We heard it firsthand from a People leader at a company going through a private equity acquisition. Her team let people go during the merger, then spent the following months trying to rehire the same skill sets at a lower cost. As she put it, "it wasn't until after the dust settled that we realized this person doesn't have the right skill set."
And rehiring is rarely the bargain it looks like on a spreadsheet. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs between one-half and two times their annual salary, rising to as much as 200 percent for managers and senior leaders.
The information that would have prevented those mistakes existed somewhere in the organization. It was just never captured in a way anyone could use in the moment the decision had to be made. This is what reorg decisions actually look like inside most companies right now: high stakes, irreversible, and made half blind.
We could have saved a lot of people's time and energy if we would have had something like this earlier on in the merger. People leader at a PE-acquired company
The striking thing across these conversations is that the problem is not a shortage of systems. One large telecom had grown through acquisition and was running both SAP and Workday, and still named understanding its employees' skills as the top priority. More HRIS platforms had not produced more clarity.
We also kept hearing that the visibility breaks far earlier than leaders expect. It starts to fray around 40 people and is clearly broken by 80, especially once job descriptions stop matching what people actually do. By the time a company is large enough to reorg, the gap is wide, so decisions get made from whatever proxy is closest at hand. In one acquisition, that meant PowerPoint slides of employees' backgrounds. People ended up in the wrong roles, or out the door too early, because a slide was the best data anyone had.
What ties these stories together is that the breakdowns are predictable. They cluster around the same moments: growth, an acquisition, a reorg, a new product spinout, or a new People leader inheriting a stack of spreadsheets. Those are exactly the moments a company most needs to know who can move, who is close, and what it truly has to hire for, and exactly the moments the answer is hardest to reach.
A skills library does not fix it, because a library is a snapshot that goes stale by the next reorg. What these decisions need is a live view of what people can actually do right now, so the next reorg becomes a set of informed trade-offs instead of a series of expensive guesses.