The question is: how can your medium sized business align its future goals for growth with your employees’ career aspirations to encourage them to stay? Well, the answer is simple. You need an internal talent marketplace platform. In this article, we’re going to take a deep dive into the concept of an internal talent marketplace to show you how it can benefit your medium-sized business as you look to grow in the future.
What is an internal talent marketplace?
An internal talent marketplace is an HR platform within an organization that facilitates the identification, connection, and mobility of its internal employees. Through harnessing the power of AI, an internal talent marketplace empowers your employees to explore potential career opportunities within your business and keep an eye out for new projects, learning or internal mentors that align with their unique skills and interests. It also enables your organization to better understand and tap into your internal talent pool when you need to, especially when it comes to looking at critical skills needed on the pathway to future growth.
Why do businesses need an internal talent marketplace?
Without a robust internal talent marketplace, your business may struggle to retain your skilled workforce, leading to frequent resignations and the constant need to hire new replacements – all because internal opportunities are not visible and people feel their career aspirations cannot be met where they are. When you consider that every departure generates a long list of unexpected expenses associated with recruitment, onboarding and training (not to mention the disruption to your team dynamics) this can be an extremely frustrating and expensive problem for your business.
How much does employee turnover cost your organization?
According to Josh Bersin’s Cost of Churn Model, employee turnover amounts to an average $20 million burden for mid-sized companies, based on a conservative cost estimate of US $50,000 per leaver and a mid-sized workforce of 3,000 full-time employees. What’s also often overlooked due to the difficulty of quantifying the problem, is that offering a lack of internal growth opportunities can also stifle your employees’ potential contribution to your business as well – further impacting your growth and profitability.
Try out our free turnover cost calculator to get an estimate for yourself.
4 benefits of an internal talent marketplace in mid-sized business
Given these concerns, it’s clear that an internal talent marketplace platform is a comprehensive solution to mitigating these issues, providing a wide range of measurable benefits, including:
1. An increased talent pool
When you shift your perspective and start to view your employees through the lens of their skills, your potential talent pool expands exponentially. You’re then able to tap into a vast array of hidden talents and capabilities that previously went unnoticed, minimizing the need for recruitment and harnessing the true potential of your employees.
2. Productivity increases (via job overlap)
With an internal talent marketplace, your business can better identify unique employee skills and utilize them to create more opportunities for job overlaps and horizontal assistance. As an example, an Executive Assistant's skills often overlap with those of a Project Manager.
By looking from a skills-based perspective, rather than a job title perspective, you’ll start to see several efficiency and productivity gains in your business.
3. Streamlined processes and reduced costs
Embracing an internal talent marketplace not only helps to unlock a world of skill-based opportunities for you and your employees, but it also streamlines your hiring process and reduces your recruitment costs.
In addition, if your company isn’t blessed with an enormous learning budget, reframing projects as learning opportunities and formalizing internal mentorship into something everyone can access are all free ways to boost a culture of growth.
4. Increased employee engagement and customer satisfaction
An internal talent marketplace empowers your employees to identify their possibilities for growth and advancement. When they have a tangible roadmap in front of them and they’re aware that their skills and efforts are valued, your employees typically become more dedicated and committed to their work – leading to increased productivity, satisfaction and in turn impacting the experience your customers receive.
As you can see, an internal talent marketplace offers many powerful benefits for your medium-sized business, as well as your employees and your clients.
GoFiGR’s Internal Talent Marketplace can help your business thrive
GoFIGR is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform designed to collect and intuitively analyze employee skill and business requirement insights so you can supercharge your talent retention and organizational development process. With valuable insights collected from your team, GoFIGR allows you to:
- identify your employees’ current skillsets and career goals
- match them to internal development opportunities like projects, mentors and learning
- realize your team’s full potential
- reduce the cost of recruitment by upskilling from within
- have full visibility of your team – whether they’re working on-site or from home
Most importantly, GoFIGR empowers you to nurture the skills and talent that your organization needs to move forward.
Your future team is already working for you.
Don’t let that talent go to waste – give them the opportunity to grow their career AND drive your business into its tomorrow. It’s the ultimate way to retain staff, foster a progressive internal culture and minimize the costs of repetitive recruitment.
Contact GoFIGR today to discover how we can help you to foster a future-focused workforce using our internal talent marketplace.
Helena Turpin spent 20 years in talent and HR innovation where she solved people-related problems using data and technology. She left corporate life to create GoFIGR where she helps mid-sized organizations to develop and retain their people by connecting employee skills and aspirations to internal opportunities like projects, mentorship and learning.
