Is the Talent Your City Needs Already Here?

For decades, the playbook for economic competitiveness has run on recruitment: winning the high-skill workers everyone else is also pursuing, the tech talent near the top of every target list. It is a hard game, and the returns thin as more communities play it. The incentives rise and the pitches sharpen, but the same workers only get harder and more expensive to land.

There is a quieter advantage most communities overlook. The talent is already there, and untapped. A trained professional stuck in work that does not draw on her skills. A worker whose industry shed jobs but whose abilities transfer cleanly to one that is growing. A newcomer whose degree from another country counts for nothing here. A young person a few transit stops from an industry that is hiring, with no clear way in. These residents rarely show up in the headline workforce numbers, which is part of why they go uncounted.

Activation Is Not Recruitment

Moving those residents into the jobs opening around them is not a side project to the real economic strategy. It is the strategy that compounds, because those residents already live here and are invested in staying. The two approaches are different disciplines. Recruitment is a sales problem, run on incentives and a good pitch. Activation is a coordination problem, run on getting employers and training providers pointed at the residents who need the work.

The method is not complicated, though doing it well is. Begin with the industries that are actually adding jobs. Find the residents who are not yet on a track to reach them. Then build the structure that connects the two and keeps connecting them. The product is not a report. It is an institution that holds employers, trainers, labor, and government to a shared plan long after the engagement ends.

Our Clients Are Already Building It

In Austin, we helped design the Austin Infrastructure Academy, a single front door that channels local residents into the careers created by the region's $25 billion infrastructure buildout, with a deliberate focus on the people the trades have historically passed over. It won the National Association of Workforce Boards' 2024 Trailblazer Award. The award is not the point. The point is that a city sitting on a generational construction pipeline chose to staff it from its own neighborhoods.

In Los Angeles, we are helping build the city's five-year workforce plan, A Path Forward, organized around a single target: 50,000 residents in living-wage jobs by 2030. It runs on sector coalitions that bring employers, trainers, labor, and the city to one table for each growing industry, so openings and local talent are matched deliberately rather than left to chance.

In Birmingham, we are designing an apprenticeship that moves youth and young adults into energy career pathways, turning a hiring sector into a ladder for the residents most often left off it.

In Oregon, we are working with Energy Trust of Oregon to define what small businesses and their tradespeople need to deliver on the state's clean energy commitments, because those targets are out of reach unless the state draws on the workforce it already has.

AI Raises the Stakes

The jobs communities have spent years trying to recruit are now the ones most exposed to automation. A recent Tufts University analysis projects that roughly 9.3 million U.S. jobs are at near-term risk from AI, concentrated in the very knowledge work communities recruit hardest for, while physical and hands-on jobs face less than 1 percent displacement. Many of those harder-to-automate jobs are sitting open right now. A community that has built the machinery to move its own residents into that work is far better protected than one still bidding signing bonuses for roles that may thin out within the decade.

The communities that pull ahead over the next ten years will not be the ones that recruit the hardest. They will be the ones that put the talent already living there to work. The shortage was never really talent. What is missing is the connective tissue between the people and the opportunities, and that is what most places have yet to build.

If your city is ready to count the workforce it has been overlooking, that is where we would start.

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