People analytics

Talent marketplace: Embracing agile talent mobility

Iryna ChornaContent writer7. April 20215 min read

The HR tech landscape is rapidly evolving to keep with the new challenges that HRs and business face today. As a response to those challenges and today’s look at the future of work, a new HR tech concept — the talent marketplace — has emerged just recently and become the subject of interest among people analytics experts.

Why is the talent marketplace such a big topic, though? And why are organizations across industries exploring it?

The key reasons this relatively new talent management model gets increasingly popular is because it offers an innovative and flexible approach to talent acquisition, talent mobility, and talent management. As today companies have been restructuring at a quantum leap speed, they need a smart way to place the right people into the right roles, and hence need technology and data to do this properly. The talent marketplace seems to become the answer to this need.

What’s at the core of the talent marketplace?

The talent marketplace, also called talent mobility or internal mobility platform, is a technology-enabled platform that connects employees with career opportunities inside the organization. On the other end, it enables organizations to engage, develop, and retain their employees and do that with all-embracing flexibility and agility.

In the talent marketplace concept, the key part is leveraging internal talents. Basically, this concept is less about “careers” and more about “experiences and skills.” Hence, by focusing on internal talents, organizations can benefit from its every department’s skills.

Leveraging the talent marketplace also allows employees to take ownership of their own careers and get work done more effectively. Thus, top performers who want to learn new or adjacent skills, take international assignments, and get a chance to work with different leaders, can do so within their companies.

Talent mobility evolution

In his heavily rotated and cited  article  about the talent marketplace phenomenon, Josh Bersin explores three stages of this concept evolution.  

Stage 1: Planned mobility. This traditional ‘career management’ model considers creating a linear career path for employees and performing annual development planning, fixed and managed. While this model seems to be easy to understand and implement, it lacks flexibility and holds employees back from promotion. This is mainly due to the idea of “waiting until someone is ready”, resulting in key talents just taking a new job elsewhere. 

Stage 2: Facilitated mobility. Also, a pretty common model which considers forcing and ‘assigning’ new roles to employees, often when another person quits from the position that is then offered as a potential to grow. On the plus side, facilitated mobility is supported (and basically is driven) by leadership and has some room for building the mindset of talent mobility. However, without a good platform at a place, this model lacks transparency for employees and can be pretty forced by management.

Stage 3: Agile talent mobility  is a gig or project-oriented model, allowing employees to shift across the company teams and initiatives fast and ongoing. Apart from being flexible and advanced, this model allows companies to get the most out of all scope of talents and skills their employees obtain. At the same time, employees get pretty much endless opportunities to do things they are most passionate about, power up their skillset with new areas of knowledge, and keep up with the company without having to leave it.

American Express, IBM, Nestle, P&G, Unilever, Google and General Mills are just a few prominent organizations that implement a talent marketplace strategy and do that amazingly. At these companies, the top-performing employees are allowed to choose projects and assignments that are most suitable to their area of expertise.

While this sounds encouraging and promising, let’s take a closer look at what kinds of challenges organizations can actually solve by leveraging agile talent mobility through talent marketplace platforms.

Challenges you can address with the talent marketplace

The talent marketplace model is comparatively new, yet the gains it brings in are pretty much aspiring. So, organizations that choose to embrace it, reap its benefits in numerous aspects of their HR management. Here are just a few of them:

People analytics through skill matching

With the talent marketplace, businesses get transparency on which skills are available in their organizations, close the skill gaps, and see the ways to develop their employees for the future. They also identify the best-fitting talents for an open task, project or initiative and this way enable the talent mobility.

Closing the skill gaps, reskilling and future-proofing

Because the talent marketplace coordinates all of the company’s talents in the context of continually changing positions and opportunities, it provides unique insight and visibility into the organization’s structure. Therefore, it helps to spot the skill gaps and critical skills at the organization and empower employees’ individual development aligned with the company’s strategy and market trends.

Reducing recruiting costs and increasing employee engagement

Many organizations still pay far more attention and dollars to recruiting people from outside. With a talent marketplace platform and insights into company’s skills and talents, organizations save recruiting expenses and instead can connect their internal talents having the right skills with the openings. On the other end, this approach enables talent mobility and motivates the employees to learn.

Enabling the skill shift and connect the knowledge

Powered by AI, the talent marketplace connects employees to new opportunities by matching their skills and interests with the company’s full-time and project work skill requirements. Based on this data, companies can get a complete and unique skills profile for each employee and predict future skills needed for person.

Building a more agile workforce

Last but not least, with the proper talent marketplace platform, companies can foster transition to a more agile workforce.

How to embrace the talent mobility with smartPeople by HRForecast

Of course, embracing talent mobility won’t happen overnight. However, it takes companies to go through a genuine framework of clear stages towards internal talent mobility. This is how it works with adopting smartPeople talent marketplace:

Discovery stage: We start with helping you make all your company’s skills transparent and documenting them.

Creating a forecast: Based on available skills and the ones your company requires to address current and future business challenges, we identify the skill gaps and formulate future skills.

Connecting the dots: As the next step, we break the silos and build connections between your employees and skills to provide you with insights so you could close the currently open positions with your internal talents, outline learning and development strategies for your employees, and go beyond.

Transformation: With all the data connected, you can clearly see the current picture, get predictions, and hence, enable the skill transformation at your organization.

As we enter a new era of competitive talent management, we hope more companies will realize that their ability to develop their internal talents faster and better can be their competitive advantage. So, rather than hire new skills from outside, we suggest focusing on and investing into the power you already have.

Here at HRForecast, we believe in the power of people analytics and workforce planning that’ll help organizations build long-term HR plans and prevent skill gaps in the future. If you’d like to learn more about internal talent mobility and ways to address your talent management needs, take a look at smartPeople talent marketplace.