Deloitte Insights and our research centers deliver proprietary research designed to help organizations turn their aspirations into action.

DELOITTE INSIGHTS

  • Home
  • Spotlight
    • Weekly Global Economic Outlook
    • Top 10 Reading Guide
    • Future of Sports
    • Technology Management
    • Growth & Competitive Advantage
  • Topics
    • Economics
    • Environmental, Social, & Governance
    • Operations
    • Strategy
    • Technology
    • Workforce
    • Industries
  • More
    • About
    • Deloitte Insights Magazine
    • Press Room Podcasts

DELOITTE RESEARCH CENTERS

  • Cross-Industry
    • Home
    • Workforce Trends
    • Enterprise Growth & Innovation
    • Technology & Transformation
    • Environmental & Social Issues
  • Economics
    • Home
    • Consumer Spending
    • Housing
    • Business Investment
    • Globalization & International Trade
    • Fiscal & Monetary Policy
    • Sustainability, Equity & Climate
    • Labor Markets
    • Prices & Inflation
  • Consumer
    • Home
    • Automotive
    • Consumer Products
    • Food
    • Retail, Wholesale & Distribution
    • Hospitality
    • Airlines & Transportation
  • Energy & Industrials
    • Home
    • Aerospace & Defense
    • Chemicals & Specialty Materials
    • Engineering & Construction
    • Mining & Metals
    • Oil & Gas
    • Power & Utilities
    • Renewable Energy
  • Financial Services
    • Home
    • Banking & Capital Markets
    • Commercial Real Estate
    • Insurance
    • Investment Management
    • Cross Financial Services
  • Government & Public Services
    • Home
    • Defense, Security & Justice
    • Government Health
    • State & Local Government
    • Whole of Government
    • Transportation & Infrastructure
    • Human Services
    • Higher Education
  • Life Sciences & Health Care
    • Home
    • Hospitals, Health Systems & Providers​
    • Pharmaceutical Manufacturers​
    • Health Plans & Payers​
    • Medtech & Health Tech Organizations
  • Tech, Media & Telecom
    • Home
    • Technology
    • Media & Entertainment
    • Telecommunications
    • Semiconductor
    • Sports
Deloitte.com
Deloitte Insights logo
  • SPOTLIGHT
    • Weekly Global Economic Outlook
    • Top 10 Reading Guide
    • Future of Sports
    • Technology Management
    • Growth & Competitive Advantage
  • TOPICS
    • Economics
    • Environmental, Social, & Governance
    • Operations
    • Strategy
    • Technology
    • Workforce
    • Industries
  • MORE
    • About
    • Deloitte Insights Magazine
    • Press Room Podcasts
    • Research Centers
  • Welcome!

    For personalized content and settings, go to your My Deloitte Dashboard

    Latest Insights

    Creating opportunity at the intersection of climate disruption and regulatory change

    Article
     • 
    7-min read

    Better questions about generative AI

    Article
     • 
    2-min read

    Recommendations

    Tech Trends 2025

    Article

    TMT Predictions 2025

    Article

    About Deloitte Insights

    About Deloitte Insights

    Deloitte Insights Magazine, issue 33

    Magazine

    Topics for you

    • Business Strategy & Growth
    • Leadership
    • Operations
    • Marketing & Sales
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Emerging Technologies
    • Economy

    Watch & Listen

    Dbriefs

    Stay informed on the issues impacting your business with Deloitte's live webcast series. Gain valuable insights and practical knowledge from our specialists while earning CPE credits.

    Deloitte Insights Podcasts

    Join host Tanya Ott as she interviews influential voices discussing the business trends and challenges that matter most to your business today. 

    Subscribe

    Deloitte Insights Newsletters

    Looking to stay on top of the latest news and trends? With MyDeloitte you'll never miss out on the information you need to lead. Simply link your email or social profile and select the newsletters and alerts that matter most to you.

