Talent mobility

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

Organisations 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, organisations need to more effectively tap their current workforce to identify and deploy people with the required skills, capabilities, motivation, and knowledge of the organisation, 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 organisation’s three most urgent issues.

It’s not hard to understand why. For many organisations, 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 organisations 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 organisation 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 organisation than inside (figure 1), a situation that leaders would do well to address.