Internal Talent Mobility & Redeployment of Your Workforce

On Thursday, April 30, 2020, Click Boarding partnered with SmartRecruiters in a compelling discussion with renowned HR leaders and analysts to discuss the focus on how best to operationalize internal mobility and redeploy an existing workforce.

SmartRecruiters launched TA Today for the Talent Acquisition Community to hear from experts on a variety of topics that are especially relevant right now. The goal is to share their insights, best practices and practical steps to positively impact your talent acquisition strategy, which has most likely changed dramatically recently.

Panelists included:

• Hung Lee (Workshape.io) – Co-founder and CEO
• Elaine Orler (Talent Function) – Founder & CEO
• Felix Serrano (Activus Connect) – CEO & Co-Founder
• Jess Von Bank (Leapgen) – Global Community Leader for Digitization & the NOW of Work

Webinar Recap

Although most organizations understand the importance, impact and value of onboarding, how many are actually crossboarding existing employees? Has your business operationalized the process and prioritized recruiting from your internal talent pool? If you haven’t already, it’s time you started.

Don’t let the competition leverage this unprecedented time to recruit the talent you already have. The statistics speak for themselves:

• 75% of job seekers say being passed over for a promotion was a reason to go job hunting
• After three years, an employee who was promoted has a 70% chance of staying at that company
• 54% of employees are unclear about their promotion and career path

Access the full recording of this webinar >>

Internal mobility operations during COVID-19

How does your organization currently think about internal mobility? Is it a priority? If it’s not, why? If yes, has it always been a priority? Or is this a new development due to the pandemic? Whatever the case, our HR thought leaders shared the following timely insights as a result of the pandemic:

• Critical assignment-based work has now become the priority.
• Skills and abilities are being put to the test with a hyperfocus on the results.
• There’s been a mass adoption of remote working which has significantly helped internal mobility. Organizations are not as well equipped as they can be and should be for remote working.
• Talent must be mobile, agile and adaptable. If they’re not equipped, they’re not as competitive as they need to be…especially now.

Ideas to keep employees moving to new opportunities

• Thought starters from Elaine
  Redefine what “internal mobility” means in your organization. Break the requirement of an employee notifying their manager if they’re interested in pursuing internal opportunities. Put that aside. Employees should be able to look internally without managers knowing. Secondly, there needs be career planning at the employee level to  expose data to employees.
• Key points from Felix
  The requirements on expectations to operate in this new world need to be updated. What does it take for an organization to have mobility (horizontal or vertical)? There are new rules of engagement. What will it take for an employee to move to the next role? First, we have to bridge the gap and set clear expectations.
• Insights from Jess
  Who owns a person’s career? The individual! Right now, there are more opportunities for people to take ownership. Give your employees tools, and make internal mobility fluid and easy to do it. If I see career paths as an employee, then there needs to be more ownership put on the individual to look around the organization.

How to drive better work while serving employee retention, engagement & experience

• When in a leadership role, you have to measure the extent to which you’re developing talent, promoting employees and growing as an organization. The compensation mechanism has to support your investing in and growing people.
• Aim to disproportionately hire from within, and prepare to support the business as it grows.
• Look at it from the work/project perspective, and then how best to allocate the work. Examine your entire talent space, not just the regular workflorce but also your extended workforce: gig and freelance workers, part-time, on leave, etc. These people are available and best equipped for the talent marketplace.
• Determine who has the necessary skills within an organization for a given position.
• Track and keep record of all resources.
• Determine who “owns” internal mobility. As an HR professional, do you own internal mobility? Do you own total talent (regardless of badge type)?
• Manage potential gaps in teams. Reassigning comes with both risks and rewards. It’s an opportunity to say “not yet, but maybe later;” but don’t hold employees there forever. Unless there’s a problem (barriers/challenge in team structure), let them finish the contribution. Balances do have to happen.

How to facilitate internal mobility

• Bridge the gap. Conduct assessments of employees and how to access the data across departments (at the outset), and  then conduct reviews. Assess, feed information into system and ultimately pick and choose from that. Be sure to assess that work in a fair way.
• People data is the new business mandate, PERIOD. If you don’t have full line-of-sight into everyone and their capabilities, then you have work to do!
• Leadership & development, training roles. Talent acquisition does well at being great coaches in the way of quality development. There’s a lot of transferable skills to hone in on and redeploy in those departments.
• Strategic sourcing from talent acquisition. TA professionals should act as talent advisors for internal mobility and the redeployment of those we need to furlough to let to. There’s no reason they can’t refer out in a positive way that allows them to come back when the organization is ready to grow again.

It’s time to raise the bar on internal mobility solutions
So what’s the best way to weather the storm in the “new normal?” Contact the employee journey experts at Click Boarding. Our robust, compliant platform enables enterprise organizations to automate the steps within the process and get your team back to focusing on the important things: your people.