Your internal talent marketplace is an essential part of integrated talent management solutions.
Your internal talent—and its collected skills, traits, and competencies—hold immense strategic potential for your business. You and other HR leaders must understand the potential of your current employees to create your organization’s larger talent strategy.
That’s where the value of integrated HR comes into play. With each HR function integrated into a shared dashboard in your HR information system (HRIS), it is easy to see the larger impact of each of your talent decisions.
Here’s how integrated talent management solutions can provide a clearer picture of your talent marketplace and improve your organization’s larger talent strategy.
What Is an Integrated Approach to Talent Management?
Integrated talent management solutions may sound complicated, but it just means integrated planning across your HR functions. Every aspect of talent management connects in an integrated talent management solution, from talent acquisition to employee experience and retention.
Integrated talent management solutions align your HR functions with your overarching business strategy. Each component of talent management works with the rest of your HR functions to produce the best talent management solutions, thus driving business results. Integrated HR solutions offer a comprehensive picture of your talent strategy to make sure that each component supports the business and moves it in the right direction.
An integrated approach to talent management is highly data-driven. You need granular information on each function under your HR umbrella to inform your overall strategy. The best way to organize this information is through a shared HRIS dashboard that shows the relationships between each of your HR functions.
For example, you need to know the skills you have available in your internal talent marketplace before developing a talent acquisition strategy for filling gaps with external talent.
4 HR Functions of an Integrated Talent Management System
The entire purpose of integrated talent management is to unite all of your disparate HR functions under a shared goal— to drive your business forward. Here’s how each of those functions, once integrated, supports better business results.
Talent Acquisition
In an integrated talent management system, talent acquisition decisions are made based on several factors:
- The talent you already have in-house.
- Your ability to upskill and develop talent internally.
- The skills and competencies available externally.
When you can visualize the talent data available across each branch of HR, you’ll be able to evaluate the current capabilities of each HR function. This visualization enables you to create a richer, more detailed and goal-driven talent acquisition plan to make the best decisions for the business.
If there are gaps in your workforce’s project management capabilities, for example, can you fill those gaps through internal training, or do you need to look externally? Do you want to hire a full-time employee to build out that capability, or will you rely on contractors to fill gaps in the long term?
A complete, integrated talent dataset enables you to make the best talent acquisition decisions for the business.
Talent Mobility and Career Development
In an integrated approach, the talent mobility function matches people to opportunities within the company. Depending on your talent strategy, your system may identify internal candidates based on their interests, adjacent skills and aptitudes, or some combination of those and other factors.
A call center employee, for example, knows what clients need from your product and communications skills developed in their current position. Those skills could support their transition into a sales role.
Once promising internal talent has been flagged, managers should be able to put them on the right learning path to move within the organization.
An integrated talent management system is essential for strategic career progression. Talent mobility and career development should be integrated with talent acquisition, for example, because the choices you make externally are dependent on your strategy for developing internal talent. And the data you pull from performance management gives you a current bird’s-eye view of the skills, traits, and aptitudes that exist in your workforce.
Performance Management
The integration doesn’t stop with hiring and development decisions. Integrating performance management with your other talent management functions provides essential data on your workforce capabilities.
Performance management data can inform your other programs, such as talent acquisition and mobility. Hiring managers can use this data to see the skills their teams already possess and the skills gaps they need to fill.
Performance management processes benefit from integration, too. When managers can help employees visualize where their skills are most needed, they can become better advisers to their team members. Managers can help each employee find cross-training opportunities or learn adjacent skills that drive professional growth while filling gaps in workforce capabilities.
Workforce Planning
Your workforce planning function should already look at talent management from a high level. But in an integrated system, you can supply your workforce planning function with better data to drive better decisions.
In an integrated approach, HR professionals specializing in analytics and workforce planning can interpret that data to become better advisers to the business. Better interpretation, in turn, helps make workforce planning professionals better collaborators with their peers in HR.
With all of your HR functions mapped out in relation to each other, it’s easier to spot potential gaps in workforce skills. You can then develop a workforce plan to fill gaps by hiring externally or through your talent marketplace.
Why Is an Integrated Approach Important to Your Talent Marketplace?
Your talent marketplace refers to all of the talents at your disposal within your entire workforce. The term “marketplace” refers to the accessibility of that talent and your ability to move talent around within the company. In a thriving talent marketplace, you can move internal talent to fill needs in creative ways.
