What is a talent marketplace?

For a long time, most talent management rules were simple. Employees were hired to do a specific job, and they had one manager who was, in turn, being managed by someone else in the same function—all the way to the top. Everyone stood on one rung of the same vertical ladder, and ultimately all employees had the same choice: climb up or step off.

Since there wasn’t much room to challenge the status quo or think outside of the box, talent management tools weren’t built for agility.

Today, HR is a much more strategic role, and the same set of tools therefore no longer suffice. Modern people leaders aren’t just filling out spreadsheets; they’re revolutionizing the way we work and transforming the employee-employer relationship. They need transformative solutions to unlock agility, prepare for the future of work, and ensure they have the right skills in the right place. And that’s where talent marketplaces come into play.

What is the talent marketplace?

The talent marketplace is a two-sided platform that harnesses the power of AI to align employees (and their skills) to projects, gigs, mentorships, and full-time roles within their organization.

Talent marketplaces aren’t an upgraded version of traditional HR technology. They’re not human capital management platforms 2.0.

You don’t have to look far to see how marketplace dynamics have already transformed other aspects of our daily lives. We don’t need to call for a cab anymore or rely on hotels when we’re going out of town; instead, Uber takes us where we want to go and Airbnb helps us find a place to stay.

Talent marketplaces utilize the same model to transform the way we work, giving HR and business leaders on-demand access to qualified candidates who can be deployed to new projects as priorities evolve and new challenges emerge.

Utilizing the talent you already have

Traditionally, the dominant way to fill emerging skills needs was through external hiring. Businesses repeated the same lengthy process of attracting and recruiting talent, interviewing qualified candidates, extending offers, and onboarding.

Yet, as the hiring landscape gets more competitive and the pace of innovation accelerates, forward-thinking companies are looking inwards to unlock the capacity they’re looking for without the lengthy applicant search and recruitment process.

Prioritizing internal candidates over external hires comes with several key benefits for both employees and employers. Workers are empowered to expand their skill sets and grow their careers with their organizations.

At the same time, organizations can save time and money by prioritizing internal mobility, while also streamlining their onboarding process. Since internal candidates already have a wealth of institutional knowledge at their fingertips, getting them up to speed becomes faster and easier.

The benefits of utilizing a talent marketplace

There’s no denying that implementing a talent marketplace is a major change. Schneider Electric was among the first of the pioneering organizations that launched their platform, and their VP of Digital Talent Transformation, Jean Pelletier, goes so far as to say, “It’s a complete rewrite of HR. You need to think differently about speed and how to go deep and broad in an organization using AI.”

While it might be a major change, the talent marketplace also comes with some game-changing benefits:

Unlocking agility

Agility emerged as the make-or-break factor for businesses in recent years. And the importance of reacting and evolving quickly is only going to increase as we look beyond the pandemic and enter our new world of work.

While nine out of ten executives believe organizational agility is critical to business success, most leaders don’t have what they need to unlock it.

Namely, leaders lack full visibility into the skills of their workforces so that talent can be redeployed at a moment’s notice to meet evolving priorities. Talent marketplaces put these rapid pivots and fast-paced redeployments well within reach.

Breaking down silos

Traditional rigid hierarchies are a recipe for organizational silos. When employees only know what’s happening within their department, knowledge remains trapped within various segments of the business.

Employees’ skills and capabilities only get utilized within their teams, preventing your workforce from achieving its full potential. As a result, companies lose 20-30% of revenue each year due to inefficiencies caused by silos.

In contrast, talent marketplaces break down barriers so your people can share their skills with colleagues across the organization. Employees can collaborate cross-functionally, lend a hand when they have extra capacity, and come together to help your enterprise achieve performance goals that may have once seemed out of reach.

Improve engagement and retention

If your people don’t see a future with your organization, they’re going to build one somewhere else. 52% of exiting employees say their manager could have done something to prevent them from leaving.

For a long time, many workers thought vertical progression was the only direction that their careers could take. Talent marketplaces expand their horizons, empowering employees to move laterally and seek out new opportunities that align with both their skills and ambitions as well as your business priorities.

Future-fit upskilling and reskilling

Since the World Economic Forum predicts that 50% of the workforce will need upskilling by 2025, the clock is ticking when it comes to building future-fit skills. In the past, L&D initiatives often failed to make an impact because they were missing a critical piece of the puzzle: experiential learning.

There’s no doubt that the right skill-building approach makes an impact. 93% of CEOs who have introduced upskilling programs noted that they’ve seen an improvement in retention and productivity.

To maximize the efficacy of your skill-building strategy, employees need a chance to put what they’re learning into practice. Talent marketplaces take training to the next level by matching people to projects, gigs, and mentorships that will provide the hands-on experience that was once lacking.

Making opportunities accessible to all

In addition to the benefits listed above, talent marketplaces have emerged as a powerful tool for breaking down barriers and democratizing career development. Furthermore, businesses that are more diverse tend to benefit from higher levels of employee engagement.

Rather than letting potentially bias-inducing factors such as geographic proximity and personal networking sway career mobility decisions, talent marketplaces harness ethically constructed AI to level the playing field.

