Most organizations seek a competitive edge, and one crucial aspect of achieving this is the strength of their talent market. This element shows the adaptability and agility of an organization’s workforce. It allows organizations to identify and match employee skills with company demands to meet short and long-term needs.
This article will define a talent market and describe how it works and its advantages to an organization.
What is a Talent Marketplace?
Also known as the internal marketplace, it is a system that helps identify and develop talented people. It does this by offering employees the opportunity to develop their current skills or learn new ones. The goal is to have employees meet long and short-term demands in the organization without hiring new hands. A report by Garter predicted that 20% of large corporations will adopt the use of maximizing an internal talent marketplace by 2025.
Source: Change Leaders
How Does Talent Marketplace Work?
The talent marketplace aims to create an environment where employees can chase their aspirations and passions within the organization using the marketplace platform. A 2020 Bureau of Labor statistic shows the average tenor for an employee is 4.1 years. Unlike in the past, employees want more from their work, and they want to improve their work-life balance and have a sense of purpose in what they do.
We saw an example of this during the pandemic with the resignation of employees en masse. For many, it was about finding a place where they were treated fairly and with the opportunity to grow. A talent market solves these issues.
An example of how a talent marketplace can be a solution is if a marketer who has a passion for designing and takes classes privately sees a design work from another department. The marketer can offer their skill instead of the company outsourcing it. This is the case if a company is short-staffed in one department and overstaffed in another. Talent marketplace can help transition those with the approximate skills from the over-staffed to the understaffed department, and it helps close skill gaps without hiring new hands.
When organizations operate like this, they keep most of their talent rather than lose them to competition. One primary reason employees change jobs is because they want the opportunity to develop and grow. And most times, organizations don’t offer them this.
Talent Marketplace Software
Talent career marketplace applications help HR managers to manage the talent of an organization through the use of artificial intelligence. These platforms allow managers to post job opportunities, short-term projects, temporary assignments, mentorships, and any other tasks for internal talents to handle.
The Importance of Talent Marketplace Software
Before the talent marketplace, companies restricted employees to moving only vertically through the cooperate ladder, but now they can also move laterally through the organization. This change makes organizations more responsive to rapidly changing conditions and creates opportunities for their employees.
HR might find it challenging to match a task to a particular skill; this is where the talent marketplace software is handy. You can’t have a striving talent market without the help of an AI. These talent marketplace applications help HR match skills to tasks, something we rarely do.
Organizations are run by performing various activities. These companies convert these activities into tasks and group them into responsibilities. They then draw a box around these responsibilities and call them roles. Doing this makes it hard to see what skills you need to complete a task.
The talent marketplace HR software helps with this by using an employee’s current skill and experience. The AI gets the information from their resume, employment record, and LinkedIn profile, analyses the data and recommends potential opportunities that match the employee’s skill set.
Features of Talent Marketplace Software
This section looks at the critical features of talent marketplace software.
Tracking and Storing Employee Skills
The AI is excellent at identifying employee skills by using their records. It helps track these skills and store them in the employee’s database. This information is crucial when HR is looking to plug a skill gap.
Develops Individual Development Plans
A possible path for an employee based on their skill. Source: Fuel50
The talent marketplace AI can recommend matches an employee never considered. Doing this creates an alternative career path for the employee. The HR can use this and other information to help the individual reskill and possibly upskill.
Succession Planning Tool
They are a great way to look into succession planning because they help to track metrics like turnover, promotion, or retirement. The application can help identify suitable candidates with the skills and career aspirations to help fill the role.
Recruitment Tool
Talent marketplace software can become one of many Omnichannel tools when recruiting. Most talent marketplace applications have a recruiting feature for both internal and external recruitment, and some also come fitted with email campaigns to recruit externally. They are great because they can easily match skills to a role.
