Something strange emerged when we surveyed more than 300 HR leaders across the U.S. and the UK about talent visibility in their organizations.
A striking 92% confidently claimed they have sufficient visibility into their workforce’s skills and capabilities. Yet in the same survey, 74% admitted a lack of talent visibility actively impedes their progress towards business objectives.
This paradox highlights how organizations fundamentally misunderstand talent visibility. Critically, the data reveals that most organizations confuse basic employee data with actionable talent intelligence.
For modern-day HR departments, knowing their employees’ job titles, departments, reporting lines, and perhaps their past roles and basic skills constitutes good visibility. It’s why 92% feel confident.
But when you dig deeper into what they do with that information –– how effectively they deploy talent, identify skill gaps, or enable internal mobility –– the picture changes dramatically.
The gap between perceived and actual visibility exposes a critical weakness in how organizations approach talent management. However, understanding it also gives us a chance to redefine skills visibility and intelligence and drive greater productivity.
The difference between employee data and actionable talent intelligence
Most organizations hold a wealth of data about their employees. They know titles, departments, reporting lines, years of experience, and sometimes even certifications and past roles. This creates an illusion of visibility.
When organizations claim they have “good visibility,” they usually mean they can pull up an organization chart or run a basic report. But true skills and talent intelligence are fundamentally different from general employee data.
Here’s what they’re missing:
Traditional workforce information tells you where people sit in your organization. Talent intelligence tells you what they’re capable of.
For instance, a senior engineer on your mobile team could have untapped experience in AI that your data doesn’t capture. Or a product manager might have developed expertise in data analytics that isn’t reflected in their job title.
These hidden capabilities –– the ones that don’t fit neatly into HR systems –– are often the most valuable.
This explains our survey’s paradox; the 92% confidence comes from having basic workforce data, while the 74% who admit to visibility problems recognize its limitations. They understand that knowing where people operate in the company isn’t the same as deploying their talents effectively.
To track skills, many organizations simply have a field in their HR system for “skills” or “competencies.” But skills aren’t static data points –– they evolve, combine in unexpected ways, and often develop outside formal roles.
An employee who takes an online course in machine learning, leads a complex project, or solves a thorny customer problem builds capabilities that rarely make it into HR systems.
Worse, the false confidence born of this narrow organizational view prevents companies from solving the real problem. They don’t invest in deeper intelligence because they believe they already have it. As a result, they fail to question if their data aids decision-making and neglect to seek out better ways to understand and utilize their talent.
This blindness will only prove increasingly costly.
In 2025, the organizations that thrive will be the ones that can quickly identify, develop, and deploy talent as business needs evolve. To achieve that, you’ll need comprehensive talent and skills intelligence.
Why traditional talent tracking systems are failing modern organizations
Traditional talent systems were designed for linear careers, skills with longevity, and talent needs that could be predicted years in advance. That world no longer exists though.
The growing cost of poor talent visibility
Our survey reveals poor talent visibility isn’t only hurting HR metrics –– it’s preventing organizations from functioning effectively.
Forty-five percent of companies can’t retain their personnel, and 37% struggle to attract new talent. This is the result of organizations poorly wielding their most critical resource: their people.
Organizations often don’t realize what they have until it’s gone, not because they don’t track departures (they do, obsessively), but because they never grasped their employees’ full potential.
The attraction problem is even more revealing: Companies struggle to hire because they’re looking for the wrong strengths, and their job requirements feature outdated specifications. They ask for “project management experience” when they need someone who can coordinate AI-augmented teams. Or they look for “coding skills” when they need someone who can architect systems that blend human and machine intelligence.
And this blindness compounds. The more organizations misunderstand their current talent, the worse they become at identifying what they need.
Why this problem intensifies in 2025
Our survey data indicates the skills problem won’t be resolved any time soon. The same organizations struggling with talent visibility are planning ambitious initiatives that depend entirely on having better talent visibility.
One third of leaders say they’re betting big on reskilling and performance optimization for 2025. But how do you reskill people when you don’t truly understand their current capabilities? How do you optimize performance when you can’t accurately map talent to opportunities?
The disconnect seeps into their priorities as well. Of the 74% who admit poor talent visibility hurts their business, only 24% are prioritizing skills and visibility improvements for 2025.
Leaders acknowledge the problem in theory but aren’t addressing it in practice.
The consequences of this inaction will be severe in 2025 for the simple reason that skill requirements are changing faster than ever. Our survey shows 33% of organizations expect to undertake major reskilling initiatives next year. But without clear talent visibility, these initiatives are likely to fail.
