Innovative Practices: Talent Marketplace
A Talent Marketplace is an innovative concept that has gained traction in recent years, with companies like PwC and IBM deploying the them and seeing improved productivity and job satisfaction, among other desirable metrics.
What Is It?
Generally, a talent marketplace is an internal platform on an organization’s intranet where leaders post available projects. Employees get to apply for – or even bid on – the chance to join specific teams and initiatives. Leaders can then review applications and select team members based on their skills, experience, and compatibility with the project. It’s an obvious win-win: organizations benefit from cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing and employees take charge of their career paths.
What’s Useful About It?
By allowing employees to work on projects that interest them, organizations can tap into their hidden talents and foster a culture of engagement, creativity, and innovation. Academic papers on the topic of work-self selection suggest doing so increases employee engagement and satisfaction. This way, employees have a chance to grow professionally and develop new skills, while organizations benefit from improved productivity and job performance.
There are also positive implications for talent acquisition and management. Internal recruitment and promotion does wonders for engagement and helps companies identify skill gaps, hiring biases, and with talent forecasting for workforce planning. Great managers – and consequently, great management – gets highlighted and quantified as employees seek out well-regarded managers for new projects. A talent marketplace would reveal your organization’s best (and worst) managers.
Building an internal talent marketplace is like hosting a buffet of opportunities – employees can sample different projects and find the perfect fit for their skills and passions, leaving everyone more satisfied and motivated to succeed.
How to Do It?
Building the actual marketplace should be relatively straightforward. There’s a good chance your existing software has features that could serve as a marketplace of sorts… and you could even hack one together with Google Sheets & Forms.
The tech is the easy part. Usage is the hard part. As with all new optional initiatives, it will require leadership buy-in and consistent usage. Piloting with a group of highly-rated managers is probably a great idea. Additionally, find opportunities to highlight success stories – the more public the better.