cultivating your internal talent
The truth hurts
In my last post, I discussed how to create an integrated talent acquisition (TA) function to ensure the organization had the talent it needed for success. Our TA team started making good progress by leveraging its collective strength to look out for key talent. My next step was to meet with business leaders to ensure we were finding the right talent to help them achieve their goals.
I have to admit, I was surprised at their feedback. While the leaders saw our progress, they also felt TA was only focused on finding external talent. In their minds, we were not doing enough to identify the best talent—regardless of whether it came from inside or outside of the organization. Their perception was that we could attract great external talent, but, in the process, we were disengaging our current employees.
I took this feedback to heart. We were a professional services firm and generated revenue from the services our employees provided to our clients’ projects. Our goal was to enable the growth of our employees, not disengage the people we worked so hard to bring on board. So, our TA team created and launched a campaign to cultivate internal talent. I’d like to share with you three things we implemented that made a huge difference in finding the best talent for our organization.
Raise the (internal talent) roof
At the heart of this campaign is the concept that every single one of our employees plays a role in talent identification. We are all talent ambassadors in some way, shape or form. We need everyone’s help to identify opportunities for themselves and refer great talent. To further demonstrate this, we developed four personas:
1. Adventurer: you are looking for an opportunity to expand your experience by taking an assignment in another country. For example, you are a civil engineer in New York and want to work on a project in India.
2. Connector: you have a broad network and know talent that you think would be a great addition to our organization. As the right jobs come up, you refer people from your external or internal network.
3. Mentor: you help guide and develop other employees by mentoring them. As part of this, you help mentees find opportunities to continue their development. For example, if a mentee tells you that they want to work in China, you give them advice to find the right opportunity to improve their skillsets to be ready to embrace a new environment.
4. Go-getter: you are ready for the next step in your career, but prefer to stay within your region. You proactively look for internal opportunities that help you continue your development. For example, you are a senior structural engineer working on a project in Los Angeles and you now want to work as a lead structural engineer in Los Angeles.
We advertised these personas across the organization and our leaders used these as another way to talk to employees about career growth. We then asked people who played one or more of these roles to share their experiences. We created podcasts, social media posts, videos, and newsletters with these stories. This interaction provided practical tips to our employees for growing their careers and the organization. Our new approach brought positive results: within the first three months of the campaign, there was a sharp increase in the number of employees who applied for internal positions.
Handle with care
From the business leaders, we also learned that many employees grew frustrated by the very curt rejection messages they received after applying for internal roles. Our employees felt that they deserved a conversation with a recruiter and hiring manager to understand why they were not a fit for the role. This was fair. We had good intentions – we had a dedicated internal career site with 100% of our postings. We also made sure all positions were advertised internally before being posted on our external career site. But, when we looked more closely, we realized we needed to be more deliberate with how we communicated with our employees who applied for positions.
The first thing we did was make sure that everyone received a call back, had a discussion with a recruiter, and was kept informed of their status. We also encouraged our hiring managers to speak with every internal applicant. If the candidate was a long shot, we asked the manager to give suggestions for things the candidate needed to be considered for a similar opportunity in the future. From this, we received a lot of positive feedback from our employees and continued to see an uptick in the number of internal applicants. Although these steps took time time, we knew they were important to identifying the best talent.
The needle in the haystack
We have a small global talent pool and, as you know, global markets are dynamic. Not only do we have to get people to apply for positions, but we also need to identify “hidden gems” among our internal talent to proactively build pipelines for possible future needs. So, we came up with the “expression of interest” concept.
An expression of interest is simply an employee raising her hand to be considered for a possible future role. This future role may not be defined, but could be based in a unique location or require a specific skillset. We used our strategic plan to identify these future roles and put a small, dedicated recruiting team in place to assess, pipeline, and keep in touch with this talent. For example, an expression of interest could be for employees interested in working in Qatar or for rail engineers globally.
This process helped us identify a number of hidden gems across a large global company. Some of these employees had unique existing skillsets while others were interested in going to other countries to develop new skillsets. This enabled us to have a pipeline of talent ready to go when we got a call from a manager looking for specialized talent. We were able to respond so much faster to the manager, which in turn, helped her provide a better service to our clients.
Achieving new heights
Our focus on internal talent paid off. Six months into the campaign, our business leaders were ecstatic over our progress and ability to deliver both external and internal talent. This campaign changed the way our business leaders viewed us – they now valued us as true talent partners. TA became the supply chain of the business and we elevated the function globally.
Over time, the campaign transitioned to an operating model that continued to position the organization for success. I always share this experience as I believe it is a great way to make a difference in competitive talent environments.
What do you think? Would a campaign like this make a difference in your organization? What are other suggestions that you have to identify more internal talent for opportunities?