Building and sustaining a thriving talent marketplace 

Talent marketplaces originated to match demand (for work) and supply
(of talent) using skills as the currency. As talent marketplaces mature,
organizations realize they can use them to drive greater organizational
agility. Talent marketplaces allow organizations to respond quickly to
evolving business needs while enabling different ways for talent to engage with work (for instance, gig, part-time or project-based work) and disrupting traditional approaches to talent management.

Successful talent marketplace deployments often begin with a specific use case or business problem, easing the path to business sponsorship and adoption. Some of the primary use cases that organizations have started with are:

  • Unlocking trapped capacity or productivity
  • Reskilling and upskilling the workforce
  • Providing career development and mobility opportunities to employees
  • Mobilizing talent to specific areas or business needs

It is imperative to address the needs and evolving roles of employees, leaders, managers and HR stakeholders to ensure a sustainable talent marketplace.

Current technology platforms offer several features in addition to matching demand and supply — including workforce intelligence, career pathing, mentoring, succession planning, work demand forecasting and more — to drive value more broadly and holistically for organizations and for employees, candidates and gig workers.

The biggest challenge in implementing and sustaining a talent marketplace is change management. A talent marketplace has a significant impact on ways of working, teaming, performance management and other talent practices. Fundamentally, it changes organizational alignment, people’s sense of work, along with ownership of their work, skills and careers.

Being thoughtful in addressing the key “enablers” of leader, manager, employee and HR effectiveness in this new way of working is the most critical determinant of success. To realize the full potential of their talent marketplaces, organizations must learn, evolve, adapt and communicate with a clear linkage to outcomes, purpose and benefits.

The origin and business case

Talent marketplaces originated from organizations’ need to match demand (jobs, roles, projects, special initiatives) to supply (internal and external talent, gig workers) more efficiently. Talent marketplaces also help create better opportunities for career growth, learning and development for the workforce based on their skills and aspirations. Progressive organizations rapidly realized the power of these marketplaces to drive greater agility, flexibility and resilience in their business model. They could now seamlessly deploy talent across their enterprises and match skills to work (as opposed to jobholders to jobs) in response to shifting business demand, which proved advantageous during the early days of the pandemic.

Traditional talent management practices based on jobs with pre-defined career paths focus on the selection and mobility of crucial talent. The war for talent, the pandemic and accelerated demand for learning and reskilling gave rise to a fast-paced, scalable model for matching demand and supply across jobs, projects, gigs, tasks and special initiatives. The pandemic also ushered in opportunities for new projects and initiatives (not jobs) that did not exist, which required quick talent mobilization with the right skills and aspirations. On the other hand, there were areas where displaced or furloughed employees needed an open and transparent talent marketplace to match supply based on skills, aspirations and availability to opportunities in other areas or geographies.

With rising inflation and recession looming large, senior leadership will soon start to review workforce productivity and seek cost-efficiency gains. At the same time, the workforce will need to broaden their skills in order to deliver on a wider range of tasks. This necessitates being innovative about how work is designed, organized and executed, and how talent flows

to work. Talent marketplaces may be a key solution to address the business demand for productivity and the employee need for skill-building.

Leaders, policymakers, managers and workers require a new work operating system that requires freeing work and workers from the traditional boundaries of work embedded in jobs and worker capabilities embedded in jobholders. Wall Street Journal bestseller, Work Without Jobs, Jesuthasan and Boudreau (MIT Press, 2022)

Employees now seek more choice and flexibility across all dimensions of work (the how, where, when, who, what and why of work):

  • Nearly half the employees surveyed globally want hybrid or remote work in 2022.1
  • Across 8 million data points from employee engagement data, career progression and opportunities to continuously develop and learn are among the top drivers for people to join and stay with a company2
  • 70% of employees say they have access to a career portal/platform that suggests career paths suitable for them (up from 51% in 2020).3
  • Nearly 1 in 2 companies who say their workforces are energized use AI-powered talent intelligence platforms for external hiring (versus 30% who don’t).4

This creates a unique opportunity to match the supply of talent — including employees, contractors, part-timers and gig workers — to demand for work across projects, gigs, full-time and part-time jobs in organizations based on skills, aspirations and availability. The emergence of AI-based technology platforms has helped democratize career development opportunities and enable a philosophy of utilizing talent across the organization. The starting point for these platforms has typically been to support “gig” work that helps address immediate business needs. It also allows employees to express their skills and passions in different areas, own their careers to pursue opportunities aligned with their aspirations, access work that’s meaningful to them, use projects and gigs to activate new skills, connect

to mentors, and develop communities of skills and interest areas.

