This article on internal mobility first appeared in December 2021 and was updated to reflect new information in August 2022. For additional information on talent acquisition and internal mobility , subscribe to the MojoHire blog.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics June 2022 report, there are only 0.6 unemployed workers for every open position in the United States or two job openings for every unemployed person. Considering how many of these are either unqualified for or unwilling to take on the available roles, it becomes evident that talent acquisition teams can’t fill all their open positions, especially more senior positions, with externally sourced candidates.
Enterprises need to do a better job of identifying current employees who are ready to make a move and replace their entry-level positions with outside talent. That’s why the convergence of talent acquisition (TA) and internal mobility (IM) is inevitable for organizations that want to stay competitive.
In this article, we show you six ways to better align talent acquisition and human resource management functions to get to the best talent faster, improve the employee experience, and retain top talent within your ranks.
1. Elevate TAs to strategic hiring partners
Given today’s tight market dynamics, TA execs no longer have the luxury of spending most of their time sourcing candidates on LinkedIn and mining other databases. They need to use technology to automate the screening and vetting process to spend their time on more strategic work and collaborate more productively with hiring managers.
Related link: Organizational Agility: Is Your TA Team Helping or Hurting?
2. Focus on the employee experience
Employees and job candidates’ impressions of your company are more important than ever in the current labor market. Companies are forced to make substantial enhancements to their employee experience (EX) programs to compete effectively for job seekers and internal candidates. Companies need to emphasize professional growth and career portfolios to attract top talent. It’s essential for TA and HR teams to be aligned when it comes to promoting an employee-centric work environment.
They are ensuring that employees have a solid EX and have clear visibility into career growth along with tools provided to achieve that growth is critical. It’s not uncommon for employers to have beneficial offerings such as LMS-driven growth (i.e. LinkedIn Learning), continuing education stipends, or even internal openings boards. However, these systems are often difficult to use and, therefore, not.
Related link: Career pathing is obsolete. Here’s what to do instead.
3. Create an internal talent marketplace
In his HR Predictions for 2022 report, Josh Bersin stated his belief that “an internal talent marketplace is becoming one of the most important systems that should exist in a business.” This prediction is coming to fruition before our eyes as more enterprises turn to this method.
The best internal talent marketplaces leverage technology and Agile processes to match internal employees with job openings and intelligently match people with other needs such as projects or mentors using AI. Such a platform is essential to delivering the level of EX a company needs to retain top talent.
4. Involve employees in internal mobility decisions
The belief that critical talent decisions are best made by managers, leadership or even HR executives is obsolete. Today’s employees want to feel respected and empowered to make their own career decisions. Empowerment provides the structure and the means for employee engagement to prosper. Internal talent marketplaces and career portfolios are powerful tools for involving employees in internal mobility decisions.
One of the main barriers to TA and IM convergence is the disconnected nature of the databases that store candidate and employee information. TA teams often don’t have access to data about employee skill sets and qualifications, and HR teams are often unaware of the open requisitions. Integrating your HR systems will give TA teams the visibility necessary to evaluate the entire talent pool, including external candidates, internal employees, and contingent workers.
6. Improve the UX for TA teams
Another barrier to accessing data on candidates and employees is the notoriously bad user experience (UX) of ATS (applicant tracking system) and HRMS (human resource management system) platforms. They tend to be so clunky and frustrating that recruiters avoid searching them altogether, preferring to go hunting on LinkedIn.
Integrating your data repositories in a way that also provides an ergonomic UX and makes it easy for cross-team collaboration between recruiters, hiring managers and HR teams will allow you to get the most out of your data and create the best employee experience.
Related link: Clunky HR Tech Stacks: The Struggle is Real, but There is a Better Way
7. How MojoHire assists with TA-HRM convergence
MojoHire’s AI-enabled talent platform can help you achieve all of the above, without changing your existing HR tech stack. MojoHire sits atop your entire HR system ecosystem to intelligently analyze billions of data points like an expert recruiter to surface the perfect candidate – external, internal or contingent.
Thanks to MojoHire’s seamless integration with any number of HR systems and data repositories, your TA teams, hiring managers, and HR execs now have a single, user-friendly interface. View qualified candidates, open requisitions, and all of the conversations and feedback around each opportunity. This level of visibility seamlessly facilitates cross-team collaboration and efficiency.
MojoHire’s internal mobility tools match internal fit on the recruiting and employee sides. The system will match employees instantly to open opportunities they are an excellent fit for or can get recommendations on career trajectories they may be interested in. MojoHire can point them to internal or external resources to help them in their career growth (e.g., LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, LMS resources).
Because MojoHire uses a robust AI to analyze candidate information, it does much better than legacy systems in identifying the best talent matches. Because MojoHire “understands” resumes and can identify relationships between different data types, it will pick up on best matches even if they don’t have the “right” keywords or phrases in their applications. This intelligence ensures that no good candidate goes overlooked.
Contact us today to find out how MojoHire can make your HR Tech work better for you, ensure you retain top talent and help you improve EX, and get you to the best talent faster.