Welcome back

To join via SSO please click on the key button below
Still not a member? Join My Deloitte

Talent mobility: Winning the war on the home front

by Jeff Schwartz, Indranil Roy, Maren Hauptmann, Yves Van Durme, Brad Denny
  • Save for later
  • Download
  • Share
    • Share on Facebook
    • Share on Twitter
    • Share on Linkedin
    • Share by email
8 minute read 11 April 2019

Talent mobility: Winning the war on the home front 2019 Global Human Capital Trends

8 minute read 11 April 2019
  • Jeff Schwartz United States
  • Indranil Roy United States
  • Maren Hauptmann Germany
  • Yves Van Durme Belgium
  • Brad Denny United States
  • See more See more See less
    • Yves Van Durme Belgium
    • Brad Denny United States
  • Save for later
  • Download
  • Share
    • Share on Facebook
    • Share on Twitter
    • Share on Linkedin
    • Share by email
  • Why is internal mobility important?
  • Why is internal mobility hard?
  • A source of competitive advantage
  • Recoding the norms

​An organization’s biggest potential talent source may be its own people. But why do so many organizations find internal talent so hard to access?

Organizations have historically focused on external recruiting to find people for new roles, but with growing skill shortages and low unemployment rates, they are now finding that acquisition alone isn’t enough to access the capabilities they need. To fuel growth, organizations need to more effectively tap their current workforce to identify and deploy people with the required skills, capabilities, motivation, and knowledge of the organization, its infrastructure, and its culture. Creating better programs to facilitate internal mobility can pay off in multiple areas: growth, employee engagement, and business performance.

As talent markets get tighter and the world becomes more connected, a major new trend has emerged from our research: the need to improve internal talent mobility to more effectively move people among jobs, projects, and geographies. This year, internal talent mobility has become a C-suite-level topic, with 76 percent of our survey respondents rating it important and 20 percent rating it one of their organization’s three most urgent issues.

It’s not hard to understand why. For many organizations, their biggest potential source of talent is to access the enterprise’s own workforce and internal talent market. Surprisingly, however, that market is often undervalued and even overlooked, and many organizations find it amazingly difficult to access. The sad and maddening reality is that employees generally find it easier to find new—and more attractive—opportunities in another organization than to explore and move to new roles at their current employers.1 In this year’s Global Human Capital Trends survey, more than 50 percent of respondents told us that it was easier for employees to find a job outside their organization than inside (figure 1), a situation that leaders would do well to address.

Most respondents believed that it would be easier for an employee to find a new job with another employer than with their current organization

Why is internal mobility important?

Learn more

Watch the related company story videos for this trend: Allergan and Shawmut

View 2019 Global Human Capital Trends

Download the Deloitte Insights and Dow Jones app

Download the full report or create a custom PDF

Deloitte’s 10th annual Global Human Capital Trends Report is coming soon. Get it first by signing up!

Organizations have many reasons for starting to explore internal mobility in earnest. Hiring people with critical skills is highly competitive; workers who want to reinvent themselves don’t necessarily want to leave their current employer; internal mobility can be a way to embed collaboration and agility into an organization’s culture, which is one of the key attributes of becoming a true social enterprise; and agile organizations and career models dramatically improve employee engagement and commitment. Ingersoll Rand, for example, developed a robust internal career program to help employees reskill themselves for new positions within the organization, and invested in an interactive, analytics-based technology solution that allows them to explore and access alternative roles and career paths across the company. The result: a nearly 30 percent increase in employee engagement.2

Another major driver for internal mobility is the need for many organizations to globalize their operations as they expand into the fast-growing economies of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Schneider Electric, one of the largest French manufacturers of electrical systems and components, changed its structure from being a Paris-based, centralized operation to having four global headquarters: one in France, one in the United States, one in China, and one in India. The company now develops and markets products in each of these geographies, requiring the organization to create a culture of mobility, diversity, and inclusion. By creating four headquarters, the company can now offer roles in all four places that were available in only one location before, which increases both the need and the opportunity for employees to develop and grow into new roles. Schneider is now investing in new technology solutions to create more mobility options for its expanded organizational talent markets around the world.3

The shift toward flatter organization models also creates a greater need for internal mobility. As organizations start to operate in teams and networks, managers are realizing that open access to the diverse skill sets, backgrounds, and experiences held by the organizations’ own people is essential for success. To staff projects and programs as they grow, team leaders have to find expertise throughout the network, which is difficult if the organization lacks an active and open internal mobility process.