How organizations use and launch talent marketplaces

Many global technology companies naturally have a business model requiring teaming across project cycles and agile ways of working. They use custom-built talent marketplaces (or commercial platforms available in the market) to keep a live, updated view of staffing and skills insights to see availability, needs, staffing, gaps and upskilling across projects.

Here are a few examples of how organizations use talent marketplaces where business models have adapted and didn’t necessitate cross-functional teaming or agile ways of working.

Large global multinational bank: The bank started with projects/gigs to provide visibility of opportunities to its colleagues and enable agile ways of working. The bank is now looking to evolve it into an opportunity hub, including full-time jobs across the bank’s footprint. The bank has also found more people attracted to its brand because of its purpose, culture and stance on development.

Major European energy and automation company: The company deployed an “Open Talent Market,” which empowers colleagues to choose roles and opportunities enabled by technology in service of their career development. The talent marketplace is transparent and open: It doesn’t demand approvals, minimum tenure or performance requirements. The company’s marketplace is truly democratizing, digitalizing and equalizing internal and external candidate experiences.

Global consumer goods company: By prioritizing development, increasing access to opportunities (experiences), creating greater transparency and flexibility for employees, and enabling leaders to dynamically source talent, this consumer goods company built new skills for the future while addressing its people’s aspirations — balancing business and

employee benefits.

Large global insurer: This insurer started with a particular business need created by disruptions during the pandemic that required moving internal talent into key roles to ensure the organization could keep up with market. The insurer is now evolving its approach by deconstructing jobs into tasks and creating more efficiencies in matching the right skills to tasks.

The return on investment realized

Early adopters of talent marketplaces globally say their marketplaces are moderately successful, with an average rating of 6.1 on a scale of 10, with some areas of improvement.5 While more than 75% users are internal employees, companies are starting to reach out

to external candidates and company alumni too.

The wins that organizations are seeing with the implementation of talent marketplaces build up as organizations move from generating awareness to focusing on user experience and advocacy to realizing business benefits. As employee adoption and usage of talent marketplaces increase in companies, organizations and their people are looking to change

the ways and the rules of work.

Some of the outcomes realized by early adopters:

  • Upskill employees through multiple channels — on the job, mentoring, real-life projects, stretch assignments and strategic longer-term career choices
  • Increase organizational agility, move work to people (and vice versa) seamlessly by deconstructing jobs to projects/gigs and tasks
  • Retain talent by providing them democratized access to learning and upskilling with career development opportunities
  • Increase productivity
  • Realize cost savings on talent acquisition and a reduction of the contingent workforce
  • Accelerate diversity, equity and inclusion outcomes
  • Generate additional revenue
  • Reduce business operations costs or people costs

Employee outcomes 

  • Realize personal and professional aspirations
  • Increase visibility to diverse career development opportunities
  • Take advantage of on-the-job learning opportunities
  • Access mentoring and networking opportunities
  • Reduce transition time to a new role
  • Get exposure to different businesses, leaders and work
  • Pursue passions, exercise choice through projects and roles
  • Enjoy seamless, crossborder experiences (without having to move)

Leader/Manager outcomes

  • Access and enhance visibility to internal and external talent
  • Improve diversity and performance of teams
  • Get the best skills-match for work
  • Speed in staffing opportunities (jobs, projects, gigs, etc.) with internal and external talent
  • Expand mentoring and reverse mentoring opportunities
  • Create opportunities to develop and gain access to talent across borders

Throughout this journey, HR has a significant opportunity and imperative to pivot from its traditional service delivery role of matching and selecting talent to strategically architecting talent retention, development and growth in a sustainable and scalable manner. Specifically, HR’s role must evolve to being a “talent orchestrator” — setting guidelines and the context for change, advising leaders and managers in deconstructing work, supporting the continuous deployment and redeployment of skills, and enabling scalable processes from selection to development to deployment to governance and performance enablement.

