Not all talent marketplaces are created equal: 5 reasons why

As widespread economic disruption and acute talent shortages have shown no signs of stopping, companies have found themselves working hard to keep up with the pace of change. With pressure mounting to develop and retain talent to better adapt to changing business needs, it’s no surprise that the market is buzzing about talent marketplaces. Internal talent mobility is a hot topic amongst HR practitioners and business leaders alike. The concept holds a great deal of promise in its ability to drive business agility, support equitable talent practices, create transparency within the organization, and encourage continuous employee development. In fact, it’s become such a must-have technology that various vendors across multiple spaces—both big and small, well-known and not—now claim to have talent marketplace solutions that will help you “unlock workforce potential”, “tap into the power of your people”, or even “unearth talent that’s hidden in plain view”.

While all of these promises sound great, how does one figure out the key differences between different products, and find the right marketplace for their business? Once you peel back the curtain behind the marketing buzzwords, you realize that all these “talent marketplaces” are often inherently different platforms, with some key differentiators to look out for. And, if you’re thinking of investing your time, money, stakeholder trust, and people into a talent marketplace provider, you need to be able to know exactly what you’re getting into, and what any solution will or will not accomplish.

Amidst the sea of options, you’ll find a various kinds of “talent marketplace” operators:

• Larger incumbent platforms built for a different core HR function that have added on feature sets to provide marketplace functionality
• Talent acquisition tools looking to turn external recruitment algorithms inward on the organization, learning and performance platforms with matching features to create a marketplace
• Tools built with the purpose of powering internal mobility. This is the category Gloat’s Talent Marketplace finds itself in

Contrasting technology backgrounds make a big difference in various tools’ impact and results. As Josh Bersin, global HR industry analyst said in his 2022 keynote at the HR technology conference, “the Talent Marketplace is not a set of features added to your current system. It is a new platform…It’s not as simple as connecting people to jobs and giving them a list to review, it’s much more than that.”  As the pioneers of the Talent Marketplace category, we’ve helped countless businesses harness the power of their workforce to break down organizational silos, operate with efficiency, and empower their talent. Here’s why we believe our Talent Marketplace stands a cut above:

1. Gloat’s Talent Marketplace was purpose-built to revolutionize organizations from the inside out

Much like finding a mechanic for your car or a doctor when you’re sick, you want a talent marketplace provider who knows internal mobility. As the creators of the category, this has been our focus from the start because internal mobility, effective upskilling, and talent deployment requires more nuance than external matching. It involves more than pairing similar job titles or skill set—do that, and you’d likely recommend an employee to their teammate’s job.

Matching talent to work requires a deep understanding of how skills and jobs behave in your own organization. We know different jobs mean different things at every company (an analyst at a media company and a medical company have fundamentally different responsibilities and skill sets), and have spent years honing an algorithm to break down the needs of a business, and identify talent across your organization suited to support.

Other HR systems weren’t built to understand the nuances involved in mobilizing internal talent and comprehending how skills relate to one another within an organization. Your HCM might know where people live and how much to pay them, but they do not have data on an employee’s unique skills, aspirations and desires without manual input? When the half-life of a skill is about 4 years, a real-time view is essential.

What about externally-focused systems? They’re indeed good at analyzing the market, but knowing how specific skills are trending broadly won’t help you understand the unique skills you have within your organization and how to use them. You can have billions of data points, but if none of them apply to your company, that data really doesn’t matter.

Internal mobility is more than just adding a feature to an existing solution, matching similar job titles and skills, or mapping out career paths that are already defined. Truly mobilizing talent requires deep insights and a big-picture understanding honed over years of experience and focus.

2. Gloat has proven experience preparing businesses to act and adapt at scale

In today’s world, uncertainty and volatility are commonplace, requiring organizations to adopt new models that enable action. This means that you need a way to provide the speed, efficacy, and flexibility necessary to stay ready for anything. But in such a burgeoning market, how do you find the right talent marketplace provider to help you pivot and adapt? You need a partner with proven success delivering results during times of uncertainty.