Why is internal mobility hard?

Although internal mobility is a high priority, it’s not easy to do well. Only 6 percent of respondents told us they believe they are excellent at moving people from role to role; 59 percent rate themselves fair or inadequate (figure 2).

Few respondents believed their organizations were excellent at enabling internal mobility

One reason internal mobility is difficult is that most organizations are modeled around hierarchical structures: systems that people enter at the bottom and spend years working their way up to increase their influence, impact, and rewards. But while organizations have spent decades building career and promotion models to help people move up the pyramid, that’s not the same thing as having a vibrant, easy-to-navigate internal mobility market and culture across the entire organization. Only 32 percent of this year’s survey respondents believed that their organization’s employees have opportunities to move between operating divisions. Forty-nine percent of respondents, the largest proportion, identified the lack of processes to identify and move employees as a top-three barrier to internal talent mobility (figure 3). Siloed organizational models make it hard for managers to look for talent outside their own fiefdom, and block employees’ views into opportunities elsewhere in the enterprise.

Respondents identified various roadblocks to internal talent mobility

What’s more, incentives are rarely set up to encourage hiring from within. Unless hiring managers are actively encouraged and rewarded for hiring internal candidates, they may pass over existing employees looking for development. Equally problematic, an internal candidate’s current manager may resist other departments’ or managers’ efforts to recruit the person unless incentives are in place to encourage managers to develop subordinates’ skills and support their growth. Indeed, 46 percent of this year’s survey respondents told us that managers resist internal mobility. Team leaders who are rewarded for producing results but not for promoting internal mobility have no reason to welcome the prospect of losing a high-performing team member—creating an obstacle to mobility, no matter how hard HR promotes mobility programs.

Culture is also a barrier in many organizations. Seventy percent of respondents told us that talent mobility expectations, the culture around talent-sharing, and decision-making around mobility were inadequate or only fair at their organization. Technology and systems around internal mobility, too, are often lacking. Forty-nine percent of respondents told us that they have few, if any, tools to identify and move people into new internal roles. Forty-five percent said their employees lacked visibility into internal positions. And in our conversations with clients, many HR leaders tell us that employees find it easier to quit and be rehired than to change positions within the organization because of the lack of systems to enable and promote internal moves.

A source of competitive advantage

Are the problems worth overcoming? Our respondents think so. Beyond looking at internal mobility to fill open positions, our respondents cited several other strategic business reasons for urgently focusing on this issue. Thirty-eight percent are looking at internal mobility to build better leaders, 31 percent cite the need to expand the business, and 32 percent believe mobility is required to increase employee engagement.

At one global engine manufacturing leader, encouraging internal talent movement stems from a firm belief that learning through experience is extremely powerful. One employee we spoke with said that this emphasis makes the company a “playground for learning” and praised “the number of cross-functional moves that take place and how open leaders are to considering high performers for any number of assignments regardless of their technical background.” Not surprisingly, enabling these experiences not only provides learning opportunities, but also raises employee engagement.4

Other organizations that have made substantial investments in internal mobility are also seeing these investments pay off. To take a well-known example, AT&T has spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 2013 on upskilling its employees, both by providing direct education and professional development programs and through tuition assistance. The program’s goal is to fill existing openings with people already at the company, and by that measure, it is succeeding: From January to May 2016, upskilled employees filled half of all tech management jobs and received almost half of the available promotions.5

A global bank offers another illustration of the types of talent market and mobility initiatives organizations are exploring and launching. The bank is building a new function for internal mobility that integrates talent acquisition with career mobility and takes an enterprisewide view and scope. Not only are internal mobility initiatives moving beyond new programs and processes, but leaders’ mindsets are changing to view the company’s entire workforce as a talent market that allows for multidirectional careers. This, in turn, is influencing how leaders think about operating models and organizational structures as internal boundaries become less important and enterprise teams and internal capability markets increase in importance and impact.

