Date Posted: Wednesday, 24th June 2026
A business may intend to launch new products, enter new markets, modernise its platforms or make greater use of AI. None of those ambitions can be delivered through investment and strategy alone. At some point, they depend on people with the right technical knowledge, leadership ability and experience.
The problem is that many organisations only begin thinking seriously about talent when a vacancy is approved or delivery starts to slip. Recruitment then becomes an urgent attempt to fill a position rather than a considered decision about the capability the business needs.
Finding technology talent for future growth requires a different starting point. Instead of asking which roles need to be filled today, businesses need to understand what they intend to build, what skills that work will require and where those skills should come from.
Statements such as "we need to become more data-led" or "we want to introduce AI" provide direction, but they are not yet workforce requirements.
The first step is to break each strategic objective into the work required to deliver it. That means asking practical questions about what will need to change inside the organisation.
For example:
This exercise moves the conversation away from job titles and towards the capabilities that will determine whether the strategy succeeds.
Annual headcount planning often produces a list of vacancies rather than a genuine view of future workforce demand. Technology plans change too quickly for a single fixed forecast to be reliable.
A more useful approach is to work across three horizons.
What is needed now?
These are the immediate gaps already affecting delivery. They may include a vacant leadership role, a project that lacks specialist expertise or a team operating beyond its capacity.
These requirements usually need a clear and relatively fast hiring decision.
What will be needed next?
These are capabilities likely to become important over the next 12 to 24 months as the business executes its strategy.
The organisation may not need to recruit immediately, but it should already be:
What might be needed later?
Longer-term requirements are less certain, so they should be treated as scenarios rather than fixed forecasts.
The business might explore what its workforce would need to look like if growth accelerates, an acquisition takes place, a new regulation is introduced or a major technology investment is approved.
Scenario planning does not predict the future perfectly. It gives the organisation options before circumstances force it into a rushed decision.
Most organisations can produce an organisation chart. Fewer can explain where their critical skills sit, how strong those skills are or how difficult they would be to replace.
A useful capability audit should look beyond roles and reporting lines. It should identify:
This often reveals a different risk profile from the one shown by the headcount plan.
A team may appear fully staffed but rely heavily on one person's knowledge. A transformation programme may have enough project managers but lack a leader who has delivered comparable change. A data function may have strong technical specialists but no one able to connect its work to commercial priorities.
The goal is not to rate every employee against an imagined future. It is to understand the distance between the workforce the business has and the one its strategy will require.
Identifying a capability gap does not automatically mean opening a permanent vacancy. The right response depends on how quickly the skill is needed, how long it will remain relevant and how central it is to the organisation.
Build the capability internally
Developing existing employees can be the strongest option where the foundations already exist and there is enough time for people to learn.
This could include:
Internal development protects organisational knowledge and gives employees a clearer reason to stay. It also allows the business to build capability around its own environment rather than relying entirely on an external market.
However, development needs time, practical experience and proper support. It cannot be used as a convenient answer to every urgent or highly specialist requirement.
Buy permanent capability
Permanent recruitment makes sense when the expertise will remain strategically important and needs to become part of the organisation's long-term operating model.
Leadership, core architecture, product ownership, data governance and cyber accountability will often fall into this category. These people do more than complete a programme. They build teams, make long-term decisions and remain accountable for what happens next.
The brief should therefore reflect the organisation the business is becoming, not only the problems it has today.
Borrow specialist expertise
Contractors, interim leaders and consultants can provide capability quickly when the need is specialist, urgent or attached to a defined outcome.
They may be appropriate for:
Borrowed capability works best when the assignment has a clear purpose, scope and end point. It becomes expensive and ineffective when temporary people are used indefinitely because the organisation has avoided deciding what it needs permanently.
Redesign the work
Sometimes the answer is not to find another person.
A capability gap may be reduced by simplifying a process, changing team responsibilities, removing duplicated work, introducing automation or buying a managed service.
Before recruiting, ask whether the work still needs to be performed in its current form. Hiring against an outdated operating model creates cost without necessarily improving capability.
A role can make perfect sense internally and still be almost impossible to recruit.
