Why Internal Mobility is More Than an HR Term

Why Internal Recruiting is More Than an HR Term

In 2021, talent shortages are at a 15-year high. Finding top talent that is proficient in the skills of tomorrow is difficult for many companies.

According to the 2021 Talent Shortage Survey by the Manpower Group, nearly 7 in 10 (69%) companies have reported talent shortages and difficulty hiring.

Some companies recognize this modern recruiting challenge and are shifting their approach to how they hire. Instead of searching for new employees outside the company, savvy managers are looking in their own backyard to fill the talent void.

This approach is called Internal Mobility.

What is Internal Mobility?

Internal mobility is the movement of employees across different roles within an organization. This movement can be verticle or horizontal through promotions, transfers, temporary-to-permanent, and employee referrals. While this isn’t a new concept, companies are far from leveraging internal mobility to its fullest potential.

Is Internal Mobility a Common Practice?

Internal mobility is up 20 percent since the onset of COVID-19, according to LinkedIn data. However, it is still more common for employees to frequently change companies to further their careers rather than try to climb the ladder in a single organization. According to a poll by Monster in July of 2021, 95% of employees said that they were considering leaving their jobs. The top two reasons? Burnout and the lack of growth opportunities.

What Are The Advantages of Internal Mobility?

There are several advantages to internal mobility for companies seeking to fill roles, particularly in these challenging times. Here are a few key advantages.

Fill Roles Faster In A Tight Labor Market

The labor market, especially for highly skilled roles, is small and competitive which means roles are not being filled in a timely manner or at all. Top talent is already employed or potential candidates do not have the skills to qualify for the available position. When you have vacant positions, your team’s performance suffers. Other employees will have to pick up the slack, even if it’s not their area of expertise. Productivity, fulfillment, and your bottom line will drop.

Internal mobility allows you to skip the line and fill critical positions quickly. Recruiting from within your organization increases the chances of a quality hire because you ideally already have a sense of the candidates’ skill sets, proficiencies, and experiences.

Reduce Training and Onboarding Needs

Internal mobility also allows you to minimize the time to onboard a new hire. While an internal recruit may need to learn the process and systems of a new department or team, they are already familiar with the organizational systems.

As a manager, you know the onboarding process is critical to the long-term success of an employee. Studies have shown that when a company has great onboarding 69% of employees are likely to stay for at least 3 years.

Instead of rushing to onboard a critical role and risk losing a new employee, managers who recruit internally can spend more time customizing the onboarding process to the employees’ needs. Without the time-consuming burden of general and cultural onboarding, a manager can focus on job-specific skills, procedures, and systems the employee needs to succeed on the job. Think about this as skipping the Tutorial stage and jumping straight into Level 1.

Minimize The Risk of a Bad Hire

The average cost of a bad hire is up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Yikes! Every time you bring in a new employee you take on the risk of a bad hire.

It goes without saying that you likely are already familiar with existing employees. You will know if they work well within your company culture, if they understand your systems, and if they have the skills and experience required to do their job well.

While it’s not realistic to completely avoid hiring and therefore bad recruits altogether, reducing the unknown reduces the inherent risk of a bad egg and the painful associated costs.

Upskill and Strengthen Your Current Workforce

Internal mobility may help you identify gaps in your workforce’s current capabilities. These skill gaps expose opportunities to upskill your teams. Especially in the digital age, ensuring that your people have access to resources, programs, and data that will help them update their skill sets is critical to maintaining performance, as industries and technology changes rapidly.

Positions that were once entirely manual are now becoming automated, requiring people to almost entirely relearn how to work. Internal mobility brings these skill gaps to the forefront, enabling managers to construct data-driven, strategic solutions to build better teams and maintain their competitive edge.

Retain Your Top Talent

This carries right over to our final point. Retaining top talent has never been more important. Yet, employees are jumping ship because they are seeking career growth. By embracing internal mobility, business leaders can prioritize upskilling, provide opportunities for career growth, and create true job fulfillment. By creating a culture that helps employees achieve their goals, managers are developing a stronger, more loyal workforce that will drive success.

How Can You Take Advantage of Internal Mobility?

While recruiting is traditionally thought of as an HR function, business managers should certainly take advantage of internal mobility. This starts with leveraging the right tools. A key principle of successful internal mobility is to look outside of your day-to-day team. Looking for an IT Project Manager? Turn to your Product Managers or Business Analysts. Seeking a new Sales Director? Try your Customer Experience team.

Like we mentioned above, skill gaps exposed by internal mobility efforts can drive better training and development programs too. If several candidates have 75% of the skills necessary to do the job but require training in the other 25% then you have data-backed justification for spending on a new training program.

Even if you turn to external recruiting to fill the immediate position, you’ve indirectly created the chance to strengthen your team or department in a key skillset and provide employees opportunities for true career growth.

How Can I Develop An Internal Mobility Approach That Gets Results?

Employee referrals and internal networking are some common ways to discover the right people for an available role. However, this can be time-consuming, produce inaccurate information on a possible candidate, and leave holes in your investigation.

Instead, we recommend investing in a tool that offers immediate insights through a live skills inventory of your company’s entire workforce.

Imagine, when you’re ready to recruit, you can just sit down with your job requirements and immediately identify the right candidates by their skill sets and proficiencies. No guessing. No bias. Only data-backed candidates.

Such a comprehensive view of your organization can also help you discover candidates you would never have sought out. Relying on internal networking, you may have never learned that Jerry on the data engineering team has previous experience in product management. Or that Lisa in web development, has a degree in network security. A live skills inventory reveals all of these hidden possibilities instantly.

Developing a strong, internal mobility program doesn’t mean that you should quit hiring externally. It just means that you now have more than one option when it comes to building your workforce. Both approaches require an investment of time and money, but with the right tools, you can empower managers beyond your HR department to adopt internal mobility and take ownership of developing a stronger workforce from within.