As the only provider managing talent marketplaces at scale, we now have over seven years of experience testing and refining our approach to deliver an effective internal marketplace. We have implementations in over 120 countries, and our talent marketplace has been pressure-tested in some of the most unpredictable situations—from a global pandemic and supply chain constraints to economic headwinds and a market-wide surge of resignations—and done so at scale across business units and geographies. We’ve spent many years developing a people-driven solution that was designed in partnership with some of the world’s leading enterprises—many of whom are using our platform to gain the skills visibility and talent mobility critical to addressing emerging business needs and adapt to shifting demands in real-time. This experience means we deliver fast time to value, and know how to provide proven results.

3. Gloat delivers continuous impact without manual input

Traditionally, gathering the insights needed to drive upskilling, mobility, and career planning within each unique organization typically requires loads of manual data input. This is especially true when dealing with larger, more incumbent platforms that employees rarely engage with. In addressing the rise of HR technologies and the emerging need to support employees, Josh Bersin stated,  “If people don’t use it, it won’t be successful.” Think about it, how often do employees engage with their HCM? Rarely. To be successful, an organization’s understanding of their workforce needs to change and evolve as frequently as they do. This is where the marketplace model comes in. Platforms need to create an experience that not only taps into external data sources, but also keeps employees coming back to engage and drive continuous insight. No data repository moves as fast as your people, and your critical business decisions need to be made with the freshest insight.

Our Talent Marketplace was designed for employee use, resulting in high levels of engagement that give us access to unparalleled people data. This focus on internal talent has allowed  our AI  to understand the unique relationships between skills, roles and careers within your organization—giving you an unmatched understanding of what is going on in your company. And, when paired with our Workforce Intelligence suite, we are able to go even deeper. By layering in powerful Gloat datasets—rich profile information from the millions of employees on the Gloat platform today, billions of external data points, and real-time data from your Talent Marketplace—we’re able to offer insights into practically every industry, occupation, and skill. Every time a new piece of data is available, it’s collected and layered into Gloat so that our systems can constantly learn and capture how job titles, job requirements, and skill needs are changing externally and within your business. No more manual mapping and updating needed.

4. Gloat’s talent marketplace connects to workforce intelligence to turn insight into action

To unlock the full capability of your workforce, you need a talent marketplace experience that not only enables you to plan for the future, but also empowers you to immediately take action. Siloed incumbent platforms that tack on a feature set to provide marketplace functionality and recruiting tools built to look externally first often fall short in their attempts to deliver a complete picture. With their closed wall approach and limited view into the workforce, these talent marketplaces fail to deliver the insights needed to act.

Our Talent Marketplace goes beyond simply matching employees to opportunities and business needs. It seamlessly connects your workforce intelligence to directly execute on changes made. This means that as you prioritize skills, create new jobs, or make changes to your job architecture, these adjustments are all immediately reflected in your talent marketplace—ensuring that your initiatives go from planning to practice right away. What’s more, we deliver all of this powerful information back to employees at scale, providing them with easy access to an up-to-the-minute skill-based view to explore their next steps within the organization.

5. Gloat has a proven and tested approach to change and enablement

In an effort to keep up with the market, many talent marketplace providers overlook two core components of a successful solution—the user experience and the cultural shift. But to drive real change, you need real action. And without an easy-to-use experience and tools to support adoption, your efforts will likely fall flat.

Because we believe that there is no stronger force for skills growth and internal mobility inside of a company than an employee’s own desire to grow and build a fulfilling career, we designed our Talent Marketplace solution for employees first. We didn’t start as a solution built for admins and business leaders to manage their talent like HCMs and external solutions, we kept our focus on the employee. This focus has helped us to create a top tier consumer-grade and intuitive system that has been intentionally crafted and perfected over years of adoption and success. But our efforts don’t stop there.

We understand that this is not just a technology shift, it’s a cultural one. That’s why Gloat includes Change and Enablement services to help companies drive change and quickly see results. Our team of experts across change, psychology management, consulting, and HR, have proven experience with implementations around the world—ranging in scale and complexity. Our experience means you’ll never have to start from scratch. With access to tools and resources like leadership briefs, training materials, communication plans, and best of all, our customer community: We’ve got you covered.

Gloat has proved instrumental in helping us manage the test phase and subsequent global rollout to drive adoption and engagement. We’ve gotten best practices from other customers, and Gloat’s support with improvements to our strategy. Gloat organizes customer calls, where the community can share best practices and ideas together.

As organizations look to level-up their operations and activate their workforce, we at Gloat have built a talent marketplace geared to activate workforce agility. To learn more about our approach and how we can support your business, book a demo with Gloat today.