The 3 Main Barriers To Internal Mobility Adoption (And How To Overcome Them)
These days, it’s impossible to deny that a good internal mobility strategy is critical to a large company’s business goals. Businesses see a shortage of talent, and employees don’t want to move around unless they must. In fact, 66% of job seekers look at their current company before looking elsewhere.
Yet, job-hopping is on the rise. As such, having a solid internal talent mobility process to help retain the potential movers is in everybody’s best interests.
75% of employees aged 18-34 view it (job hopping) as beneficial for their careers - Robert Half
However, utilizing a company’s existing human capital for its existing needs has proven to be harder than people might think.
According to the same survey by Deloitte, only 6% of respondents felt that their organizations were excellent at enabling talent mobility. In fact, another 16% labelled their organization “inadequate”.
If you’re reading this, chances are your company has an internal mobility policy. Chances are, the processes aren’t necessarily defined and you’re still trying to “figure it out”.
And that’s okay. We’ve worked with companies that are building their programs from the ground up and usually, it’s not hard to convince them of the benefits of internal mobility.
Instead, there are usually some institutional and practical roadblocks to improving internal mobility.
The good news is that they’re fixable. Here are three crucial strategies that you need to implement for internal mobility success.
Managers Aren’t Incentivized To Support Internal Moves
In most large organizations, internal mobility is doomed to fail given the way that most companies’ talent structures are set up. The three main parties involved in internal mobility are the managers, the HR professionals and the employees.
As we’ve already said, employees are willing to stay with their company if there’s the opportunity to grow. For HR professionals, promoting a company culture of career growth is also in their best interest.
But managers? Why would they care about the rate of internal applicants for new roles? If productive members of their team are applying elsewhere, that hurts them. Here’s a troubling stat…
“46% of managers resist internal mobility.” - Source, Deloitte
Managers that oppose internal mobility are putting their own team’s needs above the greater good of the company. The future of work means that companies need to have agile teams, and managers that resist internal mobility aren’t helping with the problem.
Managers are leaders of their own high-performance team, which means they’re often incentivized to keep people on their teams so they can achieve their goals. Whether their employees see their company as a great place to work and grow is not always their business.
To fix this, large companies must commit to incentivizing managers to become career coaches, while encouraging cross-department mobility. The era of the strict hierarchy is over, so don’t reward managers who won’t let it go.
SEE ALSO: Why Internal Mobility? An Easy Infographic To Share With Those Who Haven’t Bought In
Visibility of Internal Roles
A simple reason why people are more likely to take an external position than an internal one? They’re being asked to.
People want to feel wanted. As we speak, your employees are seeing recruiters constantly reaching out on LinkedIn. They’re being presented with new roles that offer higher salaries, better perks and most importantly...more opportunity for career growth.
So for your employees to stay, they need to see that you’re offering those things, too. And let’s be honest - recruiters are good at their jobs. That’s what they do every single day.
They’re really good at making sure your employees understand there are opportunities outside of your organization.
So, let’s say an employee wants to stay. They want to learn about the opportunities available internally. Who can they talk to about this?
We’ve talked about managers who oppose internal mobility, but even if they don’t? They aren’t able to compete with external recruiters.
If you’re an HR professional reading this, then you’ll relate to this: most HR professionals are not necessarily recruiters.
Put simply, your employees don’t know about the opportunities available to them. Large banks such as Credit Suisse have employed an interesting tactic: using specialized, internal headhunters as a talent acquisition method to ensure their homegrown talent can safely move around.
SEE ALSO: How To Improve Visibility Into Your Internal Opportunities
Complex Career Paths and Lack of Good Data
The modern career path is complicated, and unfortunately, that’s currently being addressed with a heavy dosage of job-hopping and talent poaching. The days are long gone when someone would start as an administrative assistant and become CFO.
We’ve established that employees at large companies often don’t know about the internal opportunities available to them. While internal recruiters are one way of raising awareness surrounding new roles, technology is enabling talent teams across the globe to create internal job marketplaces for their employees.
Put another way: why not simply empower employees to discover their own career paths?
Today, data science and AI have decoded the longstanding mystery of career pathing. At Paddle HR, we believe the path towards internal mobility needs to focus on technology. We’ve developed an AI-powered platform that allows employees to explore the best career options for them.
Our proprietary algorithms recommend roles for them, while also giving HR professionals visibility into their untapped internal talent pool. We use 400M data points to help enterprises uncover mobility trends within their organization and have been trusted by Fortune 1000 companies to uncover mobility trends within their organizations.
“Many HR leaders tell us that employees find it easier to quit and be rehired than to change positions with the organization because of the lack of systems to enable and promote internal moves.” - Deloitte
Internal mobility is important, and clearly, large organizations are putting the effort and resources to making sure it works. We’d love to show you how it can.