Talent mobility is a phrase that has quickly become part of our daily business jargon. Our world is flat, many corporations have offices all over the globe, and the best and brightest candidates for a job might be scattered around the world, a fact we in the relocation business know all too well. Talent mobility is the key to recruiting the best talent and keeping a company’s existing brightest committed to the corporation.
At TRC Global Mobility, we define talent mobility as the movement of employees to where they are needed most, sometimes across the world, sometimes right next door. Employers correctly view their most valuable employees as corporate assets. They need to be capable of using them where they can provide the most impact, while being cognitive of and accommodating to each employee’s career interests.
According to research from Bersin by Deloitte : “One of the biggest success drivers in enduring organizations is their ability to rapidly and transparently move people from role to role, function to function, and business to business to tackle the most critical business challenges.”
Why should businesses care?
In a word: survival. Companies that use talent mobility successfully use their employees to fuel growth. If done correctly, there is a constant moving of talent among jobs with a deep pipeline ready to assume the roles that are vacated. It’s succession planning, 21st-century style. When employees move on to a different role or leave a company, there is no disruption of service because there is a wealth of trained employees ready to take over. This bench strength impacts the bottom line, eliminating the extra costs associated with traditional external recruiting processes.
In “The HR Scorecard,” Brian Becker and Dave Ulrich cite seminal research conducted over the course of a decade that discovered the top 10 percent of companies with “high-performance work systems” had four times the amount of sales per employee. Remarkably, these companies filled more than 60 percent of jobs from within. In contrast, the bottom 10 percent of these companies filled just 35 percent of jobs internally.
Talent mobility is attractive to high-potential employees, since they understand that if they stay with the firm there are career opportunities available to them throughout the company. It also keeps them engaged, because they are able to creatively reinvent themselves within the organization.
The benefits
According to an Oracle Talent Mobility Report, successful talent mobility programs reap substantial enterprise-wide benefits that include:
- Shorter time to productivity;
- Greater employee engagement and retention;
- Lower talent acquisition costs;
- Streamlined information flow;
- Limited competitive-intelligence leakage;
- Stronger leadership teams;
- Better financial performance.
The report stated: “Regardless of its goals, internal talent redeployment requires access to talent intelligence—that is, information about the skills and aspirations of employee candidates matched with data on the skills and fit for open positions. A comprehensive internal mobility program supported by a holistic talent management technology platform can provide that visibility for employees, managers, recruiters and talent managers.
In a nutshell: Successful talent mobility programs not only help companies to onboard the best talent, they can also create a work environment that increases creativity and productivity, helping the organization attain growth and added value.
