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32%

32% of the skills required for the average job in 2024 are completely different from what they were in 2021.  (Lightcast)

83%

83% of talent leaders expect talent acquisition to broaden in scope by 2029. (HIGHER)

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The business gives its order — and TA teams say, “coming right up”. But this constant supply and demand dynamic keeps TA teams in reactive mode, always scrambling to fill roles after they’ve already become critical gaps.

But in today’s skills landscape, it’s no longer enough to fulfil orders. A 2025 report from talent intelligence platform Lightcast found that 32% of the skills required for the average job in 2024 are completely different from what they were in 2021. 

To stay ahead, TA teams now need to build the function to anticipate what the business needs before it needs it. 

Here are four key muscles enterprise TA teams need to build in 2025 to move beyond filling roles to proactively sourcing the capabilities that drive strategic goals.

1. Build systems that spot signals of emerging capability

In theory, internal mobility should feel like a game of Tetris. In an ideal world, organizations keep a meticulously tagged internal marketplace of employees and their skills on file. As soon as a new role opens up, you drop a perfectly-shaped employee right into place. Drag, drop, done (and repeat).

But the reality is far messier. Talent is far more dynamic than any skills map would have us think.

“You can map for skills over time — but if you overrely on it, you’re going to spend more time logging and tagging skills than proactively sourcing the right people for future skills needs,” says Matt Bradburn, strategic HR advisor and founder of AI-HR consultancy, People x AI.

While hiring is getting back on track, purse strings still remain tight. Internal mobility isn’t just a retention tool — it’s a cost-saving lever, your succession strategy, and your bet for having the skills you need when you need them.

But to make it work, TA teams need to stop asking, “Who can fill this role?” Instead, they need to ask: “Where should we look next?

What this means for TA teams

When critical skills gaps are opening up faster than organizations can fill them, the drag-and-drop approach to internal mobility no longer works on its own. Proactively plugging critical skills gaps from within requires a shift in focus from quantifying the skills you already have to spotting where capability is emerging.

Because in reality, your most valuable internal talent often isn’t what’s logged on your skills marketplace. It’s the junior individual contributor who’s teaching themselves SQL to get better at their job — or the engineer who’s taken on a cross-functional advisor role to other teams.

This means your skills marketplace becomes a baseline, not a blueprint. And when paired with data from the employee lifecycle, you see exactly where to spot the signals of potential.

“Once you’ve cleared the baseline, the whole point is: does that person show personal velocity and development in themselves?” Bradburn says. “Have they continued to build and develop their skills over time, and will that continue within our setup in our business? Then, your mapping comes from the people who are progressing fast within the business, who have shown that aptitude for continued learning.”

“Every time you hire or someone moves internally, capture what actually made them successful. Not just the job description, but the behavioral and capability signals that mattered. Layer these skill signals into your ATS and HRIS, using performance data to track which new skills were demonstrated or added post-hire.”

This means looking at employee lifecycle data to identify performance, progression, promotion, and growth trends. TA teams also need to act as strategic partners and internal headhunters for hiring managers and department heads, helping them identify the skills gaps and growth potential within their own teams:

  • Who’s growing fast?
  • Who are our top performers at a departmental level?
  • Which employees consistently go above and beyond in their roles — mentoring newer team members or elevating the bar for the team?
  • Who’s already stretching into skills we need in the future?

2. Structure hiring around evolving skills, not static roles

Organizations have been in the grip of a chronic skills shortage for years. And you only need to look at how dramatically skills have shifted in the wake of AI to see how this shortage is accelerating in real-time.

Skills-based hiring has evolved as the hail Mary organizations needed to fill these gaps at scale. Strip away the qualifications, focus on what people can demonstrably do, and boom, your talent pool should fill up.

But there’s a problem: Static job descriptions quickly become outdated in a world where core competencies shift monthly, not yearly, making traditional skills mapping a rearview mirror.

The companies getting skills-based hiring right aren’t starting with exhaustive skills inventories — instead, they’re building frameworks that can adapt as quickly as the skills themselves evolve.

What this means for TA teams in 2025

When implemented effectively, skills-based hiring can help enterprise teams identify key skills gaps and hire better candidates, faster. But to use skills-based hiring as a lever for future potential, teams need to go beyond siloed skills and consider how capabilities intersect.

“Our outlook on skills-based hiring has historically been very binary,” says Rob Thomas, enterprise people leader and VP People at the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation. “People view it as either you have a skill, or you don’t. But we don’t think about skills in terms of how they combine — and how we can tap into those combinations to be more effective at the tasks we wish to accomplish.”

“It’s not about skills as something binary. It’s more about effectiveness depending on the situation and the environment. The magic happens in the combination of skills — how can you be put in a position to pull on that thread or skill to service the need that we have?”

This shift relies on understanding how skills work together in a relational context. Building skills ontologies — frameworks that map how different skills connect — helps add structure by identifying transferable skill combinations.

AI-powered tooling can help here by cross-referencing capabilities across the organization with new job postings to surface adjacent or foundational skills that can be developed or adapted.

For example, instead of searching for someone who’s managed a CRM migration using Salesforce and HubSpot, you might look for a candidate who’s led complex comms rollouts across teams — blending stakeholder alignment, workflow design, and tool adoption in a way that mirrors your needs, even if the tools themselves differ.

