Why are talent strategies falling short in 2025?
13 Jun 2025
CHROs are under more pressure than ever to deliver results. At the same time, CEOs are counting on their HR leaders to drive growth. This tension is giving many an HR leader sleepless nights, trying to make workforce transformation, leadership development and culture fit into a KPI framework. But despite ambitious goals – and millions invested in HR tech – many organisations just aren’t seeing the outcomes they’d expected.
Fragmented talent strategies mean that onboarding, technology and workforce planning are treated as separate functions, despite being deeply interconnected. This leads to weak pipelines, underpaid new hires and exhausted employees struggling to keep up with change.
Gartner’s 2025 CHRO Talent Strategy Guide, Reinvent Your Talent Strategy, confirms what HR leaders already know: the gap between effort and impact is widening. Only 43% of hiring managers feel that new hires are equipped for their jobs. And CEOs rank talent and culture as the biggest barriers to growth.
CHROs now face four main challenges when readying their teams for success:
- Accelerating skills gaps
- Weak leadership pipelines
- Employee change fatigue
- AI adoption isn’t delivering results
It’s time to stop treating these issues in isolation. CHROs need to develop a unified, strategic approach to talent readiness – one that connects onboarding, HR tech and leadership development.
1. Why isn’t the skills gap closing?
The skills companies need are changing so fast that institutions can’t keep up – 31% of jobs will change by 2027, meaning that in just two years, a third of graduates may enter roles already vastly different from the ones they trained for. Only 43% of hiring managers say their recent hires are adequately prepared for their roles, leaving CHROs under pressure to overhaul talent strategies, with 57% unsure how to identify or invest in future-critical skills.
One of the problems is that HR teams are working with outdated job profiles and disconnected data sources. Non-integrated systems prevent them from gaining a clear picture of what skills the organisation already has, what skills it needs for future growth and, crucially, where the capability blind spots are. The result is a cycle of strategic misalignment in which hiring and training decisions don’t reflect the business’s evolving priorities. Skills development tends to be reactive rather than strategic – and there’s often no clear ownership for workforce planning or skills intelligence. Strategic workforce planning (SWP) offers a more focused talent development strategy, built around roles that drive performance.
Targeted strategic workforce planning
The answer may be a talent strategy rooted in targeted SWP that focuses on high-dynamism, high-criticality roles; put simply, investing in positions that are changing fast and are closely tied to business value. Modern applicant-tracking systems like SmartRecruiters support this shift by offering HR teams a clear view of pipeline quality, role requirements and candidate fit. They can also help surface skill trends over time, providing valuable input into your broader talent management strategy.
Even if you hire the right people, however, they can’t reach their full potential without strong leadership in place. Which is exactly where many organisations are hitting the next obstacle.
2. What’s weakening the leadership pipeline?
Gartner highlights a leadership readiness crisis – only 28% of successors are considered “ready now” for the key roles they’ll be stepping into, and just one HR leader in five feels confident in their future leadership bench. And although 76% of organisations have updated their leadership programmes, only 23% perceive them as effective – a startling gap.
Narrow leadership pipelines increase organisational risk during times of change – even positive change, like periods of growth. They limit internal mobility, succession planning and long-term strategy execution. That’s because too many organisations introduce leadership development efforts far too late, missing the opportunity to embed them into strategic human resource management from day one. In fact, it’s never too early – the onboarding phase is a prime opportunity to assess new hires’ leadership potential and set expectations from the ground up.
The hallmarks of effective leadership development
Too often, leadership programmes focus on what leaders need to do, rather than how they need to lead. Gartner calls this the gap between enterprise leadership and human leadership, and it’s one that can start forming as early as onboarding. Key qualities to look out for are:
- Experiential, in-role learning
- Support during high-stakes moments
- Connection with peer networks
- Accountability for applying new skills
Strong onboarding builds early engagement, helps identify leadership potential from day one and produces new hires with the context and the confidence to step up early. It’s time to shift focus from static training modules in favour of dynamic, embedded development. Leadership potential can’t be unlocked in a classroom; it’s forged in real moments by people who grow by doing, reflecting and adapting – with the right support in place. Identifying strong leadership starts at the point of hire.
