Navigating the great shift in the global talent marketplace

How policy can drive employee retention

From the employee’s perspective, the ability to work remotely, or even from a flexible location, is increasingly becoming a job selection criterion along with the type of work and the role progression the job may afford. Employers have noticed and many organizations are actively experimenting with policies which allow for location flexibility.

Enabling employee career and location mobility in response to hybrid and remote work trends may represent a major opportunity to attract and retain top talent. Some employers have publicly announced such policies, perhaps to distinguish their market brand, to reassure current employees of a commitment to flexibility, or to attract workers who value it. These policy changes also bring organizational challenges. In a recent Deloitte survey, organizations ranked their top challenges to implementing a remote work program.²

What is a Talent Marketplace?

A talent marketplace is a digital platform that matches an organization’s open opportunities to qualified employees. Today’s talent marketplace platforms are increasingly automated, offering transparency and speed in job matching based on the skills, experience, and aspirations of the potential worker. This can promote employee engagement, reduce turnover and accelerate career journeys.

In an efficient marketplace, both the employer and worker have access to complete information to make informed decisions, such as pay and benefits for available opportunities. In a world of flexible work location, this includes policy, regulatory and compliance indicators that provide information about obligations related to work in a new location.  Since organizations typically track location information through human capital management systems and compliance vendors, they could use that data in conjunction with logic and calculation engines to generate governance signals. Those signals could be integrated into the talent marketplace user experience, allowing a manager or an employee to see factors such as right to work, salary and benefits changes, or net pay differentials at the time they are searching for a role. Although the technical signals at this early stage would be approximate, they would be highly informative to the stakeholders. 

Evaluating the potential for global talent movement

Among the many challenges of meeting employee demand for greater location flexibility is the current and future regulatory landscape. Rules vary from nation to nation and even locality to locality. There are corporate and employment tax implications; payroll, tax residence and visa requirements; and a host of other compliance issues to consider for each situation. It’s important to identify the cross-border risk thresholds that work for your organization. That starts with getting all stakeholders to agree on the risks.

The signals can range from an easy-to-read system such as red, yellow, or green labels for each risk, or more detailed compliance signals such as cost differentials, work permit wait times, and thresholds that trigger new obligations.

Managing risk also involves creating a process to reexamine the rulesets and their implications on a regular basis. To keep stakeholders informed and confident that the organization is on top of their particular set of risks, consider regular communications that report utilization and mobility activity and share success stories. This also supports the notion that it is everyone’s responsibility, as a community concerned about obligations, to flag complex or consequential patterns and to keep one another informed.

The right mindset

Complexities in this new work environment require that companies consider multiple aspects of the talent marketplace – considering employee preferences when shaping company policies. Doing so can be challenging, but with leadership, career mobility programs, and enabling technology in place, organizations can launch the platforms to facilitate employee development and improve employee engagement in harmony with company policies.

The “future of work” is not in the future; it’s the here and now. Organizations that actively invest in transforming their career mobility infrastructure could be well positioned to have a sustainable competitive advantage.

Get in touch

		Gina Salama Senior Manager Deloitte Tax LLC gsalama@deloitte.com +1 206 716 7503				Andy Cowen Partner Deloitte LLC acowen@deloitte.co.uk +44 20 7007 0984

¹ Deloitte, Human Capital Trends, 2019.

² Deloitte, Remote Work Survey: Remote Controlled, 2022.

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