Benefits of Implementing a Talent Marketplace
The erratic nature of the labor market has meant that keeping your best employees is a must. With employees jumping ships with little effort, developing a talent marketplace strategy is essential to keep them at bay. This section will discuss the advantages of adopting an internal marketplace system.
For Employers
It Reduces Employee Attrition
It helps employers hang onto their talents. The opportunity for employees to develop themselves means they are more likely to stick around. The internal talent marketplace allows them to reinvent themselves through reskilling or improve their skills through upskilling.
Improves Employee Engagement
We can tie employee engagement to the productivity of an organization. Engaged employees are less likely to experience presenteeism and absenteeism in the workplace, call in sick, or resign. Allowing employees to pursue their ambition within the company can remain engaged in their work. According to a LinkedIn report, employees that move jobs internally are 3.5 times more engaged.
It Helps Meet the Short-Term and Long-Term Needs of the Company
The internal gig economy allows companies to solve skill gap problems in the short and long run. It’s often easy for companies to search for ready-made candidates externally for a role when recruiting within may be the best option. Reskilling may also be a cheaper and more flexible option for an organization rather than the lengthy process of recruiting externally.
It Can Create a Growth Mindset
An organization that favors internal promotion and reskilling can create a self-development mindset. If employees know they can make a lateral move into another department of interest, they can take private classes. They can also look to upskill themselves to be considered for promotion. Employees being proactive and learning more skills give employers more options and make them more agile.
Can be Attractive for Candidates
Candidates can find a culture of growth and development attractive, and it can become a magnet for attracting top talent and lead to healthy competition among employees. This secures the talent pipeline of the organization for the future.
For Employees
Leads to better employee experience
The employee’s professional and personal experience is better because of the prospect of growth and development within the organization. According to the same 2021 LinkedIn Report, employees are likely to stay longer in a role before leaving for another one. This is because they know they can grow and develop their career as they move within the organization.
Improves Job Satisfaction
Employees can map out a career for themselves and are confident of developing and growing in the business. The prospect of reskilling is enticing, especially for recent graduates trying to map out a career path for themselves.
Building an Effective Talent Marketplace
To do this, an organization will need to follow some steps. Here are some tips to help if you plan to adopt one in your company.
Determine Its Purpose and its Implementation
A talent marketplace’s primary purpose is to make an organization more agile by increasing the career mobility of its workforce. How organizations will do this will vary from one management to the other. Answering questions like what are our goals? How do we measure success? And how do we implement this change?
Factor the Changing Marketplace
Another great tip is looking at the future of the workplace. The pandemic has drastically changed the current work environment, and it sees to change work for the foreseeable future. Remote and hybrid work is commonplace, and communication in the workplace is also changing. Having in mind the skills to learn to accommodate this change and predicting future changes in the workplace will help effectively use the talent marketplace.
Choose the right Talent Marketplace Software for Your Company
Choosing the right talent software is very important. Going through them to see which fits your company’s talent marketplace goals is crucial to implementing an effective system. Some common recommendations include:
- Gloat
- 365Talents
- Fuel50
- ProFinda
- SAP Success Factors
Educate and Engage Both Managers and Employees
The success of the talent marketplace platform lies majorly on the managers and employees. The organization should educate the managers on the importance of these programs to avoid talent hoarding by managers. Sell them the idea so they can promote it by using the platform to source talent internally to assist with short-term goals or work. Managers buying into it is key to its success. HR can also provide training and help to managers.
Employee education on this is about spreading awareness of the platform. HR managers should explain to employees that it’s a shift to a more progressive and inclusive culture where growth and development take center stage in an agile and mobile company.
The HR personnel should also be available for questions, share success stories and collect feedback from managers and employees.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a talent marketplace is becoming increasingly popular, and for good reasons. The sudden change in how we work has caused a lot of organizations to use this in the short run. And it looks like a long-term solution for many companies. In a business society where change happens so frequently, companies should be able to respond to these changes. And one of the best ways to go about this is through the internal talent marketplace.
