For decades, workforce planning has been relatively straightforward: define roles, set headcount targets, hire accordingly, and repeat annually.

This approach made sense in a world where jobs were stable, career paths were linear, and skills evolved slowly. But many organisations are now discovering that traditional, headcount-led talent strategies are struggling to keep up.

As Sarah Blanchard, Head of Talent Advisory at Solve, explains:

“Traditional workforce models focus on roles and FTE. But AI and automation are breaking work into tasks and skills — many of which can now be performed by technology, partners or alternative talent pools.”

This shift is forcing organisations to rethink not just how many people they need, but what capabilities they actually require to execute their strategy.

Why headcount is no longer enough

While headcount tells you how many people sit in your organisation today, here’s what it doesn’t tell you:

• Which skills actually create value
• How quickly those skills can be redeployed
• Where critical gaps sit, or
• How exposed you are to disruption

In an environment shaped by AI, automation, and rapid market change, those blind spots are risky.

Modern talent strategy starts with a different question: What capabilities do we need to win both now and in the future?

This shift in framing is at the heart of effective integrated talent advisory, and it’s one of the most common gaps our team sees when working with leadership.

Capability starts with business strategy

A capability-led talent strategy must be directly informed by business strategy.

“Business strategy defines where value will be created,” Sarah says. “Talent strategy defines how capability is identified and mobilised to create that value.”

In practice, that means leaders need clarity on:

• Where growth will come from
• Where productivity or cost transformation is required
• Where innovation, resilience or risk management matter most

Once those strategic value drivers are clear, organisations can identify the critical work behind them and, from there, the capabilities required to deliver it.

This is where talent strategy becomes a leadership discipline rather than an operational exercise.

Build, buy, borrow, or automate?

One of the most important outcomes of a capability-led approach is better decision-making.

Instead of defaulting to recruitment, leaders can make more deliberate choices about how capabilities are accessed over time. That might include:

• Building capability internally through learning, development and mobility
• Buying capability from the market where speed or scarcity matters
• Borrowing skills through partners or a contingent workforce
• Automating tasks through AI or technology

Understanding the meaning of contingent workforce in this context is critical. It’s not about short-term fixes or cost reduction but flexibility, speed, and access to specialised capability, particularly when demand fluctuates or skills are scarce.

Rather than reactive decisions, the smartest organisations treat these options as strategic levers.

Why capability thinking matters in an AI-enabled world

AI has amplified the limitations of role-based planning and many tasks that once defined entire roles can now be automated or augmented.

At the same time, new skills are emerging faster than job descriptions can keep up, and some roles may not even exist yet.

“How do you plan for skills that don’t exist?” Sarah asks. “You focus on capability, not job titles.”

This means:

• Mapping skills across the workforce, not just roles
• Understanding which capabilities are transferrable
• Designing learning pathways that support continuous evolution

It also means challenging balance sheet assumptions that rely on stable roles, which are increasingly misaligned with reality.

Internal mobility as a strategic advantage

Another benefit of a capability-led approach is stronger internal mobility.

Before immediately going to market, organisations who understand their internal capability landscape are better positioned to redeploy and upskill existing talent, reducing time-to-productivity, protecting institutional knowledge, and improving retention.

Sarah notes that organisations are getting better at this, but it requires intent.

“Rather than recruiting for a specific role straight away, more organisations are looking at the capabilities they already have and how they can support people to fill the gaps.”

This is especially important for early-career talent. While traditional graduate roles may evolve or disappear in some areas, the need to build future capability pipelines has not gone away. What’s changing is how those pathways are designed.

From planning exercise to competitive advantage

A modern talent strategy is a living framework that evolves alongside business strategy, technology, and workforce expectations.

When organisations move from headcount to capability, they gain:

• Greater flexibility in how work gets done
• Faster access to critical skills
• Better alignment between strategy and execution
• Reduced talent and delivery risk

Or, as Sarah puts it:

“Competitive advantage increasingly depends on how quickly an organisation can access and mobilise critical capability — not just whether it can hire for it.”

In a volatile, AI-enabled environment, this shift is fundamental to staying competitive. Want to chat further? Reach out.

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