I think we could start with better labour market information. Some of the challenges you've referred include: do we know who's out there, and have we connected the right people to the right jobs? In a lot of cases we haven't.
The other side of it is that it's important to be fast to market. If you're going to be competitive, you have to be the first there. If it's a challenge to bring in a person locally who is capable of doing a specific job and easy to bring in somebody else in, you're probably still better off to bring somebody else in.