Career Mobility and Internal Talent Marketplaces

Why Read This?

According to this SHRM article by Roy Maurer, Internal Talent Marketplaces (ITMs) are the future of talent management.? The author quotes HR industry analyst Josh Bersin:

"The talent marketplace represents something much bigger than HR," he said. "It's the next form of business management. It will facilitate the evolution from the hierarchical model where you work your way up the pyramid to being an agile, creative, resilient organization where people work on multiple projects, move from role to role, and embrace job sharing."?

Bersin points out that one of the greatest benefits of the talent marketplace is that it allows career growth to be everyone's responsibility, not just the manager's job.

In this issue of the Career Mobility Corner Newsletter, we will explore the Internal Talent Marketplace which is the seventh element of my Career Mobility model below:

ITMs Defined

At their core, talent marketplaces are about bridging talent supply and demand. A digital talent marketplace reveals who within your organization wants new opportunities – it’s about identifying talent, their skills, and their openness to take on new roles. Emily Field, McKinsey Associate Partner?

ITMs and DEI

In this McKinsey podcast, Emily talks about how digital talent marketplaces democratize the process because they create more transparency and visibility into open opportunities.? For example, when we look at this from a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) lens, we know that women are much less likely to apply to jobs if they don’t meet 100% of the qualifications.? In comparison, we hear that a man will apply for a job if he has 60% of the requirements.? A digital talent marketplace infers the skills you have and matches you to jobs for which you either have the relevant skills or you are a near match.? It takes the guesswork out to create opportunities in an equitable and inclusive way.

Emily also notes that the benefit is massive from an employee perspective because they are able to remain in their chosen organization.? They can transition to a role that they are ready for or can learn a couple of skills first.? From the employer’s perspective, there is the ability to move talent dynamically.? Employees are able to add more value from day one of the job because they don’t come with the same start-up costs.? From a societal impact view, employers are helping their employees create the skills to thrive in a new part of the organization instead of watching them exit.

Leaders’ First Steps to an ITM

Where do you start first to make the most of in-house talent?? McKinsey Leader, Bill Schaninger, says to start where you need it most since some roles matter more than others.? Bryan Hancock, another McKinsey Leader, highlights project-based work where you understand the skills required and you match talent to a short-term project.? Or if you have an underrepresented group from a DEI standpoint, you can use marketplaces to understand the skills they have and better match and promote them through the organization.

Designing an ITM

In this Harvard Business Review article, the authors, Jonathon M.V. Davis, B. Pablo Montagnes, Patryk Perkowski, and Bettina Hammer, talk about how to align company needs and employee preferences.? You can also listen to this article from the same link by downloading the Noa app for iPhone or Android.

The authors note that ITMs can take two different forms. One functions like a job board of a social network like LinkedIn but for internal candidates.? Employees browse listings and managers browse profiles.? If selections match, the two can discuss the next steps. The other ITM form is automated and less personal.? Employees create profiles, review openings, and rank their preferred assignments.? An algorithm then finds optimal matches for the employee and the company. ?Matches are communicated to the candidates and relevant supervisors.

According to the authors, not every company is ready to create an ITM.

Matching talent to opportunities requires balancing several factors: business objectives, the need for agility, workers’ preferences, and continuity in existing work. Achieving that balance confounds organizations in every sector.

Prime Benefits of ITMs

• Reduced replacement costs. ?A Gallup poll shows that 48% of U.S. workers would leave their jobs for access to better upskilling opportunities.? ITMs create new avenues for career growth by providing employees access to new skills and experiences. At Scheider Electric, almost 50% of employees who left said they walked out because of few growth opportunities.? In April 2020, it launched an ITM in partnership with Gloat, an ITM software provider.
• Better placement within a large workforce. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is one of the world’s largest employers with 1.34 million active-duty service members, 743,000 civilians, and 773,000 reservists.? Within the DOD, all the divisions use ITMs.? The army has matched more than 50,000 active-duty officers since the launch of its latest system. Other branches of the government are also implementing ITMs.
• More opportunities for generalists.? ITMs benefit companies that hire generalists more than those with specialized workforces. Without specialties, workers are somewhat interchangeable. They can select tasks they enjoy without fear of failure. Google prefers hiring “smart generalists.” Adopting a talent marketplace was a strategic management decision. One year out, in a survey of Google employees and managers, 80% reported being satisfied or very satisfied.
• Better aggregation of insights.? Employees often understand what makes their teams productive and which colleagues they work well with. Gathering this information is critical if gaps exist between employees and executives.? Google found that greater internal mobility also improved knowledge sharing and flow in their organization.

