Is this a labour shortage or not?

The headlines and your hiring pipeline are telling you two different things.

Every week there is another story about how hard it is to find work right now. More applicants per posting, longer searches, people sending out a hundred resumes to get one reply. And yet that role you opened in the spring is still sitting there, and the work behind it keeps landing on whoever has room that week.

Both things are true at the same time, which is what makes it so maddening. There are plenty of people looking. They are just not the people who can do the work you actually need done.

Deloitte's 2026 manufacturing outlook reaches the same conclusion. More than a third of manufacturing executives say their top concern is skills, not headcount. As more of the floor runs on automation and analytics, the roles you are trying to fill call for capabilities the old org chart was never built to name.

That is the case for build, buy, borrow. Build the capability that defines what your company does better than anyone. Buy the specialized roles you want to own for the long haul. Borrow flex labor for the work that rises and falls with demand. You stop planning around seats and start planning around what your business can actually do.

And this is not a headcount cut dressed up in new language. Deloitte expects 81% of manufacturing task hours to stay human-driven. The work is reconfiguring roles, not removing them.

So the real question is not where to find more people. It is knowing exactly which capabilities your business runs on, and which ones you have not built yet.

Thanks for reading,
Sarah