HRTech

by Team Azilen

December 02, 2022

A Comprehensive Guide to Internal Talent Marketplace: How Does it Lead to Effective Employee Development and Retention?

The world of work is evolving fast. The way organizations manage talent needs to change along with it!

Employees with multiple skills are a huge advantage for organizations. Teams, that can shift on the fly are the new norm. That is why a common place is required in the organization where employees can connect and find a new job, new role, or new team on the go.

Employees today have an enormous number of opportunities. Unfortunately, the opportunities that most employees can see are outside their organization and are easier to see and apply, compared to the opportunities inside their organization.

PwC’s Millennials at Work report found that the most attractive part of an organization was the possibility of career progression.

What is internal talent marketplace?

Three things that are core to the dynamics of any talent marketplace (aka opportunity marketplace) initiative to cater to this employee’s favourite category are:

Primarily, the talent marketplace assists employees in discovering opportunities that they previously were unaware of within their organization.
Marketplaces help Employees in getting to know their organization more transparently as per the role requirement.
Organizations get the most out of this as the recruitment process gets shorter and their people are nurtured with new skills and opportunities.

Hence a need for Internal Mobility (aka Career Mobility) is needed, which can be fulfilled by creating a Talent Marketplace Ecosystem wherein any employee from their team can apply for another project/team role, within the organization, based on their skills and performance.

Reader’s Purview

In this blog we will cover the following aspects of a Talent Marketplace Ecosystem:

What role does Talent Marketplace play in the Employee Journey?
Role of Technology in Talent Marketplace Ecosystem?
Internal Mobility is driven by Talent Marketplace and its modules.
How Talent Marketplace makes it easy for businesses to develop and retain talent!
Conclusion

What Role Does Internal Talent Marketplace Play in the Employee Journey?

Employees are the soul of every organization. Organizations might have the best tools & technology, but they will not reach their potential if they don’t know how to nurture the right people. To have skilled and talented employees, an organization should keep in mind the different stages of an employee’s life cycle.

Employee life cycle plays a key role in an organization’s development. It involves more than just finding & retaining employees; it also entails learning new skills & making a solid first impression on people before alumnification.

Talent Marketplace platforms are substantially involved in the 4^th stage – Employee Development and subtly at the 5^th stage – Employee Retention in the employee life cycle. They help employees in various ways, in turn helping organizations to retain their people.

As we know that everyone wants to live with better purpose, clarity, and vision. It helps employees find their purpose in the organization, master new skills, and ultimately unlock full work potential through a clear vision of their career. With employees eager to build their careers, a talent marketplace serves as a learning program to promote diverse career opportunities.

Due to this, employees tend to feel happy while learning, growing, and taking on new challenges as a part of their responsibility. This raises the bar for a better employee experience and helps employees and their teams achieve a whole new level of job satisfaction.

Employee experience is an inherent part of every stage in an employee life cycle. Internal gigs, new teams, and cross-functional roles allow unique experiences, due to which employees want to continue to contribute, make an impact, and grow their careers along with it. Giving employees the freedom to chart their own careers is a crucial component of an organization’s effective employee experience, which a comprehensive Talent Marketplace platform resolves quite nicely.

How to Build Talent Marketplace: Role of Technology in Talent Marketplace Ecosystem

By experience, we all know that technology is inevitable!

Since technology has an impact everywhere in the employee life cycle, it becomes vital to understand how supreme its role is in the functioning of a Talent Marketplace Ecosystem, what its effects are, and what benefits recruiters, workforce, and employers get out of it.

To understand this, Employers need the right tools to build more than a talent marketplace to grow in today’s competitive environment. Various HR TECH businesses have been successful in leveraging AI in providing a platform to manage employees’ careers and find learning opportunities—allowing them to participate in a work environment that values transparency.

The AI-powered career transitioning democratizes access to opportunity. It helps employees with a clear roadmap for success through a Talent Marketplace system, as it helps in getting projects and short-term gigs under the same roof.

It generates skill demand reports for hiring managers and HR reps. It helps to automate the Applicant Tracking process, and it matches candidates using machine learning models and algorithms. These algorithms and models are built by training on the data organization gathers related to employees’ skills, interests, experience, and preferences.

Most importantly it identifies the skills gaps that exist in the organization and provides necessary learning tools to fill them from within. This is done by matching the workforce with open positions at both vertical as well as horizontal levels in the hierarchy of an organization.

Even after having job rotational policies in some organizations, employees get pigeonholed to a particular job role and it becomes extremely difficult to reinvent and reutilize the skills they possess. This is where systems like Gloat and Fuel50 help and serve organizations to enhance their Skill Taxonomies.

As organizations have been restructuring their businesses at a lightning speed, they need a sharp and rapid way to move the right people into the right roles. Execution of this strategy requires intelligent tools. With this vision, Talent Marketplace platforms have matured like never before.

Democratizing opportunities within organizations, Gloat and Fuel50 have pioneered in the Talent Marketplace economy. Their platform has given tremendous results in terms of closing a vacancy, career transitioning of employees, lowering employee churn rate, and raising employee engagement through appropriate job satisfaction.

Some of the key components of a Talent Marketplace system are depicted in the graphic above. This is just the tip of an iceberg. Systems such as degreed and pymetrics are evolving quickly and changing the way people experience their organization.

Degreed has built a Learning Experience Platform which can be connected directly with a Talent Marketplace solution to give employees the necessary trainings and skill development programs. Under a single roof, it integrates learning management, talent development, and internal mobility opportunities, along with insights into an employee’s skills and performance.