Building Your ITM

Here are some guidelines from the authors to help you begin:

• Choose or create the right platform. A custom ITM is expensive and time-consuming but works for companies that have vast technical resources and need platform customization.? It’s easier and faster to license software from third-party vendors such as Gloat, Fuel50, or Hitch. Most vendors make the technical adoption easy and can build a marketplace in several weeks.? Unilever, Novartis, and Mastercard work with third-party ITM providers.
• Prepare your organization in advance.? Employees might worry that a talent market will give them too many options or they may not know how to proceed if they don’t get a top-choice assignment.? They will also want to know how managers use the ITM to develop and promote employees and managers will want to know how the ITM helps coordinate transitions and headcount.? Consider programs that will complement the platform such as career coaching.
• Be mindful of company culture.? Hiring someone from another manager’s team may be off-limits.? Employees may feel resentful toward colleagues who apply for other opportunities.? Most companies use a rollout period to prepare employees and create informational videos, FAQs, and host live Q&A sessions.
• Leverage ITM data.? The platform will be a rich source of insights to better understand the gaps between employee’s wants and the company’s needs.? Are employees most excited about high-priority projects or career-growth opportunities?? These insights can be used to nudge workers toward important roles.
• Optimizing your ITM.? Employees and managers who do their own matching are more motivated and engaged by their work which results in higher retention and lower replacement costs.? They also can make better matches than HR would by sifting through resumes.? It also can be risky to allow workers to select their own assignments.? They might opt for opportunities with the least effort or choose roles with the least challenging managers.? Some will select assignments in order to develop skills, but they may be unable to succeed in the role.

Executive and HR Oversight

Most organizations let direct supervisors approve anyone who chooses to join their team.? Sometimes, manager’s agendas may not align with the organization’s overarching goals. For example, Google executives feared that employees would flee mission-critical projects for moon-shot assignments.? The authors found that top-performing workers usually want to work with top-performing teams. Executives and HR may prefer that their talent be mobile, or placed in specific projects.? A combination of nudges, incentives, and top-level oversight can help avoid talent hoarding.

Barriers to ITMs

In this early Josh Bersin blog, he talks about how ITMs were exploding into view.? He also highlighted the many barriers to internal mobility in companies.? The biggest has of course been culture.? While most companies have vertical career paths, if someone makes a radical internal job change, they may be taking a risk.? Usually, the hiring manager wants someone with more experience, the internal candidate may not be ready, and if they underperform, they may not get their old job back or their current manager might not let them go.? He talks about how people get pigeonholed into a job role and it’s very hard to reinvent yourself. ?

Josh says all this is now changing thanks to stories by Unilever, Schneider Electric, Standard Charter, Seagate, Societe Generale, IBM, and many others.? He touts that it has become clear that opening up internal opportunities is the most powerful of management practices.? It engages people and helps them grow and it helps the organization identify skills that reduce the need to continually search for external talent.

Enduring, high-performing companies have figured this out. Companies like Cisco, Nestle, Google, IBM, GE, Procter and Gamble, General Mills, Unilever, and Bank of America have been internal talent machines for years.

Josh says that Talent Marketplace strategies evolve in three stages:

• Planned Mobility –There are often many barriers to this approach and this traditional model is very limiting. ?The pyramid narrows as you move up and most employees “learn to be ready” by taking a new job. ?Companies often come up short in filling their succession plans at this stage.?
• Facilitated Mobility – This happens all the time and is usually driven by politics (who you know) so it may not be the best business outcome. ?With a good talent platform, it can be better since many HR leaders study patterns of mobility to determine which moves have the greatest success.
• Agile Talent Mobility – Over time all companies are moving in this direction but for many, it is still a new idea.? This agile approach is very common within a job function such as IT, HR, or Finance.? A more agile example would be a strong IT data analyst moving into marketing analytics. In this approach, performance management is based on “results” not reputation.?

In this MITSloan Review “What Outperformers Do Differently to Tap Internal Talent” (subscription or purchase required), the authors offer practical insights to help companies that are underutilizing internal talent.? A joint research project involving the MIT Sloan School of Management, New York University’s Stern School of Business and Revelio Labs, found that lateral career opportunities are more than twice as important as compensation in predicting employee retention.

By adopting leading practices for internal mobility, companies can better deploy existing worker capacity and benefit from more successful hires who hit the ground running in new roles with greater institutional knowledge, higher levels of engagement and retention, and even improved gender equity.

Their research identified companies that are leading the way as talent mobility outperformers and offer learning from those at the leading edge of this trend.?