Companies like these have caught on to what is becoming more and more self-evident: Internal mobility is a driver of growth in today’s digitally powered, highly competitive global economy. The numbers tell the story: When we looked at the fastest-growing organizations (those growing at 10 percent or more compared to the prior year) in our survey, they were twice as likely to have excellent talent mobility programs than organizations that were not growing at all, and more than three times more likely than organizations whose revenues were shrinking.

Recoding the norms

As organizations reexamine how they approach internal mobility, they need to address a fundamental issue: Internal mobility today is governed by a set of (often unwritten) norms that are outdated and need to be fundamentally recoded for the future needs of today’s workers and organizations (figure 4). It is only through this reinvention that organizations may be able to unlock the potential hidden within its existing workforce.

Recoding the norms governing internal mobility

Not surprisingly, the earliest adopters of this shift have come from the technology industry. Spotify and Facebook are leading examples. At Spotify, internal mobility has become such a core cultural element that employees take on a new role, on average, every two years.6 And at Facebook, employees and managers have conversations about career progression with internal mobility understood as an accepted element.7

Internal mobility, in short, can be a major source of critical talent and competitive advantage. To do it well requires investment and a focus on culture, infrastructure, and incentives—but it’s an investment well worth considering for leaders looking for ways to bridge the talent gap. In an economy where outside talent is becoming more and more difficult to find and attract, looking within can make the crucial difference between struggling and succeeding.

unnumbered

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Rumi Das, Jonathan Pearce, Steven Hatfield, Sarah Cuthill, and Ina Gantcheva for their contributions to this chapter.

Cover image by: Hylton Warburton

Endnotes
    1. Robin Erickson, Denise Moulton, and Bill Cleary, “Are you overlooking your greatest source of talent?,” Deloitte Review 23, July 30, 2018. View in article

    2. Based on conversations with company leaders by colleagues of the authors. View in article

    3. Ibid. View in article

    4. Josh Bersin, Irresistible: Seven Management Imperatives for Success in the Digital Age, forthcoming in 2019. View in article

    5. John Donovan and Cathy Benko, “AT&T’s talent overhaul,” Harvard Business Review, October 2016. View in article

    6. Shana Lebowitz, “Experts say a counterintuitive management strategy used by top tech companies like Google and Facebook can yield major benefits,” Business Insider, December 18, 2018. View in article

    7. Ibid. View in article

Show moreShow less

Topics in this article

Human Capital

Deloitte's Human Capital professionals leverage research, analytics, and industry insights to help design and execute the HR, talent, leadership, organization, and change programs that enable business performance through people performance.

Learn more
Get in touch
Contact
  • Arthur H. Mazor
  • Global Leader – Human Capital Practice
  • amazonr@deloitte.com
  • +1 404 631 3917

Download Subscribe

2019 Global Human Capital Trends

img Trending

Leading the social enterprise

Article 6 years ago
img Trending

Learning in the flow of life

Article 6 years ago
img Trending

From jobs to superjobs

Article 6 years ago
img Trending

The alternative workforce

Article 6 years ago
img Trending

Leadership for the 21st century

Article 6 years ago
img Trending

Organizational performance

Article 6 years ago

Explore the collection

  • From employee experience to human experience Article6 years ago
  • Accessing talent Article6 years ago
  • Rewards Article6 years ago
  • HR cloud Article6 years ago
  • Looking ahead Article6 years ago
  • 2019 Global Human Capital Trends Collection
Jeff Schwartz

Jeff Schwartz

Principal

Jeff Schwartz, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, is the US leader for the Future of Work and author of Work Disrupted (Wiley, 2021). Schwartz is an adviser to senior business leaders at global companies, focusing on workforce and business transformation. He is the global editor of the Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report, which he started in 2011.

