How to Maximize Your Organization’s Internal Talent Marketplace

It’s rare to look at the news these days without seeing headlines speculating that a recession could be looming and highlighting layoffs in industries such as Big Tech. With the potential for decreased spending, hiring freezes and reductions-in-force on the horizon, organizations may need to get creative to secure the talent they need to deliver on business objectives. Luckily, some of the best talent may already be in-house, within a company’s own “internal marketplace.”

What is an Internal Talent Marketplace?

An internal talent marketplace refers to the tools, processes, and dynamics that connect an organization’s current talent with open roles. A successful talent strategy that emphasizes the internal marketplace goes beyond simply posting open positions internally and considering existing staff for open roles; it includes an awareness of skillsets and where and when they can best be deployed to achieve business goals.

Organizations that effectively leverage their internal talent marketplace also provide guidance and support for skill development and maintain the flexibility that allows employees to move in nonlinear patterns.

Cultivating the internal talent marketplace has tremendous value for organizations, as leveraging employees’ existing skills and reskilling or upskilling them can be far less costly than turnover. It also helps to maintain institutional knowledge, minimize disruptions and engage employees.

To capitalize on the benefits of the internal marketplace, it’s important to be intentional about how you tap into your existing talent pool.

How to Maximize Your Internal Talent Marketplace

An effective internal talent marketplace strategy requires some specific approaches and new ways of thinking. Here are some pointers on how to get started:

1. Clarify role architecture and requirements. A solid architecture is a critical foundation for an internal marketplace and employee development. Employees want to know that they can progress in a career within the organization; they also typically desire guidance to focus their development.

When companies articulate and share a career framework that defines how roles are grouped and connected to one another, along with expectations and required skills for each role, employees can see their future possibilities. They can focus their efforts on building skills in the areas that both appeal to them and are valuable for the organization.

2. Think about what’s truly necessary. It’s important to identify qualifications that are genuinely required, rather than simply desired, for an individual to perform successfully in a role.

To maintain performance standards and broaden your internal candidate pool, determine which critical skills a candidate must already possess, and which skills or knowledge can be learned while working in the role. When there is a skill gap, focus on targeted development to increase proficiency.

3. Be open to transferrable skills. Organizations tend to fill open positions with candidates who have identical job titles and come from equivalent departments. We understand the practice – it’s efficient and allows applicant tracking systems to narrow the candidate pool. However, this approach misses opportunities to find critical talent.

If a candidate is successful in doing something specific in one context, they are likely to be good at it in another. For example, if someone has expertise in statistical modeling, that statistics expertise can be used to solve various kinds of business problems. Prioritizing the skill itself, rather than where it’s applied, can have a big payoff.

4. Value employees’ potential. While an employee’s transferrable skills capture what exists, an employee’s “potential” considers opportunity. Potential involves skills or experiences that the employee can reasonably and realistically acquire to enable strong performance. Some common areas of development include the ability to lead people, lead a project or perform particular tasks.

Considering potential not only supports career mobility for staff but expands your pool to manage talent needs. When employees are preparing for a role that relies on their future potential, intentional development planning, manager support and employee follow-through is crucial.

5. Engage in systems thinking. Systems thinking involves looking at how different parts of an organization contribute to the functioning of the whole unit. Applied to talent, this approach considers big-picture workforce needs and how best to meet them. Workforce planners with this perspective can benefit from managing by skill and expertise category, much like a consulting firm.

In consulting, teams are assembled quickly based on a solid understanding of everyone’s expertise and availability. Organizations can increase their resiliency by taking a similar approach, assigning employees to projects based on capability and capacity rather than keeping them siloed in a specific team or department. With a systems approach, talent is deployed in a manner that benefits the entire organization.

6. Remember, it’s a two-way street. We have focused on the employer’s perspective of the internal marketplace, but it’s essential to consider employees’ desires as well. Recent research has consistently found that a key driver of turnover during the “Great Resignation” has been employees’ perceived lack of career development opportunities.

Organizations that excel at talent management encourage ongoing conversations between managers and employees to understand employees’ career goals and opportunities that interest them. When employees feel that their growth is valued, and they can envision a path forward, they are more likely to be satisfied with the company and commit to working there.

Sourcing talent through your internal talent marketplace can be an incredibly valuable way to achieve organizational objectives, even in times of constraint or limited external hiring. By adopting new ways of thinking about talent, organizations can become more resilient and strengthen employee engagement and retention.