Identifying employees for internal opportunities throughout their careers has taken on new meaning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Companies in need of rapid restructuring found that strong internal mobility programs, backed by talent market technology, helped them recruit to meet rapidly changing business needs.
Leveraging a digital talent marketplace helped global consumer goods giant Unilever redistribute 4,000 employees to high-demand areas and free up 300,000 hours of productivity in the first few months of the pandemic, said Jeroen Wels, executive vice president of talent for the company. “The talent market is an important tool that has enabled us to move people with less work to do into areas where business is still growing, keep our businesses going, protect jobs and get results,” he said .
Human resources analyst Josh Bersin said, “In many ways, the talent market is the perfect response to the volatility caused by the pandemic: since it began, around 40 percent of US workers have changed jobs, roles or managers. If you haven’t have done.” To have something like a talent market, you had to do it all manually. ”
Use the talent you already have
Ruslan Tovbulatov, vice president of global marketing at Gloat, a leading talent markets platform based in New York City, said investing in employee development has become more critical as many companies expect to cut recruitment budgets in 2021.
“Organizations recognize that the key to unlocking speed, adaptability, and agility is to take full advantage of the talent they already have in projects, full-time positions, mentoring, and other types of work and development opportunities,” he said. “We are increasingly seeing companies moving retraining from the classroom into the workflow to develop employee skills in the workplace when and where the company needs them.”
Bersin goes further, arguing that the emergence of the internal talent market is about much more than career paths, internal recruiting, or employee learning and development – a transformative innovation that will be central to future talent management.
“The talent market is a lot bigger than the human resources department,” he said. “It’s the next form of corporate management. It makes it easier to develop from the hierarchical model, in which you work your way up the pyramid, to an agile, creative and resilient organization in which employees work on multiple projects, move from role to role and adapt to that Accept job Share. “
Ariana Moon, director of talent acquisition at Greenhouse Software, a recruiting technology provider in New York City, said the shift from maintaining isolated teams to training and retraining employees is the way forward. “I anticipate companies will move from linear career ladders to career climbing frames that can take an employee in different directions depending on how they want to grow – and overlap with business needs,” said Moon.
Talent marketplaces make this easier. “A talent marketplace is essentially a way of identifying projects and needs, as well as the skills associated with them, and enables people to fill those gaps,” said Ben Eubanks, SHRM-SCP, principal analyst and chief research officer at Lighthouse Research & Advisory, a human capital research and advisory firm. “At a high level, executives can see the widespread skill demand across the organization and the organizational skill gaps that may require deeper intervention and investment. Trends over time in projects and demand can also indicate how, when, and where to work internally Talent mobilized to fill recurring gaps. “
Besides Gloat, Fuel50, Hitch and Workday are some of the other players in the growing talent market. In October 2020, it was announced that the cloud machine learning platform is comparing people with opportunities by comparing their skills and interests with the company’s -time, project and gig work skill requirements.
Increase customer loyalty and career growth
Mark Lobosco, vice president of talent solutions at LinkedIn, noted that internal mobility programs have been on the rise for years, but the pandemic made the practice business critical. “Learning and development executives say internal mobility is a higher priority today than it was before COVID-19. We are also seeing an increase in internal mobility rates – from April to August 2020 the internal hiring rate was nearly 20 percent higher than during of the reporting period at the same time in 2019, “he said.
According to talent acquisition professionals, retention is the most important benefit of internal mobility.
More than 80 percent of those surveyed by LinkedIn agreed that in-house recruiting improves retention, followed by accelerating productivity for new hires and reducing time-to-hire.
“Increased engagement, lower costs, and a shorter hiring process are just a few of the benefits driving this relocation, but perhaps the biggest benefit is greater retention,” said Lobosco. “Employees in companies with high internal mobility stay almost twice as long as those who don’t, and employees who have found new roles in-house are three and a half times more likely than those who haven’t.”
Customer loyalty was the biggest problem Schneider Electric tried to solve when it invested in a talent market in 2019. “Exit surveys found that about 47 percent of people who left voluntarily said they were leaving because they didn’t find the right opportunity in Schneider,” said Divkiran Kathurian, former general manager for HR transformation at the Paris-based energy management company and now director of talent mobility at Seagate Technology in Bangalore, India.
“On the other hand, we found that our hiring managers waited 40 and even 90 days for some critical positions to be filled,” she said. A talent market was the solution to create more transparency about the two topics of supply and demand of the company. The company has since opened up new opportunities for thousands of employees.
Kathurian said she also wants to use the platform to create an internal gig economy and meet talent needs for short-term projects.
Bersin said one of the greatest advantages of the talent market is that career growth is everyone’s responsibility, not just the manager. “It makes employees aware of opportunities in the company and aligns them with those opportunities. It creates connections between project managers and people who want to work on projects. It promotes professional development. It makes it easier for teams to get more work done.”
Watson Stewart, global director of talent solutions at Standard Chartered Bank in London, said implementing a talent market is an opportunity to become more flexible and agile – the blueprint for the workplace of the future. “It makes it easier to create multidisciplinary teams that don’t think of people by job titles or roles, but of people for the skills, experience and potential they bring to solving a business problem.”