Here are four talent practices that are setting talent mobility performers apart:

• Put more Power in the Hands of Employees – For companies like HSBC, the shift from organization-led mobility where managers must initiate and approve mobility opportunities, to employee-led mobility is intentional to give employees more power, while reducing the friction associated with finding internal opportunities.
• Expand the Mobility Option Menu – Fidelity launched a pilot career vitality program focused on growing internal talent that includes internal project work and job shadowing.? Hamish Nisbet, global head of resourcing for HSBC says that from a future of work lens, internal mobility might just be about stretching into other areas while staying in your current job role.
• Take Advantage of Recent Innovation – Unilever looked at the trends and beyond the walls of their organization. In 2018, they went on a digital safari to visit future of work startups in five cities around the world. It was on that tour that they met Gloat, and would later partner with them to launch Unilever’s Flex experiences program which uses AI to help employees match with open career opportunities.
• Integrate Mobility With Other Talent Practices – Comcast rebranded quarterly reviews as opportunities to allow for conversations about potential job changes.? Unilever’s purpose workshops enable employees to develop future-fit skill plans to support their development and talent mobility goals. Seagate Technology requires that jobs be posted internally before being posted externally.

This TalentGuard blog also highlights hurdles to internal talent mobility.? It references a Gartner study that shows only 27% of workers feel that their employers make it easy to find and switch to attractive internal opportunities. ?Their research also indicates that engaging employees not actively seeking jobs could result in 36% possibly switching jobs given the right circumstances.? This is a real opportunity to increase engagement.

First, although internal hiring is often a priority, for some reason or another, internal mobility programs struggle to come to fruition.? It’s simply a lack of concerted actions.? As always, knowing something and doing something about it is two different things.

This blog also mentions HR culture as another stumbling block. ?Finally, it highlights the absence of incentives to overcome the human response that blocks internal recruitment. ?Review the TalentGuard blog to learn more about how to increase internal mobility.

Examples of ITM Success

Google.? For information on Google’s algorithm-powered internal job marketplace that created a more scalable and dynamic staffing model, read this re:Work article.? Hear from a Googler who switched roles in this interview.

Mastercard. Watch this video, part of Josh Bersin’s Talent Marketplace Collection, to learn how Mastercard unlocks mobility and career growth with its ITM.? Harvard Business School also has a podcast and transcript on How Mastercard connects its employees with opportunities.? It is a fascinating conversation.

NASA.? Review this NASA blog to find out how it launched an agency-wide internal job listing and candidate selection platform called the Talent Marketplace that aligns with its Future of Work model.

Spotify.? Read how the company “Ditched the List” and got rid of the 9-box grid by building a homegrown system that scouts its organization to identify potential successors and internal talents.

ITM Solutions Providers

Josh Bersin identified these 12 vendors in his blog referenced earlier on the explosion of Talent Marketplace platforms:

In this blog, AIHR classified these vendors based on fit to client size and type:

• Gloat – a leading provider geared for enterprise organizations
• Eightfold – targets mid and large-size organizations, including government entities
• Fuel50 – serves mid-size businesses, enterprises, government, and non-profits
• smartPeople by HRForecast – focuses on mid-size businesses, enterprises, and government
• Read more detailed reviews and ratings of the best 2023 Internal Talent Marketplace products by G2 and Gartner.
• Summary
• Josh Bersin offers an important insight:
• This is not a solution that can be “solved” by buying a platform.? Creating a culture of internal mobility is a top-to-bottom effort. It changes the way careers work; it changes the way you reward and pay people; and it changes the nature of management, leadership, and learning.
• He believes that every organization over time will become more like a professional services company, and less like a “hierarchy of jobs”.? While this is already occurring in certain business functions (IT, Finance, HR, and Marketing), once it transcends to other functions, business units and geographies, companies will start to feel like global services firms.

Additional Resources

Many of the ITM vendors and related service providers curate helpful content on implementing platforms. Below are some additional resources I found in my research for this newsletter edition.

• AIHR: The Complete Guide to Talent Marketplaces
• BetterUp:? What is a Talent Marketplace and Why Do Employees Need It?
• Eightfold: Five Tips for Making a Talent Marketplace a Success
• Fuel 50:? Why and How to Create an Internal Talent Marketplace?
• Gloat: The Talent Marketplace Explained
• McClean & Company: Insights on Internal Talent Marketplaces (video)
• Mercer:? Build Future Capacity with an Internal Talent Marketplace
• Talent Guard: Ten Ways to Boost Internal Talent Mobility
• Training Industry: Drive Business Success With an Internal Talent Marketplace

Call to Action

Thank you for taking the time to read this exclusive Career Mobility Newsletter on LinkedIn, initially designed for HR and talent professionals.? A later version will focus on how employees can find and leverage career mobility opportunities in their company.

In order to drive engagement with some of our 988 subscribers, here are a few questions for you:

What are some challenges that HR and talent professionals potentially face in implementing an ITM in their organization?

What experiences have you had, if any, with an ITM?

What more would you like to know about internal Career Mobility?

Be one of the first to place your comments in the box below to start the conversation.

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