Businesses often create specifications by combining everything several stakeholders would like into one position. The resulting brief may expect deep technical knowledge, leadership experience, sector expertise, commercial credibility and hands-on delivery from a candidate who fits a restricted salary and location.
Market mapping should take place before that specification becomes fixed.
It should establish:
This gives the business an opportunity to adjust the brief before spending several months proving that the original version was unrealistic.
Technology changes too quickly for every appointment to be based on an exact match with the current specification. Employers that insist on candidates having already completed precisely the same work, in the same sector and at the same scale, restrict the market considerably.
Previous experience still matters, particularly in senior, specialist and regulated positions. But it should be assessed alongside the candidate's ability to adapt.
Look for evidence of:
The question is not only whether someone can perform the role as it exists today. It is whether they can continue to add value as the role and organisation change.
Finding suitable people does not mean they will want the job.
Experienced technology professionals are likely to examine the quality of the opportunity as closely as the employer assesses them. They will want to understand whether the strategy is credible, whether the role has proper sponsorship and whether they will have the authority and resources required to succeed.
A convincing proposition should explain:
Pay remains important, but it is rarely the whole decision. Career development, meaningful work, flexibility, leadership quality and the ability to make an impact can determine whether a candidate engages or quietly withdraws.
Businesses lose credibility when they describe a difficult situation as a perfect opportunity. Strong candidates usually appreciate honesty about the challenge, provided the organisation can also explain the mandate and support available to address it.
The best time to understand a talent market is before the business urgently needs someone from it.
For future-critical areas, employers should maintain an informed view of:
This is not about collecting thousands of names in a database. It is about knowing where important capability is likely to come from and beginning relevant conversations early.
That approach is particularly valuable for leadership and specialist roles, where the strongest candidates may not be actively applying when the vacancy eventually opens.
A strategic workforce plan can still fail through poor execution.
Unclear ownership, repeated interviews, slow feedback and late changes to the specification create avoidable candidate loss. They also suggest that the organisation has not fully agreed what it is trying to achieve.
Before approaching the market, decide:
A senior or specialist hire should be properly assessed, but rigour does not require an unnecessarily long process. The objective is to collect enough relevant evidence to make a confident decision.
Time-to-hire and cost-per-hire are useful operational measures, but they do not show whether the workforce is becoming better equipped to support growth.
A broader set of measures might include:
The workforce plan should also be reviewed regularly. Business priorities move, technology develops and the availability of particular skills changes. What looked like a permanent requirement may become a short-term project, while an experimental capability may become central to the operating model.
What is technology workforce planning? It's the discipline of translating a business's growth strategy into the skills, leadership and team structures needed to deliver it, then deciding which of those capabilities should be built internally, hired permanently, brought in on contract or designed out of the process altogether.
Should we hire permanently or use contractors for technology roles? It depends on how long the skill will stay relevant and how central it is to the business. Permanent hires suit leadership, architecture and other roles where someone needs to own long-term decisions. Contractors and interims work well for specialist, time-bound problems such as migrations, remediation or temporary leadership cover.
How do we know if a job specification is realistic? Test it against the market before it becomes fixed. Map how many credible candidates exist, what they currently earn, where they sit and what adjacent backgrounds might also succeed. A brief that only makes sense on paper usually takes months to prove unworkable.
Finding the talent required for future growth is not primarily a recruitment exercise. It is a business-planning discipline.
It begins by translating strategy into work, work into capabilities and capabilities into clear decisions about where people will come from. Some skills will be developed internally. Others will need to be hired permanently, brought in temporarily or removed through better operating design.
The earlier those decisions are made, the more options the business retains. Waiting until a programme is delayed or a critical leader leaves usually narrows the choice to whichever candidate can start soonest.
Future growth depends on more than having ambitious plans. It depends on building a workforce capable of delivering them.
TRIA works alongside technology leaders on exactly this kind of planning, from mapping future capability needs through to finding the people who can deliver them. If you're starting to think this through, it's worth having that conversation early.
As a founder of TRIA, Harriet is proud of the company's impact in transforming recruitment through strategic insight and deep market understanding. Her leadership style is characterised by a focus on sustainable growth and the development of long-term client relationships.
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Written by Harriet Kirkpatrick
Written by Harriet Kirkpatrick
