The talent treasure in the corporate backyard

A key element of workforce planning and an area where we believe many employers have significant room for improvement is optimizing talent mobility.

Research shows that internal promotion has numerous benefits for both organizations and employees. But despite clear benefits from cultivating a robust internal talent mobility program, effective performance on this front remains elusive.

Organizations face a number of hurdles in improving internal mobility, but we believe new technologies can help by better identifying employee competencies, skills gaps, and career aspirations and using that information to develop internal talent to match organizational priorities and to balance internal promotion with external hiring.

We highlight several publicly traded and private companies offering innovative technology solutions for internal mobility and skills mapping.

Barring an unforeseen plot twist in the last few weeks of 2020, the blockbuster fourth-quarter news in the future of work sector is Salesforce.com’s (CRM) plan to acquire Slack Technologies (WORK). While we see many reasons for the acquisition (such as enhancing Salesforce’s competitiveness with Microsoft), one benefit for customers, assuming successful execution, is better integration of workflows with CRMs to more closely tie individual workers’ day-to-day activities to their employers’ economic drivers. To fully realize the potential of this vision, we believe companies will ultimately need a third leg of integration: aligning their long-term workforce planning and optimization with day-to-day operations and business drivers. A key element of workforce planning, and an area where we believe many employers have significant room for improvement, is optimizing talent mobility and the mix between internal promotion and external hiring, an objective we believe will take on increased importance in the post-COVID-19 work world.