’re talking about this full ecosystem, not just the people on your payroll.

Here’s what most leaders miss: you’re already operating this way. You just haven’t designed it intentionally.

You’re already running a blended delivery system

Most companies think they run on full-time employees with maybe a few contractors here and there. Then you start looking at what’s actually happening.

Your engineering team is using AI coding assistants that weren’t approved by IT because they make work faster. Your marketing team hired a freelance designer who subcontracted the work to someone else without telling you. Your operations lead set up automation scripts that run critical reporting, but they’re not documented anywhere and only one person knows how they work. Your product team is using collaboration tools that someone expensed but no one formally evaluated for security or compliance.

This isn’t rare. This is normal. People find ways to get work done, and they use whatever tools or resources help them move faster. You’re running a blended workforce. The question is, are you managing it intentionally or letting it happen by accident?

If work is being done outside your formal org chart, you’re carrying whatever risk comes with it. Vendor relationships with unclear ownership. Contractors who might leave mid-project with no transition plan. Automation that breaks and no one knows how to fix. AI tools processing sensitive data through third-party APIs. These aren’t hypothetical problems. They’re already sitting in your environment, invisible until something breaks.

The first step isn’t solving these problems. It’s seeing them. You need visibility into what delivery system you’re actually running before you can design it properly.

Start with a talent inventory

A talent inventory sounds bureaucratic, but it’s simpler than you think. You’re just making visible what’s already happening.

Start by listing who or what is doing work on behalf of your organization right now. Include the obvious things: full-time and part-time employees, contractors and consultants you’re working with regularly, staff augmentation partners providing embedded talent, outsourced vendors handling specific functions, freelancers on retainer or project-based, global remote team members, and software, automation, and AI tools your team relies on.

Then add the hidden reality. Tools people are using that IT doesn’t know about. Freelancers who subcontracted pieces of work. Side workflows someone built that aren’t documented. Automation scripts running in production with no ownership. The Slack integrations and browser extensions and AI assistants that people installed because they help, but nobody evaluated for risk.

This isn’t about catching people doing something wrong. It’s about seeing what you’re actually running versus what you think you’re running. You can’t manage what you can’t see.

Once you have the inventory, patterns emerge fast. You realize you’re paying three different vendors for overlapping services because no one knew the others existed. You see that half your engineering team is using AI tools with different security profiles, and no one compared them. You discover that critical automation lives in someone’s personal account and if they leave tomorrow, it stops working. You notice that you’re treating contractors like full-time employees, expecting ownership and long-term thinking, but structuring the relationship as transactional.

The inventory doesn’t solve these problems, but it makes them visible. And that visibility is what lets you start designing intentionally instead of just reacting.

Match the delivery model to the work

Once you see what you’re running, you can start asking better questions. Not “who should we hire?” but “how should this work get delivered?”

Some work requires deep context built over months or years. It depends on institutional knowledge, long-term relationships with stakeholders, and high-judgment decisions that can’t be easily scoped or handed off. A product lead shaping the roadmap and managing cross-functional trade-offs. An engineering lead designing system architecture and making technical decisions that affect the platform for years. A finance lead building models that reflect how the business actually works and evolving them as the company grows. This work needs continuity. It needs someone who will be around long enough to see decisions play out, learn from them, and adjust course. Full-time employment makes sense here because you’re paying for judgment and domain expertise that develops over time.

Other work is well-scoped and doesn’t require years of institutional knowledge to execute. You need specialized skills for a defined period, or you want to scale capacity quickly without committing to permanent headcount. You need flexibility to adjust as priorities shift. A senior engineer building a specific feature with clear requirements, or a data analyst completing a migration project over four months. Let’s say you need a designer to create a new brand system. Staff augmentation or contract work fits here because you’re buying execution and expertise, not long-term integration. You can bring in senior capability, deliver the work, and scale back down when it’s done. No need to carrytfixed costs indefinitely.

Some work is repeatable and standardized. It’s not core to what differentiates you, and someone else has already built the expertise and infrastructure to do it well. Payroll processing. Customer support for tier-one issues. Infrastructure monitoring. These functions are critical, but you don’t gain competitive advantage by running them internally. Let a vendor handle them so your team can focus on what actually makes you different.

And some work is repetitive and rule based. It doesn’t require judgment or context informed decision-making, and consistency matters more than creativity. Data entry,  report generation, basic code reviews or content moderation. This work benefits from automation, whether that’s traditional software or AI because it frees humans to focus on problems that actually require their minds.

The key is matching the delivery model to the work itself, not defaulting to one model for everything. When you get it right, teams move faster. When you get it wrong, everything feels harder than it should, because the system is fighting against the progress of the people working in it.

The real advantage

Companies that design their talent strategy intentionally have an edge most teams don’t realize they’re missing.

They’re not locked into fixed costs when priorities shift. If a strategic bet doesn’t pan out, they can wind down contract capacity without layoffs. If a new opportunity emerges, they can scale up fast by bringing in staff augmentation instead of waiting months to hire.

They’re not defaulting to the most expensive option for every problem. They know when full-time makes sense and when it doesn’t. They use permanent headcount for work that needs continuity and judgment, and they use contractors or vendors for work that’s well-scoped or standardized.

They’re not carrying hidden risk from tools and workflows no one signed off on. They know what’s running, who owns it, and where the dependencies are. When someone leaves or something breaks, there’s a plan.

And they’re not treating all work the same. They’ve thought about what requires deep context versus what just needs execution. What needs human judgment versus what can be automated. What should be built internally versus what should be bought from a vendor who’s already solved it.

This isn’t about having perfect answers up front. It’s about stepping back before you decide and asking how this work should get delivered instead of who we should hire. That pause alone to assess our willingness to consider the full range of options before writing a job description, delivers clarity most teams never find.

What this looks like in practice

When a client comes to us saying “we need to hire an engineer,” we start by asking what work are you trying to get done? What outcomes are you trying to achieve? Does this work require deep integration with your team over time, or is it well-scoped and temporary?

Sometimes the answer is straightforward. You need a full-time engineer who will grow with the team, build subject matter expertise, and take ownership of the platform as it scales. That’s a hire, and we help you find the right person.

Sometimes the answer is different. You need senior contractors who can execute a specific migration project over six months, and once it’s finished, you don’t need that level of capacity anymore. That’s staff augmentation. We bring in experienced engineers who can deliver without requiring years of experience.

And sometimes the answer is both. You need full-time people for strategic work. Platform architecture, product direction, team leadership,  and you need contract capacity for execution-heavy work that’s well-scoped but time-intensive. That’s a blended model, and we help you design what belongs where.

The right answer depends on the work, not just the role title. When you match the delivery model to the work, teams feel lighter. Priorities get clearer. Work moves faster. When you get it wrong, everything feels harder than it needs to be, even when people are working hard and trying their best.

Talent strategy isn’t about having all the answers before you start. It’s about asking better questions before you commit. Should this be full-time or contract? Could a vendor handle this? Does this work need a human at all, or could it be automated? These questions feel basic, but most companies skip them entirely. They default to hiring, then deal with the consequences later.

The companies that win are the ones who pause long enough to design how work should get delivered before they start hiring people to do it. If you’re building or scaling a team and want help with thinking through what delivery model fits the work, reach out. We’ve spent years helping companies navigate exactly this question.