Build, Buy, or Borrow? How One HR Leader Chooses a Talent Strategy

When Patrick Henley, SHRM-SCP, took over as the director of human resources and risk management at the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority (CCMWA) in Marietta, Ga., about nine years ago, he entered a workplace in which one-third of workers were eligible to retire. How was he going to maintain the right level of workers with the right skills for this critical public utility?

Henley quickly realized he had to rethink his talent strategy, specifically to decide whether to focus on recruiting a new breed of workers or double down on developing current employees through targeted training and development.   

“It’s important to be intentional about your talent strategy; you don’t want to be reactive,” Henley said during a session at SHRM25 in San Diego. “And the optimal way to do that is to align your talent strategy with your business needs upfront.”

SHRM Talent Acquisition Specialty Credential

Like many organizations, CCMWA had to decide among three strategies to fulfill its human capital needs:

• Build: Develop current talent through training, education, job rotation, special assignments, and action learning.  
• Buy: Acquire new talent by recruiting from external sources.  
• Borrow: Use freelancers, consultants, vendors, and clients outside the organization in arrangements that transfer skills and knowledge.  

In recent years, a fourth “B” strategy has been added to this popular human capital framework: Bot, meaning to leverage artificial intelligence, automation, and other technologies to deliver work. 

“You’ve got to look at your organization and industry and see which model would work and tailor your strategy to that,” Henley said. “A build-focused strategy may not work for your organization or your industry. Maybe you need to buy. You need to look at your individual situation.” In his presentation, he broke down the pros and cons of each of the big three strategies.

Build: Experience, Educate, and Elevate

“Research shows that internally promoted employees outperform their externally hired peers for the first two years in that job and will cost you about 18% less,” Henley said. Other pros of leaning into the build strategy:  

• It ensures familiarity with company policies. 
• It gives workers a career trajectory. 
• It has a positive impact on morale and productivity, which is a major talent challenge facing CHROs in 2025, according to a recent SHRM report. 
• It leads to higher retention rates for internally promoted managers. 

However, building up employees is time intensive, compared with buying or borrowing ready-made talent. It doesn’t provide as much outside perspective, and it’s hard to anticipate demand in some industries. 

“It does take time to build employees, and you may not have that time. And if you don’t bind them to the organization, they may leave,” Henley said. “So you can’t do this in a vacuum. You have to make sure you’re doing the things to bind them to the organization.”  

Buy: Assess and Acquire

“If you bring people in from the outside, you get fresh perspectives,” Henley said. “The research shows that for individual contributor positions, this is going to be one of your best bets because people coming in from the outside are going to see things in a different way and not the we’ve-always-done-it-this-way attitude.” 

Other potential benefits of a buy strategy:

• It allows relatively speedy hiring, compared to “build.” 
• It increases the knowledge base and skill set of the organization. 
• It brings in new leadership styles and philosophies, especially at the top. 

Potential drawbacks: 

• It has higher upfront costs. 
• It requires money and time to compete in the open market for talent.
• It takes more time to acclimate the worker to the company. 
• It adds training and orientation costs.

Borrow: Outsource to Get ‘Talent on Demand’ 

Using freelancers, consultants, and other such workers helps fulfill work and skills demands with little or no recruiting effort. Investment is limited to the specific needs of the business, and it provides a “talent on demand” approach. Plus, the borrow strategy allows you to accommodate the ebb and flow of work and productivity demands.

However, this does make training difficult, timely, and costly. It could generate more turnover due to the temporary nature of the work, as well as create potential legal and payroll hurdles.

Case Study: CCMWA Went All In on ‘Build’

After studying all of these options, Henley decided to focus the talent strategy of his employer, CCMWA, on building up the skills of his current staff. The utility still hires some workers from the outside, but it leaned heavily into building the leadership and management skills of its workers to allow them to move up in the organization rather than move out. 

Henley launched a series of mentoring, leadership, and management development programs at CCMWA. That included a Career Conversations program that brought together mentors and mentees regularly to discuss topics such as personal branding, executive presence, and internal interviewing. 

The result: Since the program started in 2019, the organization has filled more than 90% of its open leadership positions with internal workers.  

“This has given people the opportunity to fulfill their career goals and gives them a career path,” Henley said. “It’s really worked out well for us.”