The problem then compounds because each failed adaptation makes organizations less capable of the next one.
When an organization can’t see their skill gaps clearly, they miss early warnings. By the time they do notice it, it’s already affecting performance. They rush to fix the gap, but without solid talent visibility, they can’t identify who has adjacent skills to develop. Instead, they end up hiring externally at premium rates and the overlooked internal talent with relevant capabilities eventually leaves.
This explains why 48% of organizations rank talent retention as their top priority for 2025. They feel the pain of this vicious cycle, but until organizations solve the underlying visibility problem, they’re simply treating symptoms while the disease worsens.
Moving from surface-level visibility to in-depth skills intelligence
The solution isn’t to collect more data, but to transform how organizations understand and employ it.
Robust talent visibility starts with a fundamental shift. Instead of asking, “What roles do we have?” companies need to ask, “What capabilities can we access?” They also need to grasp how their skill sets can evolve and where they overlap.
Consider how organizations currently handle internal mobility. Despite 95% claiming they promote from within (of which 65% strongly agree), 74% still have trouble filling internal roles. This isn’t a coincidence.
Traditional systems can tell you if someone has done a job previously, but they can’t tell you who could do it given their full range of capabilities. They miss the product manager who could lead your AI initiative thanks to their knowledge of both customer needs and machine learning. They overlook the operations analyst who could transform your data strategy because their analytical skills developed outside their formal role.
Rather than implementing new systems or collecting more data, companies are finding success by fundamentally changing how they think about talent visibility. They’re digging into not just what people do, but what they’re capable of; not only their current skills but also their ability to develop new ones.
Practical steps organizations need to take now
Expensive new HR systems or complex analytics can’t get to the heart of the talent visibility issue. Organizations are already drowning in HR data — now they need to glean insights from it.
Start by pinpointing what you don’t know, then map your blind spots. Where do your current talent decisions fail? Our data shows specific patterns: 45% struggle with retention because they can’t see flight risks until it’s too late; 37% face attraction challenges because they can’t accurately define what talent they need; 74% have trouble filling internal roles despite having the capabilities they need because they miss them.
The next step is harder but crucial: Move from tracking titles to tracking capabilities. This sounds obvious, but almost none of the organizations in our survey do it effectively. They monitor formal qualifications and role histories but miss the capabilities that matter most — those that develop through experience, cross-functional projects, and informal learning.
That being said, the organizations that excel at this don’t try to track everything. Instead, they focus on learning which abilities drive their business outcomes. They build visibility around the skills and talents that directly connect to their strategic needs and map both what people can do today and could do tomorrow given the right opportunities.
This isn’t just a baseless claim; the 24% of organizations prioritizing talent visibility for 2025 are already seeing results:
- They’re twice as likely to fill roles internally.
- They retain key talent longer.
- They can adapt faster when new capabilities become crucial.
The path forward
Moving from tracking job titles to skills isn’t always an easy shift. Fuel50 can help solve the talent visibility problem through our comprehensive skills intelligence platform:
It gives organizations a proper skills foundation through our expert-built ontology of thousands of skill types and proficiency levels. Unlike traditional HR systems that merely track job titles, Fuel50’s ontology creates a common language for capabilities across an organization. Companies can either use this ontology or integrate their own existing taxonomies through the “Bring Your Own Skills Architecture” feature.
Our platform’s Talent Blueprint then maps these skills to actual work. Beyond matching people to current roles, it identifies who could step into new opportunities based on adjacent skills and learning potential. When KeyBank implemented this feature, they mapped 9,858 skills across their organization and found 2,774 specific opportunities for upskilling. Further, their 72% user return rate shows employees use it because it’s helped them grow.
The skills marketplace is where this intelligence then becomes actionable. Employees can find projects and roles that match their skill sets, even if those capabilities aren’t part of their current position. Managers can staff teams based on skills needed rather than availability. The system’s AI suggests matches based on both direct and adjacent skills, so organizations can discover talent they didn’t know they had.
Most importantly, Fuel50’s analytics engine helps leaders make data-driven decisions about their talent. They can see exactly where skill gaps exist, which capabilities are emerging, and how to develop their workforce to anticipate future needs. Organizations can track skills trends, predict future requirements, and measure the impact of their development investments.
This comprehensive approach is why companies like UCI and Texas Health use Fuel50 to drive their skills transformation. It’s not just another HR system — it’s an all-encompassing solution for understanding and deploying talent effectively.
