I am going to be talking about talent market place in a panel this week. So I did a re-visit to my older medium article, and simplified and updated it. Here is a condensed version of talent marketplace introduction. As always, if interested : ).
Definition:
a platform where leaders can find the fitting talent for open positions, gigs, mentorships and projects based on skills and preferences of the employees. For employees, it is a platform where they can transparently see the different opportunities in the organisation, get a good insight about the skill needs of the tasks and be assured that the selection is fairer and more transparent.
Talent marketplace concept as I will describe here is mostly for large and geographically spread organisations and targets internal talent. If your organisation is under 3.000 people, you might want to think about investing your energy and money to topics like employee experience or learning management systems.
Talent marketplace requires a platform aimed specifically for this. There are mainly three platforms in the market that I know and worked with: Gloat, Eightfold and Fuel 50. I will talk more about those platforms, but first let me show you how it looks to explain the concept better:
Gloat:
Eightfold:
I deliberately chose one from employee perspective, one with available open positions angle.
As you can see, talent marketplace is a platform to match employees to positions, and also career coach them. Platforms use AI matching algorithms, as you can expect.
There are two main reasons to implement talent marketplace in an organization:
Increase internal mobility through talent visibility and nudges.
Provide a transparent and fair view of the hiring process and the skills needed for each role.
Both of the two reasons have great second order effects:
Increased internal mobility (or I call this talent fluidity):
Talents in the organization today are stuck with their own network, and if they are lucky, someone from HR sponsoring them. The reverse is also valid, the hiring managers are limited with their own network, and the internal post and pray hiring methodology. The visibility and AI based rank stacking of talent in the organization will enable the hiring managers get to know the talent that they would not have access to.
The platform will nudge the matching talent, and let them know that there is an opening for them, increasing the engagement of the talent as they are seen and valued.
Not to mention that internally promoted talent mostly outperform external hiring1. And many other advantages of talent fluidity, which I hope to cover in the coming issues.
Provide Skill Based Transparent Hiring Experience:
This has many second order effects.
First of all, overall fairness notion of employees increase, with trust to the organization and eventually engagement and performance.
There is a chance to provide a much better hiring experience for internal talent, most of the companies struggle to make their internal talent valued during these processes.
Most important (I think): Transparent skills needed information for the roles, will increase the learning culture. Coupled with good learning enablement like 20% project time for the skill needed, this second order effect alone can make organizations much more successful with a constantly learning talent society.
Skill based approach push the organizations be flexible about job design. Allow apprenticeship assignments, on the job learning opportunities. All of those will decrease attrition and increase engagement and development.
There are a few more, but I think I made the case.
Having all those positive effects, all organizations would have jumped on this and already had talent marketplaces. However, only few companies like Unilever or Schneider Electric has this up and running. Establishing a working talent marketplace is not easy.
Some pre-requisites:
A frictionless platform with decent AI and User Experience. Gloat or Eightfold for now. Successfactors and Workday are working on their own features, but not nearly successful as the former ones. And their user experience is not great from my own experiences. Also I was very impressed how customer centric Gloat was, and how ready they were to make adaptations, unlike the giants in the HR tech sector.
An enterprise skills inventory (or taxanomy), and a solid way of assessing those skill levels. (this is almost impossible for many organizations, dont take this item lightly)
A superior learning design, with on the job opportunities.
A good change management, so that the leaders are not “talent hoarding” type, and will let go their people.
Flexible internal mobility and reward policies.
A good TA team focused on candidate experience.
They are not easy, but they dont need to be in place 100%. Organizations can start small, only for project assignments and mentorship assignments. Get the leaders and employees familiar with the marketplace notion.
The dark side / Something to watch out for:
I still have question marks about the AI algorithms of these platforms. The AI learning is still based on past practices and biases. Mostly those AI algorithms are black boxes, and HR doesn’t know how those matchings are made.
Finally people are getting the platform and fair treatment they deserve. I am hopeful that talent marketplace will be a major part of employee experience.
If you are interested to listen to the HR Leaders panel about talent marketplace, here is the free registration link.
burak
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