You Already Have the Talent. You Just Don’t Know Them.

by Laurie Ruettimann

I don’t know my DISC profile or remember my StrengthsFinder results, and I never took the Birkman. But I do know I’m a Capricorn, INTJ, Enneagram 8, and a Wood Tiger in Chinese astrology. Someone recently told me that my Chinese astrology forecast says 2026 is my year because the Tiger lines up with the Horse in a Fire Trine. I liked hearing that, even though I haven’t checked what a “fire trine” actually means. I just assume it’s good.

All those results agree that I’m strategic, direct, and don’t like being managed. I lead with competence, not charm, and I’d rather be respected than liked. Four different systems from different times all say the same thing: I’ll tell you what I think and don’t need anyone’s permission.

Even though I’ve had coaching based on assessments, I know more about my astrological forecast than I do about my actual development profile.

Now imagine what’s happening inside your organization.

Everyone Loves AI Until They Need a Human

Right now, there’s a quiet argument against human workers. Most leaders won’t say it, but if you look around, the logic is everywhere.

The future of the economy is focused on AI, not human intelligence, despite how leaders lie to us. Every investor presentation and earnings call is about automation and productivity. It’s getting harder to argue for investing in people, not because people aren’t valuable, but because the story has changed. And stories shape budgets.

When companies invest in people, the emotional risk is bigger than most admit. A bad SaaS purchase can be written off. But a bad hire is a lawsuit, a morale problem, and six months of everyone pretending things will improve. AI doesn’t file complaints or have personal problems. It doesn’t need a manager, which is convenient since most managers are terrible at the job anyway. A bot’s ROI shows up in weeks. A person takes months, if not years. And boards don’t like to wait.

So here’s the bias that matters most for this conversation: companies believe the best people are somewhere else even though they don’t have the money to find that person. They romanticize external talent while ignoring the people already doing the work. That belief is expensive and almost always wrong.

So You’re Stuck with Your People. Good.

If your hiring requests keep getting denied and AI is eating the budget conversation, you’re left with your current team. Smart people leaders already know this, and they’re thinking about how to keep their people and figure out what those people can actually do. Train them up. Develop them. Promote from within.

But you can’t do any of that if you don’t know who’s sitting in your organization.

That’s the baseline case for assessments. Not the fun quizzes you take at an offsite and never mention again. Not the one that told your colleague that she’s a Golden Retriever. The real ones. The ones that tell you something useful about how a person thinks, what drives them, and where they’ll fall apart.

If You’re Starting from Scratch

Choosing the right assessment starts with knowing what question you’re trying to answer. That sounds obvious. It’s not how most organizations operate. They grab a tool because a vendor demo was convincing, or because their CHRO attended a conference and came back excited about Predictive Index. That’s buying a solution before diagnosing the problem.

A few things to think about before you spend the money.

What decision are you trying to make? Are you building better teams? Identifying flight risks? Planning succession? Trying to figure out who’s coasting and who’s waiting to be challenged? Each of those is a different question, and different tools are better at different things. Hogan does something different than CliftonStrengths, which does something different than DISC, which does something different than Birkman. HR should be literate in the differences. Using an invalid tool to make a high-stakes talent decision is worse than guessing, because it gives you false confidence wrapped in a professional-looking report.

Assess what’s hard to train: values, behavioral tendencies, and motivational drivers. How someone handles ambiguity, conflict, and being told no. These matter most for long-term development and retention, and a two-day workshop won’t change them.

Make it about the person, not just the org chart. An assessment that only serves the company’s succession plan is a compliance exercise. A retention tool that also helps the individual understand what they want and where they’re headed is also helpful. People stay when they believe the organization sees them as a person with a future, not as a resource to be optimized. (And then you’re back to fighting for that req again.)

And don’t assess and abandon. The assessment is the beginning of a conversation. If you’re not following up with coaching, development planning, or at a minimum a real talk about what the results mean and what happens next, you’ve spent money on a PDF nobody will read. I’ve seen it dozens of times. Big investment, slick rollout, zero follow-through. That’s not a talent strategy. That’s bullshit.

Who Do You Already Have?

You already have talent in your organization. People who could stretch into bigger roles if anyone bothered to find out what they’re capable of. People who are coasting because nobody has challenged them or asked what they actually want. People three levels down, quietly waiting to be seen.

Assessments won’t get you more headcount. They won’t fix your culture or replace a bad manager or stop your CEO from talking about AI like it’s going to save the company from having to deal with humans. But they will answer the only question that matters when the budget is frozen, and the reqs are dead: who do we already have, and what the hell are they capable of?

Stop waiting for permission to hire. Figure out who’s already there.

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I write about work, money, and knowing when to quit. Subscribe to my newsletter.