Embracing Agility in Talent Management

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by Dean Callaghan, C. Psychol., Ps.S.I, Managing Director at Aon’s Human Capital Solutions

It’s a candidate’s market, and the skills you need most to succeed may come at a high price in the external talent marketplace. An effective internal talent mobility strategy can help you close the gap between the workforce you have now and the one you need for the future.

Here’s what you need to know to develop an internal talent mobility strategy that can empower an agile approach at your company.

3 Elements of an Internal Talent Mobility Strategy

1. Ongoing Needs Assessments

To develop an effective internal mobility program, you need to understand the business strategy and forecast the business’s talent needs.

Compare the skills you’ll need to reach your business goals to the skill sets your workforce already has. Look at where those skills are located within the company, too. For example, you can cross-train employees with transferable skills from another department to fill those needs instead of hiring externally.

2. Improved Talent Acquisition Processes

Modify your hiring processes for attracting, interviewing, and onboarding internal talent.

As you revamp internal hiring processes, define clear criteria to help internal candidates navigate the openings where they’re qualified to apply. Make it part of your talent strategy to advertise open positions better internally and to make these openings more accessible to internal candidates.

3. A Culture of Agility

Employees may not realise the options for mobility available to them or feel like they need permission to explore other roles within the company. The best way to give employees permission to explore internal career opportunities is through cultural reinforcement.

Curating cultural norms can be challenging, though. Changing your culture may require adjusting rewards to incentivise the behaviours you want to see.

How Internal Mobility Supports Agility

Talent management in agile organisations is a complex process. It requires a shift in how we think about training and deploying talent. But developing agile talent management through internal mobility can generate tremendous dividends.

• Talent Sharing Opens Access to Skills

An open record of the skills in your workforce and where they’re located allows managers to fill gaps in their teams. Flex teams, or agile teams, pull employees from across the organisation to work on designated projects. Talent sharing allows you to prioritise team performance and the needs of the work over a fixed organisational structure.

• Internal Mobility Offers Employees Opportunities to Grow

When employees are exposed to different tasks company-wide, they can find their strengths and identify better opportunities to reach their full potential. Create job structures that allow employees to visualise points where their skills could have the most significant impact.

• Transferable Skills Gain New Life

Transferable skills (like communication, adaptability, or collaboration) can be maximised in various contexts and roles. Talent sharing allows business leaders to optimise these skills by moving employees into projects where they can use them to their full potential. Use assessments to help employees understand which transferable skills are the strongest.

Embrace Agility Through Mobility

More companies have adopted agile methodologies to improve processes and ensure customer satisfaction. But to truly embrace agility, you need to put internal mobility into practice. When you have the necessary talent resources accessible within your workforce, you don’t need to rely on the external hiring market—giving you a distinct advantage over your competition.

Aon | Assessment Solutions

Aon’s assessment solutions provide clients with powerful tools and insights to help them make better talent decisions at every stage of the employee lifecycle. This includes pre-hire assessments, identifying future leaders, screening for digital skills and agility, and AI-enabled solutions. To learn more contact Aon’s Human Capital Solutions Managing Director Dean Callaghan at [email protected].