Internal Talent Marketplace Maturity Framework
Five years ago, companies began experimenting with internally-developed “opportunity platforms” to match the talents of employees with skills needed on internal projects. Fast forward to today and these platforms, now known as Internal Talent Marketplaces, have become the hottest new HR Technology. While these platforms are well suited to fill open roles or provide development opportunities, they have the power to change the way we work. This new way of working will help companies earn higher returns on their investments.
The experience of helping an organization to implement a Talent Marketplace to accelerate productivity, performance, and learning has led to me co-author a book called, The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capacity (2020, LifeTree Media). We wrote this as a playbook to help companies to understand how to approach this new way of working. This new approach let’s employees bring all of their skills, experiences, interests, and passions to work. Employees choose to work on projects that interest them, in addition to fulfilling the requirements of their job. They accomplish this by either making room during the ebbs and flows of the demands of their role, or by breaking their job into projects that they can resource to others.
Manager Mindset Is The Biggest Obstacle to Success
What I have found is that implementing this technology requires a company to develop a new mindset around sharing talent that goes against the grain of most organizations. A research study from i4cpfound that 50% of managers in general, and 74% of managers in low performing companies, do not encourage employees to seek out opportunities outside of their day-to-day role (Talent Mobility Matters, 2016). However, with the right culture and leadership behaviors, this new approach to work can lead to amazing outcomes. Not only does it contribute to improved employee engagement, but by leveraging internal talent rather than hiring external contractors, companies can both increase productivity and reduce expenses.
Learning in the Flow of Work
Internal Talent Marketplaces are highly regarded for their ability to let employees learn on the job. That is, employees opt-into projects where they have interest and apply their current skills to build new skills or gain new experiences that facilitate career development. This is critical because traditional classroom training (or E-Learning) does not always help employees to acquire skills. Applying formal training in real-world situations embeds the learning in a lasting manner.
Making Sense of the Technology Landscape
It seems like once a week I am learning about a new technology platform that facilitates an Internal Talent Marketplace. How is one to make sense of all the platforms available? I have studied many of the approaches companies have taken and the technologies that are currently available. My perspective in developing this maturity model comes from both how a company is using the technology and what the technology was originally designed to enable.
Talent Marketplace Maturity Model
| Ad Hoc | Focused | Disruptive |
|---|---|---|
| • Internally designed system that allows for posting of projects | • Solution providers are coming from their core expertise (recruiting, career development, learning) | • Focus is on the work that needs to get done, not jobs |
| • Often searchable with key words | • Primarily focused on retention and development | • Enables talent optimization |
| • Employees must actively search for opportunities | • Greater focus on jobs, but migrating toward gigs | • Facilitates organizational agility and dynamic teaming |
| • Not widely accepted in the organization; may be an experiment or only done in a few functions | • Leverages AI to make matches of employee skills to role/project requirements | • Democratizes career development |
| • Cost-benefit ratio is positive | • Facilitates learning in the flow of work | |
| • Leverages AI and ML (skill adjacencies) | ||
| • Strong ROI |
Ad Hoc
Many organizations are experimenting with talent mobility platforms with the idea of creating new opportunities for employees, or of providing flexible employment alternatives, or simply to meet urgent organizational needs. For example, Intel had a program they dubbed “Freelance Nation.” They identified a group of employees who needed more flexibility in their work-life, who opted into being a shared resource for teams across the organization. While they were permanent Intel employees, they did not necessarily work full-time. Just like an external freelancer, they marketed their skills to business groups across the organization who were able to access this talent at no additional cost. The experiment was deemed a success. Employees found enough work to keep them busy, hiring managers were happy with the quality of their work, and their work satisfaction was higher than the rest of the employees in the company, but the program was retired because they could not resolve challenges regarding who would pay for the employees who were working across all lines of the business.
During the early days of the pandemic, we also saw many companies create ad hoc systems as the organization needed to move talent to new initiatives and figure out a way to better utilize employees who worked in parts of the company impacted by the shelter-in-place orders. Many companies were creating spreadsheets to address this immediate issue, realizing that perhaps they needed to invest in a better infrastructure to enable the company to be more agile, given the inevitable future business disruptions we are likely to face.
Focused
The majority of solutions available today I would categorize as focused platforms. Most of these companies started with a core of expertise – they were a recruiting platform or a career management or learning platform – and then pivoted toward talent marketplace solutions. With the companies that came from a core in recruiting, those solutions may lead with full-time roles first. That is, their focus is helping to leverage the existing talent to fill open, full-time roles in the organization. The logic here is that if you don’t recruit your own talent, another organization will. We know employees want new and different experiences, so companies would retain talent longer if they looked inside first.
The companies that started with career development or learning at their core have also focused on helping employees develop the skills needed to advance into new career opportunities. The use of internal gigs has been a way for employees to learn in the flow of work and to put to use other learning that they have received through their platforms (e.g., on-demand learning courses, blogs, videos, etc.).
While many of these platforms have now shifted to include internal gig opportunities, their reason for being has always been to facilitate learning and career growth. Most of these platforms assume individuals will opt-in to a short project on top of one’s day job. At Tata Communications they provide their employees with an internal gig platform, but they only expect their most ambitious employees – who are willing and able to devote extra time to developing their careers – to opt in. This is somewhat similar to how Google has operated their 20% time for innovation.
Disruptive
The new Talent Operating Model presented in The Inside Gig is fundamentally different from these focused platforms in that it addresses explicitly the need to think about work differently. At the core is an idea that if we help employees to break work into projects, then you can move projects around so that employees are working at their optimal value. It requires a company to shift from operating in a hierarchical, siloed manner to a team-of-teams model. Teams form, expand, or contract based on the business need.
While some of the companies that present their talent marketplaces as a focused solution may have the capability to disrupt, their change management approach does not favor this intention. Systems designed to be disruptive understand that changing the way we work to optimize the use of talent is a key part of both their design and their implementation.
These technologies have the ability to enable transformational change, helping a company to become more agile. In the past year, when organizations have had to move talent quickly to different roles or projects to address the challenges and opportunities presented by the pandemic, the need to be agile with your talent has become clearer than ever.
Edie L. Goldberg, Ph.D. is a nationally recognized expert in talent management and organizations effectiveness. She is co-author of the newly released book, The Inside Gig: How Sharing Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capacity.