Companies today struggle to staff up or staff down in an effective and timely way to meet fluctuating business needs. This is often due to leadership and managers lacking visibility of skills, job interests, and capacity of their employees across the organization. While most have tried to close these gaps, they struggle to connect the right players and form the right partnerships to deploy talent effectively across the organization.
Simultaneously employees find it difficult to manage their careers within an organization. A critical component of Employee Experience (EX) is having the opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the organization. Employees are looking for internal mobility, understand the skills needed for their current job as well as any future opportunities. Once they understand what is needed, they are looking for opportunities to develop and validate those skills to improve their internal marketability by working on internal gigs and projects.
What is a Talent Marketplace and what challenges does it solve?
A Talent Marketplace is a solution designed to solve the organizational and individual challenges of identifying, developing, and leveraging talent at scale. It goes beyond using a standard talent pool in that it identifies employee skills at a detailed level so companies can deploy work aligned to real-time demand and employee aspirations in the company. The transparency of employee skills, aspirations, and capacity enables companies to continually evaluate and develop the workforce to enhance business responsiveness to changing market dynamics.
What value does Talent Marketplace bring to an organization?
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) indicates that the average cost per hire in the U.S. hovers around $4,000 and can take an average of 42 days to find and fill a position. Upskilling or reskilling current employees is seen as the most cost-effective approach to meeting business needs in the eyes of executives globally today. A Talent Marketplace helps identify and build new skills in organizations in a time when skills are viewed as the currency of success in the market.
In addition, a talent marketplace can improve your organization’s productivity. Over the last five years, a huge effort has been seen in companies to improve internal talent mobility and maximize talent. The pandemic only brought greater visibility to already existing challenges in leveraging talent across organizations today. McKinsey research found that companies that were able to quickly reallocate talent resources during the last two economic crises nearly doubled their shareholder returns.
An example of success is with Unilever and their ability to increase workforce capacity by unlocking over 500,000 hours that boosted the overall productivity rate by 41% while redeploying 8,300 employees to areas of high demand in their organization.
How does the employee benefit from a Talent Marketplace?
Workers across the generations have different needs within their organizations. While anecdotally we hear that Millennials and Gen Z do not have the same inclination to stay at organizations long term, there is also a belief that it can be mitigated with agility and less time in a role. Employees want to have development opportunities with purpose and true opportunies for growth. Senior-level workers look for opportunities based on a desire to expand their skill set or to act in a mentor capacity to help develop the next generation.
A recent study asked employees what the #1 thing was that inspired them to be happy and work harder. The right job was ranked highest where it was twice as important as culture and four times more important than money. Having opportunities for other job experiences helps employees to develop more quickly and broadens their exposure to the organization.
After only two months of leveraging a new Talent Market Place platform, Schneider Electric indicated a 60% adoption and a significant increase in employee development, engagement, and satisfaction.
In today’s world, trust is a challenge in most aspects of life with the pandemic and other current day challenges. Organizations need a way to communicate new opportunities so that employees feel their development is meaningful and that they are empowered to try new opportunities and/or roles. Through consistent transparency and awareness, the Talent Marketplace provides a platform to build trust with employees as they are supported in a true culture to grow.
How do you get started building a Talent Marketplace for your organization?
The approach to building a Talent Marketplace varies depending on the organization’s purpose. The focus of the Talent Marketplace could be for career growth, gig and project work, developmental assignments, and/or talent mobility. Creating a Talent Marketplace is not simply a matter of opening up every job for movement in the company. It must be done strategically. Companies need tools and platforms to manage, monitor, and enable the execution of their plan aligned to their internal purpose or vision. Here are some recommended steps to implement a successful talent marketplace.
- Define the Purpose of your internal talent marketplace. How does it align with your business objectives?
- Engage Managers, Talent Management, Talent Development, Talent Acquisition, and employees as key champions of the transformation.
- Implement a Flexible Change Management program that engages managers and other key stakeholders.
- Assess Technology platforms and choose one that enables the desired experience and outcomes for your organization. Technology should reinforce a culture of talent and career mobility and create value for the entire organization.
- Iterate over time by starting small and allowing the marketplace strategy to evolve.
This post was written by Collaborative Solutions, they are an exhibitor on the HRTech247 Workday Partners floor in the Partners Hall here.
