Opportunities optimized: Meet the new Talent Marketplace

When we created Gloat’s Talent Marketplace, our mission was clear: build employee-focused products that change the way the world works, and continue optimizing them to consistently deliver a best-in-class development experience. As the pace of change keeps accelerating, we’re evolving our platform to meet rising employee expectations.

People expect technology to work for them—not work for their technology. That’s why we’ve enhanced the Talent Marketplace to keep the end-user front of mind, in turn creating a more engaging, intuitive experience for both the employee looking for ways to grow and the manager looking to fill a role internally.

An employee-focused product is only successful when end-users want to use it. That’s why we’ve partnered closely with our customers to create a more accessible, more understandable, and easier-to-navigate Talent Marketplace experience. Our commitment to changing the way people work doesn’t stop at launch—it means evolving ourselves right along with users.

More accessible, more actionable opportunities

When it comes to user experience, simpler is usually better. Whether it’s watching a movie, buying a car, or planning out their careers, people want technology that seamlessly connects them to what they care about, and the Talent Marketplace was made to do just that.

Gloat’s Talent Marketplace hosts several ways to engage with the platform—Career Planning, Profiles, Skills Landscape, and more, but most employees who are looking to discover opportunities will do so through the Opportunities page. This page presents employees with a curated set of learning experiences relevant to their aspirations so they can close skill gaps and continue developing toward their career goals.

That engagement is what powers talent marketplaces—the more active a workforce is in posting project assignments, finding relevant opportunities, and searching for mentorship connections, the more successful the platform is as a whole. This is why every time we refine our offering, we make sure that each change makes the experience more intuitive, inclusive, and engaging to all employees—fostering a positive feedback loop to further encourage people to come back and find their next opportunity.

Beyond the necessity for easy interactions between users and opportunities, one of the driving forces of what we do at Gloat is our belief that all opportunities, whether they be learning, development, or career opportunities, must be visible, accessible and suggestible to employees based on their skills and interests—not preconceived or unconscious biases. Increasing and democratizing access to opportunities has always been at the heart of the Talent Marketplace, and giving all employees a chance to shine means making it easier to act on opportunities. To further this commitment, we’ve achieved VPAT certification, which ensures our product is held to the highest accessibility standards.

Calls to action have been updated to more clearly describe what the next step is; opportunity card information and icons are more visible; all colors in the design have been thought out to ensure minimal clashing that could make controls and functionalities inaccessible to some users.

To give people the experience they’re looking for, we prioritized updating a few key components of our offering: Opportunity cards, Opportunity details, and My Opportunities.

Opportunity cards

From how users navigate dropdown menus to the colors used in classifying opportunities, every aspect of the user journey has been designed to make the experience intuitive. Opportunity cards are now simpler to navigate directly from the opportunities page.

A person can now make major interactions directly from the front of the opportunity card as easy as liking a post on social media—a heart icon to save an opportunity for later, a share icon to send directly to a colleague, a link to talk directly with the owner of an opportunity, and a color coding system to know the category of each card (and how they fit into an employee’s skill set) at a glance. Insights into why each opportunity is a match live directly on the card as well, showing the relevant skills they embody and are valued throughout the organization.

Opportunity details

When clicking into a card, users are now presented with a single, streamlined view of the details of the opportunity. There they can find relevant details like the item’s description, required skills and experiences, as well as the location of the opportunity and time commitment. But even if a match comes at an inopportune time, users can decide to save it for later or share it with a colleague who also fits the task.

And directly from the view, users can connect with the opportunity owner to discuss the next steps and any questions they may have. By continuing to foster greater communication within an organization, information flows more easily and cross-functional collaborations become second nature.

My Opportunities

Formerly known as Wishlist, a worker’s My Opportunities list is the comprehensive home for those opportunities an employee has saved for later, has in progress, successfully completed, or that have been closed. By sorting through their status—Saved, In Progress, Successful, and Closed—people can stay on top of their career development with just a few clicks.

The change helps foster greater clarity, bringing a sense of ease and understanding to what could otherwise be an intimidating process. Putting yourself out there can feel daunting; by simplifying the process, employees can get connected to the right opportunities in a more approachable way.

Putting employee upskilling in plain sight

One of the most powerful tools for employees using the Talent Marketplace is the ability to take action to upskill towards development goals. Determining how to develop desired skills based on educated guesses alone can feel daunting, so we revamped Career Tracks to let people know exactly how. Our redesign focused on streamlining the experience: no more bottomless scrolling through opportunities when creating an action plan and a clear understanding of what each upskilling track consists of, making it a little easier for everyone to take action to move their careers forward.

Career Tracks

Career Tracks acts as the step-by-step roadmap to turn their goals into realities. By connecting talent with the upskilling opportunities relevant to their ambitions, people can develop themselves more efficiently and effectively. A sleek new design and the addition of Edit mode helps employees contextualize each opportunity, putting understanding behind every action.

As skill needs evolve, trying to manually maintain a grasp on what’s needed to push the ball forward can be overwhelming. That’s where Gloat’s AI shines: it takes the guesswork out of the process and empowers people to better themselves with clear upskilling plans to make short-term gains turn into long-term transformations.

Transforming ourselves to meet transforming employee needs

While some other talent marketplaces were solely built with leadership in mind, our belief firmly remains in the strength of an empowered, engaged workforce being the primary driver of any talent marketplace’s success. And Gloat’s numbers speak for themselves: 80% profile completion and 40% monthly active users across our entire user base. Throughout more than seven years of experience testing and refining the way we deliver opportunities to people at scale, putting employees in charge of change has been the constant.

Our Talent Marketplace and Workforce Intelligence deliver game-changing results for organizations looking to increase workforce agility, enhance internal mobility, democratize opportunities, and create a future-fit workforce. We believe that people are most successful when they’re given tools that let them drive (instead of driving them), which is why we’re committed to listening to where employees want to take their careers and presenting them with the opportunities they need to get there.

As workers and companies evolve through the use of Gloat’s Talent Marketplace, we transform with them. To see where it can take your organization and people next, book a demo with Gloat today.