How Companies are using Talent Marketplaces to Promote Internal Mobility
Careers are changing. The era of linear career paths as the #1 form of professional growth is coming to an end. Slowly but surely, “career switches” are becoming less of a surprise (or even concern) as the global workforce acknowledges the rapidly changing job market. What’s more, the spotlight is on lifelong learning to keep employee skillsets – and employees – agile throughout their careers. And let’s not forget younger workers, who are keen to experiment and try on different roles whilst growing and rising within an organisation.
In the coming era of agile professional growth, finding the next role within their organisation is a challenge for workers. Over 50% of respondents in Deloitte’s 2019 Human Capital Trends survey said it was easier for employees to find a job outside the organisation than inside.
This is because most organisations are stuck with outdated progression models, where people enter the company and work their way up the pyramid. These models don’t suit a more fluid, modern approach to career development. Much rarer are flatter, more agile progression structures where movement across teams, departments and operating divisions is normalised. However, there is an awareness that this kind of movement – known as internal mobility or talent mobility – is important. In LinkedIn’s 2020 global talent trends report, internal recruiting was the third most important trend for the future of HR, with 65% of talent professionals acknowledge that their company needs to improve its internal mobility efforts. (Internal talent mobility also features in our list of emerging strategic workforce planning trends.)
The business case for internal mobility is straight-forward: lower recruitment costs, the avoidance of productivity losses during onboarding and an attractive employer brand (especially to job-hopping millennials). When Deloitte looked at the fastest-growing organisations, defined as those growing at 10 per cent or more compared to the previous year, “they were twice as likely to have excellent talent mobility programmes than organisations that were not growing at all, and more than three times more likely than organisations whose revenues were shrinking.”
Source: LinkedIn’s 2020 Talent Trends Report
Shifting to an agile career progression model is a big ask – instead of straight-forward linear promotions, organisations face the challenge of creating their own internal gig economies. This is where the idea of talent marketplace comes in: a data-driven approach to managing a fluid workforce.
Gloat, a talent marketplace vendor, defines the emerging field as:
“Put simply, a talent marketplace is a platform that allows managers throughout the entire organization to post listings for open positions, temporary assignments, short- and long-term part-time projects, mentorships, and any other initiative that talent within the organization is needed for.
Using AI and smart algorithms, the platform can then match relevant positions to employees, and allow the organization to benefit from the untapped ambitions and abilities of people it employs, regardless of what they were originally hired to do.”
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Talent marketplace solutions give HR practitioners x-ray vision into workforce skills on the one hand and roles, projects and internal opportunities on the other. Using match-making algorithms, they then proactively recommend internal opportunities to relevant candidates. Typically, it’s not until an employee actively shows interest in an opportunity on the platform (e.g. by “liking” it) that a member of the HR team gets involved. Not only is this invaluable for a recruitment team grappling to fill positions in a timely manner, but the insight gleaned from this data is crucial for leadership teams defining business and talent strategy.
Organisations like Unilever and Schneider Electric are leading the charge on adoption of talent marketplace solutions. Unilever has enrolled 100,000 employees across 12 business areas in 90+ countries into their talent marketplace platform, FLEX Experiences, since 2018. The ultimate goal is to reshape how people see their careers, beyond titles and instead as a more diverse and meaningful set of experiences. In a nutshell, democratising opportunity. Through this work, Unilever has unlocked 30,000+ hours of workforce capacity and improved employee engagement and satisfaction. They have also gained greater visibility into organisational skills, which enable more efficient access to the right talent at the right time.
Developments in the vendor space and increased adoption of these platforms is exciting and points towards a growing trend. A crucial component of talent marketplace adoption, however, isn’t technical. It’s cultural.
One of the oft-cited reasons for unsuccessful internal mobility efforts are managerial resistance. Research from Deloitte suggests 46% of managers resist internal mobility, whilst LinkedIn’s 2020 Talent Trends reports a much higher figure of 70%. The need for a culture overhaul with regards to a fluid workforce mindset is clear.
Let’s look at three components of a culture that supports internal mobility and talent marketplace adoption:
Lifelong Learning. A fluid approach to careers necessitates a more integrated adoption of learning and upskilling in the day-to-day life of employees. The added benefit being that learning is truly embedded in the flow of work and a culture of continuous upskilling and reinvention becomes the norm. Degreed’s recent acquisition of Adepto is an exciting example of a learning platform expanding into the talent marketplace field – showing just how closely knit learning and internal mobility are.
Independently minded employees and open-minded managers. Employee independence is crucial: each employee takes responsibility for their own growth and development in an effective talent marketplace. On the other side of the coin, managers have to stop talent hoarding. Google’s G-Tech department implemented their own talent marketplace with the same match-making algorithm used to pair graduating doctors with training hospitals in the US. They made the process of internal mobility – of shifting into a new role, project or team – mandatory three times a year. A swift way of eradicating talent hoarding, the unintended consequence, as described by Google, was that workforce fluidity became part and parcel of the team’s culture.
Celebrating career growth in any direction. Flexible reward programs can be used by HR to embed talent marketplace models as the dependence on title and tenure wanes. Netflix, for example, allows people to choose what percentage of their salary they take in stock options (the amount can also change over time), which allows workers to increase their cashflow in line with life’s demands. This has led to Netflix boasting the highest percentage of workers who believe they are being compensated fairly across the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google).
The career structure as-you-know-it is waning. For organisations to attract, engage and hold on to top talent, internal mobility – powered by talent marketplace – should be a key focus.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caroline is the Research Director at Insight222. She is a thought-leader, researcher and writer on people analytics and the future of HR. Prior to joining Insight222, she worked at the Center for the Future of Work where she was an advisor and in-demand speaker on topics related to the future of work. She has also held roles in digital services and transformation consulting at Cognizant. Contact Caroline at caroline.styr@insight222.com