Flipping the script on Internal Mobility
How many times have you been in a job that you’ve outgrown. Don’t lie, it’s literally every job you’ve ever had. You are not stagnant. You are a person who is driven to learn and grow and achieve. But, as a practitioner in Human Resources, you’re often times looking at your own talent as just that, stagnant. Yes, you do reviews. Yes, you reward high performers with an increase. But, when it comes to providing them tools they need to grow and extend their time with you as their employer, you treat them like you don’t even know them.
You’re not thinking about this valuable audience in the right way at this moment in time. And it’s really at this moment in time where we need to re-evaluate how we treat our internal talent because we are all living in recent (or even present) trauma. We need to amp up our empathy for our current employees and begin to treat them very differently to avoid the mass exodus that could happen at any minute when the world and the labor market opens back up.
You need to really think about how your talent is feeling right now to design a better system to keep them engaged and offer the growth they so desperately crave. Let me tell you what I’ve observed about your talent over my 20-year career in this space: Your talent thinks it is easier to get a job somewhere else. Your talent is fielding LinkedIn requests every week. Your talent doesn’t even know where that internal job board is.
Like most of the innovations in HRTech, we have been retrofitting old ideas into new paradigms. Don’t believe me? Tell me how a Help Wanted sign isn’t a newspaper ad isn’t a Facebook post about a job? It’s all the same. Just like internal mobility. We have a job board, we have an ATS. So let’s take the job board and make it an internal job board. Poof, problem solved.
Except it’s not solved. You are not getting the conversions from the internal job board. You send them to the Internal Job Board. You make them apply like everyone else. Not-so-fun fact, they don’t want to be treated like everyone else, which is why they don’t engage with your internal job board.
You can do so much more for them. Why are we not matching them to jobs based on their skills, aspirations, and experience? Why aren’t we making it INSANELY simple to apply? Why aren’t we lowering barriers for the people you’re already invested in. They need it. They want it. And honestly, you could offer it to them right now. Flip the script for your people and watch them stay, grow, and thrive. And when they do, your business thrives along side them, which is what we all really want anyway. So, let’s deliver it. Now.