How you organize your talent marketplace depends on your talent strategy. You can organize your internal capabilities around those broad competencies if you have an in-house competency model. If you want a more fluid and less structured marketplace, consider developing a talent marketplace where employees can pick up “gigs” on a project-by-project basis.
However you design your talent marketplace, it must serve the larger needs of the business. Developing your talent marketplace is key to unlocking your workforce’s potential.
Your people processes are all aligned with the business strategy in an integrated talent management system. A developed talent marketplace affects how you proceed with additional HR functions such as talent acquisition and internal mobility.
What Impact Does Your Talent Marketplace Have on Integrated HR Functions?
An effective talent marketplace supports your integrated talent strategy. The skills, abilities, and competencies at your disposal affect every business decision. You can use the talent you already have to better meet the needs of the business.
Let’s look at the relationship between your talent marketplace and an integrated approach to talent management.
Career Path Infrastructure Affects Internal Mobility
Don’t just catalog your existing talent by skills and abilities. Develop a framework for moving those skills and abilities around within the organization.
Your career path infrastructure is an essential component of your talent marketplace. Without a clear organizational chart and opportunities to move within it, you can’t gain a complete picture of your internal capabilities. This affects your performance management and professional development, too, because managers can’t make learning recommendations if they can’t help their teams see their options for mobility.
Goal alignment software can help you visualize your org chart to see where skills and abilities exist in the company now and where you need to scale those capabilities. Seeing everything mapped out helps you create pathways for internal mobility, including lateral moves, within the org chart.
Internal Skills and Capabilities Impact External Hiring
To make the best use of your internal talent, you need to be able to see — at a glance — the skills and capabilities available in your talent marketplace.
Data on your internal talent feeds directly into your external talent acquisition strategy in an integrated system. You can make more informed decisions regarding your ability to upskill existing talent with adjacent skills and which skills you can’t cultivate internally.
To determine what you need to acquire from the external market, refer to your larger business goals and workforce planning data. You may already have some of the skills you need to improve workforce capabilities but not enough to meet the business’s changing needs. You then have to decide whether to scale internally through learning and development or find new talent to bring into the company.
All of these decisions will be informed by your larger talent strategy. As you make talent decisions, always refer to the business’s top priorities.
3 Benefits of Integrated Solutions for Your Talent Marketplace
Applying integrated talent management solutions at your company produces several benefits for your talent marketplace.
Agile Talent Management Processes
Integrated talent management solutions support greater agility in your talent strategy. When you can see all of your HR functions mapped out— and their impact on each other — it’s easier to make informed decisions.
Making decisions and moving forward quickly is an important component of organizational agility.
That agility, when applied to your talent marketplace, helps you make better use of your internal talent. Developing an internal gig system, where employees can pick up tasks and projects that use their skill sets on an “as-needed” basis, can help managers to fill gaps in existing projects.
This process creates an approach to work where employees are less tied to one specific role or function. In a gig system, employees can move around and fill in where needed, supporting greater workforce agility.
Long-Term Talent Flexibility
An integrated approach to talent management supports greater flexibility for your talent strategy. You can see how everything fits together, which exposes gaps in your workforce’s skills and abilities.
Having that knowledge as you develop your talent strategy helps HR leaders make the best decisions for the business — even if that means pivoting.
If you learn that the talent you planned to source externally is in high demand, for example, you can pivot your talent strategy to develop those competencies internally instead. Pivoting allows you to create a distinct advantage over competitors paying a premium to find those skills on the market.
Your talent marketplace can become less reliant on legacy workforce structures and develop job paths that support business agility. By building channels for internal talent to move freely within the company, job descriptions become more flexible, and employees can move with greater agility within the workforce.
Improved Workforce Capabilities
Using an integrated talent management approach to develop your talent marketplace allows your employees to evolve and grow in new ways. When employees can pick up gigs from the company, for example, they can bring the skills they hone during those experiences back to their base team and role.
With a clear understanding of your talent needs across all of your business functions, you can develop your talent internally to meet those needs. The more you invest in strengthening and expanding your talent marketplace, the easier it will be to grow your workforce capabilities.
Integrated Talent Management Solutions and Your Talent Marketplace
Your talent marketplace must support your integrated talent management strategy. Companies have many varied skill sets, aptitudes, and even experiences at their disposal that they simply aren’t using to their full potential. Understanding your talent needs at a micro-level can help you harness those qualities to move teams in the right direction.