The internal candidates that the platforms suggest are recommended based on their skills and experiences, and nothing else. As a result, talent marketplaces can surface qualified employees who may have once been overlooked.

4 Best practices for implementing an internal talent marketplace

While any talent marketplace is likely to deliver benefits, there are 4 steps leaders can take to maximize the success of their platform, including:

#1. Prepare your team for change

Talent marketplaces are a disruptive technology, so it’s important to prepare your workforce for change. Your talent marketplace should have dedicated Change and Enablement support to help you create a plan for onboarding and adoption.

Prior to rolling out your platform, your people should have an understanding of what’s coming and the role the platform will play in their growth and development.

Your provider should support you with tools, templates, and expertise to ensure you have a clear launch plan and ongoing communications to get your marketplace off the ground.

Many of our customers created fun promotional videos and knowledge repositories so that employees could start getting familiar with their forthcoming platform before it launched.

#2. Engage your broader team

A talent marketplace is a critical asset not only for HR teams and executive stakeholders, it’s a tool for every business leader in your organization.

Your C-Suite, GMs, and other leaders can be your biggest advocates and the biggest beneficiaries of talent marketplace adoption. Take the time to educate other executives and business leaders on how the tool can support them, their teams, and their needs.

Establish champions and advocates amongst company leadership to help encourage employee adoption and drive benefits across the entire organization.

#3. Keep an eye on the future

A talent marketplace is just one piece of your workforce strategy. Keep the big picture in mind, and explore the ways you can use your talent marketplace to evolve your holistic approach to talent.

How can your marketplace enhance your career development or your skill visibility? Can you tap into talent to help support your emerging HR needs?

It’s important to align your long-term planning goals with your vendor’s roadmap and capabilities to help maximize the value of your solution.

#4. Beware of talent hoarders

Talent hoarding describes the tendency of managers to keep employees on their team or to restrict their cross-functional collaboration opportunities, even when this worker is interested in branching out and lending a hand to other teams.

While it’s easy to understand why some managers might feel possessive of their top talent, leaders must cultivate a culture of talent sharing and put a stop to these hoarding tendencies so that employees can expand their horizons and hone new skills. 

3 typical features of talent marketplace platforms

While no talent marketplaces are identical, most platforms offer some of the same features, including:

Career pathing

Career pathing is the process of aligning opportunities for employee career growth with organizational talent priorities. The most impactful tools don’t just show people one potential path; instead, they present users with a few different options for what direction their careers can take based on their skills and interests, so employees can choose the path that fits best.

Mentoring

In the past, mentorship pairings were usually a guessing game. Leaders needed to make inferences about which colleagues would benefit most from working with one another, but it was challenging to accurately track and align employee interests and experiences.

In recent years, talent marketplaces have eliminated the need for guesswork, enabling pairing processes that are more efficient and accurate. The platforms go beyond obvious matches and generate suggestions based on your employees’ skills, interests, and professional ambitions.

This means that you might see pairing suggestions that you never would have thought of, but will work based on what your people are looking to achieve.

Project and gig marketplace

Now that the working world is changing fast, businesses must be prepared to shift gears and launch new products that align with consumers’ ever-changing demands.

Since work is no longer stable and predictable, executives need a fast way to spin up cross-functional teams to complete whatever priorities come their way—which is exactly what a talent marketplace provides. They can post a project on their platform and gain access to internal candidates with the exact skills they’re looking for, no lengthy search process required.

What kinds of results are talent marketplaces helping businesses achieve?

Talent marketplaces may be a relatively new development, but plenty of businesses are already leveraging the technology to achieve impressive results. Some inspiring examples include:

• Schneider Electric credits their talent marketplace with helping the enterprise unlock more than 200,000 hours and generate a savings of $15,000,000 in productivity gains and reduced recruitment costs
• Seagate’s talent marketplace has generated a savings of $1.4 million within 4 months of launch. “The talent marketplace has saved us millions in contractor spend and helped us provide an opportunity for our people to grow,” notes their Chief Human Resources Officer Patricia Frost.
• Mastercard’s talent marketplace has helped the company unlock over 500,000 hours of productivity, leading to an estimated cost savings of more than $55,000,000.

How to select a talent marketplace

The rise of the talent marketplace is great news. As the technology becomes commonplace, more businesses will be able to democratize careers and start unlocking the agility needed to thrive in their next chapter.

But it also means that choosing the right platform is now a high-stakes decision. Since this technology is designed for your entire organization to use, there are a lot of factors to weigh. If you’re looking to make a selection with confidence, here are the questions you’ll need to answer:

• Is the platform scalable
• Have other companies implemented it successfully?
• What is the product built to do?
• What kind of internal opportunities will users be able to access?
• Are change and enablement help included?
• What kinds of users is the talent marketplace designed for?
• What does it take to get started?
• Is the AI ethical?

A few years ago, talent marketplaces were fledgling technology. But with the intensifying race for skills and the rise of AI serving as powerful accelerants, these platforms have become ubiquitous among agile and pioneering organizations, especially when combined with the right skills intelligence.

To learn more about the game-changing results companies are achieving by harnessing this technology, check out our Talent Marketplace 101 guide.