The time for a talent marketplace

There comes a time in every organization’s life cycle when it gets harder to keep track of talent. 

In the beginning, it’s easy to stay connected and aware of who everyone is and what they do. It doesn’t take much effort to locate knowledge sets or mentoring opportunities when a team is small, and it’s fairly simple to envision career pathways.

At a certain point of growth, things get a lot more complicated. As more and more people come on board and bring more and more skills with them, the coziness starts to fade. It becomes harder to maintain a solid idea of who is who, who can do what, and where everyone fits down the line.

The difficulty level soars even higher when the HR and recruiting teams tasked with managing all of the moving parts are still small. Often, it’s just a few people, and they’re suddenly facing a towering workload. It falls on their shoulders to do everything talent-related, so naturally they can’t give every single aspect the same love and care. Employee roles and skill sets can both get blurry, learning and development can suffer, and mobility can get shelved as something to work on someday. 

The bottom line is that these teams and their organizations are in growth mode, and as such they just don’t have time to keep track of everyone’s skills and goals.

There’s another problem, too: employees see the company growing, but don’t have the chance to grow themselves.

The good news is, there’s a way to both ease the burden on these overtaxed teams and give employees control over their own careers in one fell swoop. With a talent marketplace, organizations of any size can shift to a completely automated, self-service model that works better for everyone.

Automation and self-service means that each and every employee gets the chance to not only share their own skills and career desires, but act on them. A good talent marketplace will allow people to easily find and apply to open internal jobs and/or take advantage of learning and development opportunities. Our own research indicates 74% of employees want control of career change intent, so these are powerful incentives to actually use it. They’re also powerful incentives for people to stay.

At the same time, HR and recruiting teams can see the accurate and up-to-date big picture of their internal talent pool at a glance, saving tons of time and effort. Some solutions like WORQDRIVE offer job matching, so hiring teams can easily find qualified internal candidates, too.

For companies that have grown to the point where time is in short supply and mobility is lacking, automation via talent marketplace is really the only way to go.