No Suitable Candidates: The Three Talent Visibility Gaps in Your Organisation

Here is a number worth sitting with: 38. That is how many days, on median, it takes a company to hire someone today, according to SmartRecruiters’ Recruiting Benchmarks survey.

Let’s put that in perspective. It takes less time (27 days) for the moon to go around the earth. It took anthropic less time (a month) to increase its revenue run rate by about $6 billion. It takes a little more (40-80 days) to sail around the world, if you are a professional race sailor.

The fact is 38 days is too long.  Why does it take so long to find a suitable candidate?

We don’t have to look too far to understand that. The problem is often internal. In many organisations, the hiring process relies on job titles, keywords in a CV, and individual judgement rather than a clear view of skills and role readiness.

As a result, your organisation keeps reopening the same roles, expanding the same searches, and paying the same premiums for the same skills. Meanwhile, existing employees who could potentially grow into these roles remain invisible to the process.

Here are three gaps your organisation needs to bridge before suitable internal candidates move to your competitors.

Talent Visibility Gap #1 : Lack of a Usable Skills Inventory

The reason candidate shortlisting fail is simple. Many organisations cannot answer, quickly and confidently, what skills they already have.

They have job titles, CVs, performance notes, and managers who know their own teams well. What they often don’t have is a single, current, searchable view of skills across the workforce. Only 38% of organizations now maintain a single, enterprise-wide skills library.

When a role opens, hiring teams need to identify internal options fast. Without a usable skills inventory, internal capability is easy to miss. The process moves straight to external sourcing, because internal talent is hard to find. That’s what a skills inventory is meant to do.

What’s Missing: Skills Taxonomy and Consistent Profile Management
Together, they provide the foundation for a skills inventory by:

• • Establishing a standard skills language across the organisation
  • Capturing skills consistently at the individual level
  • Enabling reliable search and comparison of capability across teams
  • Supporting faster identification of internal candidates against role requirements
  • Improving visibility into existing capability before extending the search externally

Source: Mercer Skills Snapshot Survey

Talent Visibility Gap #2 : Inconsistent Proficiency Validation

Many hiring processes stall at the evaluation stage. Even when candidates appear relevant, teams struggle to agree on who is truly ready. Shortlists become difficult to defend because there is no consistent basis for comparison. Over 60% of leaders say they struggle to transition workers into new roles. That’s not surprising when you consider that only 33% of organisations are investing in data insights and technology to understand workforce skills and capabilities.

In the absence of a common framework, proficiency is inferred from years of experience, certifications, past job titles, brand names, and interview performance. These signals are interpreted differently across teams and roles. Two hiring managers can look at the same profile and reach different conclusions because they are applying different criteria.

This creates a constraint that starts a chain of chaos. HR can’t standardise screening, hiring managers can’t compare candidates consistently, and internal candidates are often overlooked because readiness is difficult to validate.

What’s Missing: Assessment to Validate Proficiency and Role Readiness
A consistent approach, anchored to a shared framework. It enables validation by:

• Setting common evaluation criteria and thresholds across teams
• Producing comparable results that hiring managers can rely on
• Reducing back-and-forth caused by differing interpretations of capability
• Creating a fair basis to assess internal and external candidates

Talent Visibility Gap #3 : Weak Skills-to-opportunity Matching

Skills visibility and proficiency validation are only useful if they lead to staffing decisions. In most organisations, that connection is weak. Roles and projects are managed through one set of workflows. Skills and role readiness are tracked through another. When these are not connected, organisations struggle to move people into the right roles and projects, even when the capability exists internally.

This gap shows up when roles and projects are defined without clear skill requirements, and staffing depends on manager networks rather than a clear match to skills and readiness. As a result, employees who could move into an opportunity with targeted upskilling are not identified early, and hiring teams start focusing on external resources. Targeted upskilling is not something most organisations are investing in. Only 8% believe their organisations are highly effective at meeting the continuous, always-on learning needs of their workforce.

What’s Missing: Marketplace and Intervention
A structured way to match roles and projects to skills and role readiness, supported by targeted upskilling to close specific gaps. It enables progress by:

• Converting roles and projects into clear skills requirements
• Identifying employees who can step in with targeted upskilling
• Linking upskilling to specific roles and project needs
• Increasing internal movement into roles and projects over time

Come to think of it, these three gaps are connected. Without skills visibility, organisations cannot surface internal capability. Without consistent proficiency validation, they cannot compare candidates with confidence. Without skills-to-opportunity matching, they cannot convert capability into staffing and growth.

Credence Talent Marketplace is designed to address this end-to-end by bringing skills taxonomy and profile management, assessment, intervention, marketplace matching, and dashboards into one connected approach.

With Credence Talent Marketplace, “no suitable candidates” becomes a harder conclusion to reach, and 38 days to hire a new resource becomes a thing of the past. It’s time to make the right moves before your talented workforce finds “more suitable workplaces.”