  • jeffschwartz@deloitte.com
Indranil Roy

Indranil Roy

Indranil is an Executive Director in the Human Capital practice at Deloitte Consulting, based in Singapore. He leads the Deloitte-Leadership Practice for Asia Pacific and is the Chief Strategy Officer for the global Deloitte-Leadership practice. Indranil is a globally renowned strategic advisor in innovation/digital, leadership, strategy organization and culture. He has extensive experience in advising clients from ASEAN, Brazil, Japan, China, India, Korea, United Kingdom and United States across a wide range of sectors, including financial services, IT, government, consumer and healthcare.

  • indroy@deloitte.com
Maren Hauptmann

Maren Hauptmann

Partner

Maren Hauptmann is the German Human Capital leader and Organization Transformation offering leader. Hauptmann has 21 years of experience in strategy and human capital consulting across multiple industries and has supported German, European, and global companies in large organizational, digital, and cultural transformations.

  • mahauptmann@deloitte.de
Yves Van Durme

Yves Van Durme

Partner

Yves Van Durme is a partner with Deloitte’s Belgian consulting practice and the global leader of Deloitte’s Strategic Change practice. He specializes in leadership and organizational development, as well as talent and HR strategy, in business transformation contexts. Van Durme has more than 20 years of experience as a consultant, project manager, and program developer on human capital projects for multiple European, Japanese, American, and Belgian multinationals; family businesses; and small and mediumsize enterprises.

  • yvandurme@deloitte.com
Brad Denny

Brad Denny

Brad Denny, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, leads Deloitte’s US Human Capital practice for the power and utilities industry and coleads the 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report. With almost 25 years of transformation, leadership, talent, and strategy experience, Denny has helped organizations navigate large-scale transformations in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, and Poland.

  • braddenny@deloitte.com

Share article highlights

See something interesting? Simply select text and choose how to share it:

Email a customized link that shows your highlighted text.
Copy a customized link that shows your highlighted text.
Copy your highlighted text.

Talent mobility: Winning the war on the home front has been saved

Talent mobility: Winning the war on the home front has been removed

An Article Titled Talent mobility: Winning the war on the home front already exists in Saved items

Invalid special characters found 
Forgot password

To stay logged in, change your functional cookie settings.

OR

Social login not available on Microsoft Edge browser at this time.

Connect Accounts

Connect your social accounts

This is the first time you have logged in with a social network.

You have previously logged in with a different account. To link your accounts, please re-authenticate.

Log in with an existing social network:

To connect with your existing account, please enter your password:

OR

Log in with an existing site account:

To connect with your existing account, please enter your password:

Forgot password

Subscribe

to receive more business insights, analysis, and perspectives from Deloitte Insights
✓ Link copied to clipboard

Deloitte Insights and our research centers deliver proprietary research designed to help organizations turn their aspirations into action.

Deloitte Insights

  • Home
  • Topics
  • Industries
  • About Deloitte Insights

DELOITTE RESEARCH CENTERS

  • Cross-Industry
  • Economics
  • Consumer
  • Energy & Industrials
  • Financial Services
  • Government & Public Services
  • Life Sciences & Health Care
  • Tech, Media & Telecom
Deloitte logo

Learn about Deloitte’s offerings, people, and culture as a global provider of audit, assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services.

© 2025. See Terms of Use for more information.

Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee ("DTTL"), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as "Deloitte Global") does not provide services to clients. In the United States, Deloitte refers to one or more of the US member firms of DTTL, their related entities that operate using the "Deloitte" name in the United States and their respective affiliates. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Please see www.deloitte.com/about to learn more about our global network of member firms.

  • About Deloitte
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy
  • Data Privacy Framework
  • Cookies
  • Cookie Settings
  • Legal Information for Job Seekers
  • Labor Condition Applications
  • Do Not Sell My Personal Information