To bring this together, let’s take a deep-dive look at a market leader and early adopter.

Unilever has long been regarded as a leader in adopting and deploying a talent marketplace. In 2020, the company rolled out “Unilever Flex” with the invitation to its workforce to “live your purpose,” “upskill,” and “do something exciting and different from your daily job.”

Following are some of the results the company realized:

The challenge(s)

Digging deeper into implementing a talent marketplace, it quickly becomes evident that it’s not about technology, but about enabling new ways of working and fundamentally shifting the culture of workplaces. Leaders and managers must change their mindset and behaviors — on the shape of work, talent and teaming. They must reconsider their role as leaders and managers in bringing together work and people, managing outcomes and disbanding teams. A moderately successful score of 6.1/10 reflected in participant ratings from our talent marketplace survey shows this is an opportunity for growth and improvement.

One of our key findings is that HR, employees, leaders (at the senior management level) and managers (at the middle/frontline management level) generally support talent marketplaces. However, managers and leaders show some levels of resistance, with managers being less supportive than leaders. This reinforces that managers are key stakeholders who must be engaged, supported and enabled to make a talent marketplace successful in any organization.

Getting started and sustaining momentum

Here are some tips we’ve gleaned from our survey, conversations and work with organizations to help you get started and sustain your journey.

1. Start with a “use case” and be willing to adapt.

Having a clear business problem requiring a solution helps anchor the launch, adoption and achievement of ROI/metrics of the solution. Some key use cases across

early adopters have been on the continuum of business to employee needs — starting from releasing trapped capacity, to becoming more future-fit by upskilling employees, to providing more transparent career opportunities for employee retention. It’s also critical to be flexible on the use cases and evolve based on needs over time as employees, leaders and managers get more mature with the use of the talent marketplace, and culture shifts begin to take place.

Some key use cases across early adopters have been on the continuum of business to employee needs — starting from releasing trapped capacity, to becoming more future-fit by upskilling employees, to providing more transparent career opportunities for employee retention.

2. Find the sweet spot in aligning the needs of the business, employees and leaders. Successful adoption of a talent marketplace rests on finding and aligning to the sweet spot where the needs of the business, managers and employees overlap. The symptoms arising from a lack of alignment manifest through low participation, talent hoarding or low sponsorship.

  • When business and manager needs are met, employees may perceive gigs and projects as “extra” work, leading to low participation, limited adoption and uptake.
  • When business and employee needs are met, managers may not see value in rotating team members and/or don’t know how to redesign work, leading to talent hoarding or a blocked flow of talent.
  • Finally, when employees and managers align on projects and movement, and business needs are not met, business sponsorship drops due to low return on investment.

Balancing the needs of these key users and stakeholders is crucial to ensure a thriving and sustainable talent marketplace. The role of HR evolves — they’re no longer the connectors of talent, but the arbitrators of conflict management, enabling the movement and flow of talent with the right processes, governance, technology and change management.

It’s also crucial to bring an employee experience lens to thinking about the needs and experience of various segments of users of a talent marketplace (such as part-time, full-time and gig workers), along with the infrastructure to support their needs and enhance their experience. Given fixed, flex and flow models of work will exist simultaneously in the future organization, a one-size-fits all approach will not work.

3. Build the right capabilities.

Given leaders and managers are critical in determining the success of a talent marketplace, invest early in building manager capability, particularly in enabling ways in which work can be deconstructed into tasks and turned into attractive projects that motivate and allow talent to connect seamlessly. Support HR teams in adopting a future orientation as their role evolves to become a talent orchestrator, which requires new skills and capabilities such as talent and skills brokering, work design and data analytics. Invest in building robust governance mechanisms such as principles and guidelines around thoughtful data management (data flow and ERP interfaces), decision-making, key metrics and policy changes to enable and accelerate the flow of talent to work.

