Building the Capability You Can't Buy
Most leaders working inside resource constrained organisations run into the same wall eventually: you cannot compete with private sector pay for the technical skills everyone is chasing. The honest response to that isn't to keep trying anyway, running the same recruitment process, advertising the same role, watching strong candidates take the better offer somewhere else, and repeating the cycle a few months later when the post falls vacant again.
The more useful response is to change the question you're asking.
Most hiring starts with "who already has the skills." When the answer to that question keeps coming back empty, or keeps coming back at a price you can't pay, the better question becomes: who has the aptitude, the personality fit, and can I genuinely commit to developing them into the role.
Personality fit deserves to be called out on its own, not folded quietly into "aptitude." Skills can be taught. Personality fit can't, it has to be there from the start, which makes it a non-negotiable, not a nice to have.
That shift sounds small on paper. In practice, it changes almost everything about how you hire, how you structure the first year of someone's employment, and how comfortable you are with risk.
It's worth naming the trade off honestly, rather than presenting it as a clever shortcut. It takes longer, someone with the technical background can often contribute from week one, while someone you're developing needs sustained support before they're carrying real weight. It carries genuine delivery risk in the short term, because you're trading a known quantity for a judgement call. Done properly, it’s more than a hiring decision dressed up as a strategy. It's structured time from senior people, honest feedback along the way, and a willingness to let progress be slower than the project plan would prefer, building capability the way most lasting things get built: through small, consistent investment rather than one decisive moment.
I've seen this work in practice on a role where a contractor was brought in to cover an immediate technical gap, doing the work the post demanded while a permanent recruitment process kept failing to find anyone with the right skills at a price the organisation could pay. Rather than treating the contract as the long term answer, the better option was to identify someone already in the team with the aptitude and the personality fit but not yet the skillset, curiosity, a strong work ethic, the kind of fit that doesn't show up on a CV, and build a structured development plan around them: mentoring, gradually increasing responsibility, and time spent learning alongside the contractor for as long as the contract ran. When the contract came to an end, the capability it had helped build stayed. The substantive role was filled by someone who'd grown into it, not someone brought in to cover it.
None of this is an argument against contractors or suppliers. Used well, they bring real value, defined periods of access to specific skills or experience that would take too long, or cost too much, to build internally, and there are plenty of situations where that's exactly the right call. The distinction is in the decision behind the relationship. Bringing in expertise for a defined period and a defined purpose is different from quietly hoping a gap fills itself, or treating a string of short term contracts as a substitute for a long term capability plan.
One real advantage worth naming: contractors and suppliers often bring battle scars your organisation doesn't have yet. There's an old story about a retired maritime engineer brought in to fix a fault on a ship that a capable, younger crew couldn't trace. He listened for a few minutes, picked up a large hammer, struck one precise spot, and the fault was gone. His bill, for what looked like five minutes of work, was substantial, and when queried, he explained it wasn't a labour charge, it was an experience charge. That single bill still came in lower than the combined labour cost of every engineer who'd tried and failed before him, and it solved the problem sooner. Experience has its place, and it's worth paying for. That kind of judgement, built up over years of seeing the same fault in different forms, is hard to manufacture internally. It only comes from having been there before.
The trade off is knowledge retention. When the expertise sits with someone who isn't permanent, it can walk out the door at the end of the contract, taking the context that took months to build along with it. It's a real risk, but a manageable one. Captured properly in knowledge articles and playbooks while the contractor or supplier is still engaged, that learning can stay with the organisation long after they've gone.
This is more a habit of thinking I keep coming back to than a finished playbook. When you can't buy the capability you need, lowering your standards isn't the alternative. Lengthening your timeframe, and properly investing in the people willing to grow into the gap, is.
It's a decision available to most leaders, most of the time. It’s really worth considering and planning for as the wider conversation about pay, skills shortages, and how the public sector competes for technical talent keeps gathering pace. The organisations that figure out how to build capability internally won't just be solving today's vacancy. They'll be a little less exposed to whatever the market does next.
“It’s what you do. Not what you’re called.”
Published by The Everyday Leader
Written by Craig Bromage
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