3. Why is everyone resistant to change?
Even with the right people and leaders in place, another issue is quietly eroding productivity and morale: constant, unrelenting change. The sheer velocity with which the landscape shifts – seemingly from one day to the next – is affecting people’s engagement and retention.
Employees are facing a staggering five times more organisational change than eight years ago, and support for these changes has plummeted from 74% to 44%. It’s no wonder that people are burning out, their confidence diminished by constant ambiguity – far more than the speed or scale of unremitting transformation. Felt most keenly among new hires, this results in cynicism and a feeling of detachment – and keeps people from spending very long in a role. It’s really hard to build momentum or establish culture when people are stuck in survival mode, something traditional employee retention strategies often don’t address.
Change shouldn’t happen to people; it needs to happen for them
Involve your employees early on in shaping and delivering change – especially by empowering leaders and influencers to lead from within the ranks rather than relying on top-down comms. Build your programme around their capabilities by prioritising changes they’re ready for and that will positively impact their working lives and environments.
During onboarding is when most of your employees will first encounter organisational change. If built effectively into your talent strategy, this process can build trust, clarify expectations and reduce ambiguity from the start. Tools like Enboarder allow you to tailor onboarding journeys for the individual, introduce change in digestible quantities and equip managers to support their teams through transition.
But as organisations race to embed new tools and tech to lighten employees’ loads, yet another gap is opening: between the promise of AI and its actual impact.
4. Why isn’t AI delivering what we were promised?
Gartner found that CEOs expect a 17% productivity spike from AI over the next 12-18 months, but only eight percent of employees are using GenAI tools in ways that improve speed or quality in any measurable way. Most workers don’t have access to the technology, aren’t confident using it or aren’t sure how (or even if) it fits into their role.
When adoption is lagging and the promised productivity boost never materialises, this can also lower morale and compromise trust among employees. And HR gets caught in the middle – expected to land the tech, make sure people know how to use it and instantly demonstrate its value.
Take a human-first AI approach
Ask not what the tool can do for your organisation; ask what employees are trying to achieve. Prioritise adopting only those tools that offer the biggest impact – the nice-to-haves can follow later. And give the innovation a friendly face – identify employees who can model their use and support rollout. But most important, don’t drop people in the deep end. Onboarding is the perfect time to demystify GenAI and establish tailored use cases for each person’s role. Platforms like Enboarder allow you to personalise tech training and monitor adoption trends throughout the process, setting your people up for success in the future of work.
The bottom line is that talent strategy can’t be treated as a siloed HR function. Your organisation’s agility, growth and long-term success depend on it.
Align your onboarding, tech and teams behind one talent strategy
It’s time for CHROs to stop playing catch-up and start designing talent strategies that are responsive, tech-enabled and people-centred. That means treating onboarding as a strategic level, not a compliance tick-box. Align your tools, data and culture and you’ll not only close the skills gap, you’ll also keep your best people engaged and growing, long-term.
How Kindred Technology can help
Onboarding isn’t a formality. It’s the frontline of culture, clarity and retention. The right onboarding process, supported by purpose-built HR onboarding software, can change everything. With Kindred Technology’s implementation support, you can tailor your hiring journeys to reflect real-world skill priorities, not just generic job specs.
SmartRecruiters helps you anticipate skills shortages or gaps and identify perfect matches before you know you need them. Enboarder can facilitate feedback loops, peer interaction and track engagement to help flag emerging leaders early. Through smarter recruiting tools, tailored onboarding and enabling change, Kindred Technology helps organisations move from AI ambition to real-world adoption, starting at the entry point of the employee journey.
Want the full report? Download it here or schedule a 30-minute strategy session.