To get ahead here, TA teams can:

  • Use skills data to design assessments that test for combinations of skills and situational effectiveness, rather than one specific skill.
  • Integrate skills ontology platforms within sourcing platforms and applicant tracking systems to match candidates to roles based on current and adjacent skills, plus future potential.

3. Build intelligent TA systems that pipeline ahead of demand

In 2025, the most effective talent functions will flip this script entirely. From our 2025 report, we know that 83% of talent leaders expect talent acquisition to broaden in scope by 2029.

Instead of waiting for headcount and hiring approvals, future-focused talent teams are now building intelligence systems to anticipate where the business is heading, and which capabilities are needed to get there. They’re moving from simply filling roles to shaping quality of hire, employer branding and future skills strategy. 

“The best talent leaders are going to need to understand where their business is in its lifecycle, and proactively identify which skills they need to develop for future growth,” said Jason Gingrich, Talent Acquisition Lead at Intrinsic, in HIGHER’s The State of Talent Acquisition 2025 Report. “Finding generalists that can evolve over time is going to be key in the next few years.”

This means building a TA function that acts more like market researchers and strategy partners, not order-takers.

What this means for TA teams in 2025

Building a more intelligent TA function that is responsive, not reactive, relies on understanding your organization’s trajectory, rather than its current state. You need to know what your organization is building, what your mission is, and how that impacts the capabilities you need in the future.

“You have to start with leadership,” Thomas says. “What’s the vision for your organization? What are we trying to optimize for? How are we being purpose-driven to get there? And then we can back into how we can fill those gaps with the capabilities and skills we need at any given milestone.”

Predicting the future might not be on most TA teams’ bingo cards for 2025 — but building the signals that help you spot where to look next should be. The TA teams at the forefront of this shift are already building early warning systems to help them spot hiring trends, monitor changing skills needs in their industry, and create relationships with candidates months or even years before a role opens up.

In practice this might look like:

  • Tracking hiring patterns across your competitive landscape and monitoring job posting trends and patent applications to identify emerging skills clusters — use talent intelligence platforms like TalentNeuron or Horsefly to do this more efficiently.
  • Tracking quality of internal referrals to identify employees with high-performing networks.
  • Overlaying core talent data such as retention, involuntary turnover, or hiring trends with business outcomes and broader market trends to anticipate hiring patterns.
  • Building multiple talent pipeline scenarios based on different growth trajectories, market conditions, or role scarcity.
  • Pooling data with HR, L&D, and other cross-functional teams to identify patterns in what drives retention and success.

4. Build cross-functional teams with strategic range

From The State of Talent Acquisition 2025, we know that overall, talent teams aren’t getting any bigger. Gone are the days of plush budgets and even plusher headcounts — and this shift is changing both TA team structure, and how TA teams are addressing skills gaps from within.

Case in point: Some specialist skill sets and roles are on the decline. Less than 30% of respondents in our report said they plan to hire for specialist roles like sourcers or coordinators in 2025. Transactional or repetitive skills that once defined TA — like sourcing and scheduling — are being absorbed or automated by emerging tech.

In this environment, TA leaders aren’t thinking in terms of narrow functions — they’re thinking more holistically about the function, its positioning across the organization, and future skills needs as a whole.

“What we’re looking at now is how we can uplevel each individual on our team beyond recruiting in a way that benefits both our business and their careers,” said Claire Berkley, in our report. “This includes the areas that funnel into talent: operations and technology, internal mobility, and reporting. This process was more proactive in the past — but now it’s a little more reactive to where we need to strengthen the team.”

What this means for TA teams in 2025

For TA teams in 2025, the goal isn’t to do it all — it’s about building teams that can think about their skills in a systems-focused way, and move fluidly across cross-functional tasks. This means shifting from narrowly defined roles and skill sets to a more skills-agnostic and strategically balanced model.

Many teams are going for the 70/30 approach here. This is where team members have a clear area of ownership in their role or area of expertise, but build secondary and tertiary experience in key areas, such as employer branding, talent ops, analytics, and building custom recruiting GPTs.

Leaning into team strengths and interests is helpful — but the key is balance. Without a systems view of the whole TA machine, you could end up top-heavy. The most important thing is balancing hands-on experimentation and learning with strategic direction and clear priorities.

In practical terms, this might look like:

  • Upskilling TA teams in business acumen skills that connect TA to business impact — including how to use business intelligence tooling and analytics, build effective reporting, engage stakeholders, and manage projects.
  • Building competence in talent intelligence with targeted learning and templated resources, such as statistical thinking, data storytelling, and market intelligence.
  • Creating safe sandbox environments and pilot projects for TA teams to experiment with AI and automation in a systems-focused way to solve problems — such as prompt engineering, building custom GPTs and workflows, and learning advanced analytics.
  • Doubling down on TA traits that can’t be automated, such as critical thinking skills, decision-making, networking, and relationship management.

Turning TA into a strategic partner

At its core, evolving the TA function from order-taker to strategic partner relies on reshaping how teams think, act, and drive value for the business. 

This means gaining clarity on where your organization is going, aligning your hiring strategy to the capabilities that will drive it forward, and embedding systems that make talent more visible, dynamic, and data-driven.

This shift doesn’t happen by accident. It takes new structures, stronger partnerships, and a clearer view of where talent can create long-term value across the whole business.

At Talentful, we help TA teams build these capabilities from the inside out — embedding experts who align hiring strategy with business goals, map emerging skills, and create flexible, future-ready functions.


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