Pymetrics is one of the leaders in AI-based skills assessment, now acquired by Harver, which is built for volume hiring. After creating the world’s top AI-based capability testing systems, Pymetrics discovered that its customers now had hundreds of data elements about the innate skills of their people. Making it possible to find people with certain skills internally and repositioning its platform as a talent mobility solution clearly indicates that they are opening its platform for Internal Mobility.

All the above-mentioned highly matured systems have contributed in the development of a Talent Marketplace ecosystem.

Due to these highly developed systems and their major impactful areas, it is necessary to comprehend the key components as well. Talent Marketplace solutions can be utilized from a variety of angles. The people who are most immediately touched by these systems are those who work in the areas of recruitment, talent acquisition, resource allocation, employee engagement, etc.

Significant effects also extend to employees, companies, RMG heads, CxOs, and human resource officers. The below table highlights some of the critical benefits for the Employees and the Employers that can be unlocked using a comprehensive Talent Marketplace solution, in turn creating a positive culture within the organization.

After looking into these innovations from different angles and perspectives, we can safely say that technology in the Talent Marketplace ecosystem has given an avenue for employees to get what role they want and in exchange, employers are able to fulfil their recruitment needs.

How do internal talent marketplace and its modules drive internal mobility?

It is well known that companies have been working to improve internal talent mobility in the recent years of Great Resignation. Saving resources on external recruiting, enabling organizations to find internal expertise, and creating a strong sense of belonging (DEIB) in the workforce are the main characteristics of Internal Mobility driven Talent Marketplaces.

Internal mobility today is far less about “careers” and much more about “experience and skills” an employee can develop staying with the same organization. Facilitating the same, mentioned types of internal mobility can be elaborated as:

Planned Mobility: In this, career paths are available to employees which encourages advancement. This is the traditional ‘career management’ model, where development planning happens annually.
Facilitated Mobility: Here, an employee is given a challenging task to take on significant new responsibility. These are mandatory, business-driven moves that often occur. These are dynamic processes and happen in a rapid manner which can create a negative employee experience.
Agile Mobility: In this, employee movement is maximum. This takes place when employees work on multiple projects, they join various teams, and the organization operates more like a professional services firm and less like a hierarchy of jobs and functions.

Hence, Talent Marketplace served with internal mobility is nothing but a combination of career management, social networking, and recruiting system all in one. In many ways, it’s like an organization’s internal “LinkedIn” – with recruiting features, training, and mentoring all included in one.

As known, it is vital to demonstrate to employees, that organizations want them to have a fulfilling career. This will help organizations to keep employees happy and retain them for many years in the future.

Therefore, by integrating internal mobility with immersive Talent Marketplaces, organizations can win the hearts of their employees in this unprecedented war of skilful talent.

How does building a talent marketplace lead to effective employee development and retention?

Let’s relax a bit to understand a touching case of a Turkish Ice-cream Brand Manager. To launch a new ice cream brand, the manager was struggling as he doesn’t have the required talent on that location. So how to solve this?

He posts the opportunity on the Talent Marketplace solution of their organization. Within weeks, he gets a global team of people from India, Latin America, and Europe, to support him on this vision of creating a unique and premium ice cream brand. Not only did he unlock the capacity that was existing in the organization, but he also enabled the innovation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Due to Talent Marketplace, employees from other geographies helped the brand manager in turning his vision into reality by introducing flavours into that brand line that the Turkish consumers didn’t even know existed.

This evidently demonstrates that it wasn’t just about getting the work done, it was actually about innovation. After this, the employees from around the globe were rewarded for their contribution and expertise and the Brand Manager also gained fresh knowledge & lifelong learning.

This kind of amazing teamwork can be facilitated using Opportunity Marketplaces, which increases collaboration & engagement within the organization by helping employees find their purpose at work. Below are examples of how Talent Marketplace solutions have impacted the HR Tech world:

Schneider Electric credits its talent marketplace with helping the enterprise unlock more than 200,000 hours & generate a savings of $15,000,000 in productivity gains at reduced recruitment costs
Unilever achieved a 41% improvement in productivity after launching its platform.
With a 94.72% uptake of the Talent Marketplace solution and a new career structure, employees of Allied Irish Banks (AIB) were empowered to develop their careers, explore new opportunities, shift in different directions, and progress in a continuous manner
Seagate’s talent marketplace has generated a savings of $1.4 million within 4 months of launch.
The perceived internal talent mobility of Aon in the overall career opportunities gamut increased to 57%, and employees of Aon gained trust that it offers excellent career opportunities.

Conclusion

The concept of Talent Marketplaces was just emerging a few years ago. But with the gig economy – internal and external, the rise of hybrid work, and the new talent war as significant accelerations, these platforms are now pretty much common in agile and forward-thinking organizations.

Technological research and consulting firm Gartner, in its Market Guide for Talent Acquisition (Recruiting) Technologies Report, assumes that by 2025, 20% of large enterprises will have deployed an internal talent marketplace to optimize the utilization and agility of talent. It also showcases the Talent Demand Fluctuations in the graph below.

To stop the flow of talent externally, a well-built Talent Marketplace program can help. It can hire better, develop talent with more agility, share skills with multiple stakeholders, and retain people in a more comprehensive way. At its core, Talent Marketplace solution is fundamentally about developing a workplace that supports an inclusive company culture, promotes career advancement, and fosters team relationships through mentorship and mobility.

Looking at the impact through the aforementioned stories and facts it is evident that Talent Marketplace solutions are here to stay. The massive $360 billion L&D market of training is constantly evolving. In order to contribute to this evolution, Talent Marketplace solutions are not even close to entering a downward trend because they are expected to grow and explode like nothing else!

You may find this resource useful: Career Profiling and Transitioning with AI-based Guided Platform

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