Workforce planning

Five talent mobility best practices

Iryna ChornaContent Manager14. September 20215 min read

External recruiting has always been a key source of talent for emerging roles within organizations. Internal recruiting started gaining traction recently, mainly because of talent shortage and rapidly changing business demands.

If your organization has a high internal talent mobility rate, that means you can:

Retain key talent more efficiently through talent development
Accelerate your time-to-hire
Boost employee engagement
Improve productivity of new hires
Build a culture of continuous learning and improvement

Indeed, you can’t improve your talent mobility overnight. That’s why we prepared this guide with five internal talent mobility best practices you can implement off-hand without going over budget. Read on!

1. Solicit support from leadership

Internal mobility concerns everyone: from recruiters and HR managers to team leaders and their subordinates. That’s why it’s essential to raise awareness of talent mobility and tangible benefits for each team member and organization in general.

It can be hard to get buy-in from your colleagues that deal with new concepts for the very first time. To win their support, do your homework first. For example, start with identifying supporters and preparing a project canvas or a similar document outlining your objectives, implementation resources, time constraints, etc. Thorough preparation will demonstrate your commitment and give a complete picture of what you pitch.

2. Launch an internal mobility program

Sometimes an internal job board isn’t enough to spread the word about your internal vacancies and career opportunities. An internal mobility program will come in handy.

The goal of an internal mobility program is:

To provide clear guidelines and policies for participating
To create a centralized database of available skillsets and competencies
To connect employees with talent development programs, internal career opportunities, available mentors, and gigs (small projects) based on their skillsets.

Typical budget-friendly approaches to creating an internal mobility program include company-wide Slack channels, AI-powered chatbots, bulletins, internal platforms, and more.

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3. Redefine your recruitment practices

Your old recruitment processes may function like clockwork, but can you handle tasks like talent mobility best practices? Typically, recruitment teams rework their conventional processes to meet new challenges.

Just because you work with internal hiring, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to invest in efficient recruitment marketing tactics, talent sourcing, and leading candidates through recruitment pipelines. So, a dedicated role of an internal recruitment manager to source and recruit talents within an organization will contribute to your hiring team.

Written artifacts ensure the success of your internal mobility program as well. Revise your policies and employee handbooks to set the record straight: you don’t want talent hoarding and get people stuck in their job roles. On the contrary, your goal is to increase the employee value in the hiring market through talent development, timely upskilling, reskilling, and internal promotions.

4. Put the DEI first

2020 taught us many lessons, including this one: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a cornerstone of HR. Internal talent mobility and inclusion in the workplace should go hand in hand. Here’s how you can achieve this:

Bring top management to the conversation. Often, team leaders don’t want to let go of the best talents. Analyze what departments have the lowest promotion rates and movements to detect talent hoarding and discuss the issue.
Establish diversity policies to cope with tasks like balancing diversity rates on leadership, middle-level, and entry-level positions; eliminating bias; and empowering diverse talents to take control over their careers and succeed in the workplace.
Broaden your diverse groups. Specific employee family groups – like single parents and people that take care of their elderly parents – often fall out of HR managers’ sight. However, such employees often struggle with advancing in their careers and keeping a healthy work-life balance. Consider introducing inclusive policies and benefits like daycare reimbursement for these employee groups.

5. Put candidate experience in the spotlight

Positive candidate experience matters even in the internal talent mobility context. Like with external hires, it’s crucial to provide timely and exhaustive feedback, especially when a candidate doesn’t get the job. Explain the reason for a refusal and indicate the skills and competencies a candidate must gain to transition to a new role in the future successfully.

Regulate the length of an internal hiring process. Don’t build a long process with numerous interviews to test candidates from all sides, but don’t make it too short to avoid bias and favoritism among top management. For example, Google came up with a perfect hiring formula: it shouldn’t take longer than four interviews to hire a candidate.

Positive candidate experience – across internal and external talent pools – contributes to increasing applicants’ interest, a better quality of hires, and positive brand awareness.

Wrapping up

Remember that your best hires are already at your hand. Just reach out to them with tools like talent mobility portals, mobile applications, bulletins, internal job boards, etc.

Here at HRForecast, we’ve developed an ultimate internal talent marketplace platform, smartPeople, that helps you identify skill gaps and work out skills transformation paths for your organization. smartPeople aids hundreds of our clients in employee upskilling and enabling talent mobility. To get a free demo of smartPeople, contact our team, and we’ll get in touch with you promptly.