4. Establish new ways of working.

Making and sustaining the shift begins with critical decisions on the purpose, use, rollout and commitments underpinning a talent marketplace. Establish new ways of working that equalize access to opportunities and deconstruct work from jobs to projects, gigs and tasks.

a. Democratize: Establish policy and process changes that enable the flow of talent and work in the talent marketplace. Provide access and choice to employees to equalize the experience of internal and external roles, opportunities and job searches. Often, standards and rules for internal application and selection are more stringent than for external hiring, restricting the movement of internal talent and often incentivizing talent to look outside the organization instead of internally.

b. Enable: Agree and set new “rules of engagement.” These should include teaching managers how to deconstruct jobs into tasks and activities (for example, gigs, projects, assignments and secondments), redeploy tasks and activities, and reconstruct new ways of working. Establish rules: For example, 5%–15% of all new work should be posted on the talent marketplace before opening a new hire requisition. Consider including metrics on talent marketplace adoption on managers’ scorecards as part of performance management.

5. Don’t underestimate or under-invest in change management.

The number one piece of advice from every organization implementing a talent marketplace is to focus on change management. It’s the most critical factor in determining a talent marketplace’s success. As shown in the change matrix (Figure 3), HR and employees are adopters and propagators of the talent marketplace. Leaders and managers, while supportive, can be resistant. Help them understand their roles, how you will support them after they release talent from their team regularly for projects and gigs, and how it links to their medium- and long-term success. Leaders and managers have the steepest learning journey on work design, talent integration, integrating work, delivering outcomes, and managing team dynamics, performance and more — support them with new ways of working. Finally, create a safe space where employees are encouraged to experiment, try new things and raise their hands for aspirational opportunities — and allow them to work without fear of retaliation or failure.

6. Sustain momentum.

To sustain the focus on and momentum of a talent marketplace, be patient, learn, evolve, have strong branding and communicate with key learnings and success stories. Successful deployments create a lasting impression. Some strong talent marketplace brands we have come across are “Raise a Hand, Lend a Hand,” “Digital, Borderless and Democratized” and “Open Talent Market.” Measure KPIs, communicate the benefits, share success stories and constantly link back to the purpose of the deployment to maintain momentum and focus on the right actions.

By making a clear business case, balancing stakeholder needs, establishing new ways of working and maintaining a strong focus on change management, organizations can help set up their talent marketplace for success. To sustain momentum, companies must learn, evolve, adapt and communicate with clear linkages to their talent marketplace’s purpose, outcomes and benefits.

Our respondents

Sectors: Financial services, fast-moving consumer goods, manufacturing and professional services

Respondent roles:

  • Global Head of Talent Solutions
  • Global Director of Talent Innovation & Organization Effectiveness
  • Head of HR Strategic Initiatives
  • Director of HR, Talent & Organization
  • VP Digital Talent Transformation
  • Career Management Team Lead
  • Global Internal Mobility Lead

Endnotes

1 Mercer. 2022 Global Talent Trends Study.

2 Mercer. Employee Engagement Survey data.

3 Mercer. 2022 Global Talent Trends Study.

4 Ibid.

5 Mercer. Talent Marketplace Survey, 2022.

Findings from a Mercer study

Authors

Ravin Jesuthasan

Global Transformation Leader

ravin.jesuthasan@mercer.com

Rupali Gupta

Transformation and Talent Leader, Singapore

rupali.gupta@mercer.com

Chitralekha Singh

Transformation and Talent Consultant, Singapore

chitralekha.singh@mercer.com

Contributors

Brian Fisher
Global Solution Lead — Careers,
Jobs, Skills

Marcus Downing
Transformation Partner, UK

Paul Habgood
Transformation Partner, UK

Nicole Peichl
Transformation Partner,
Central Europe

Lewis Garrad
Partner, Career
Business, Singapore

Wan Yee Choo
Transformation and Talent
Consultant, Singapore

Related products for purchase

Related Insights

Related Case Studies