A talent marketplace is a digital platform that helps your HR team find internal best-fit candidates and connects employees with internal opportunities within your organization, including projects, temporary assignments, and new roles. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to match employees’ skills, interests, and career goals with business needs. Talent marketplaces help you fill skill gaps, retain talent, and promote a more transparent and inclusive environment for growth opportunities.
- Talent marketplaces empower your HR team to find best-fit candidates for work within the organization, allowing you to offer upskilling opportunities, access to new roles, mentorships, coaching programs, and more.
- Talent marketplaces improve employee experiences by making career opportunities more personalized and accessible.
- Talent marketplaces help align employee opportunities with business goals, creating a more productive and rewarding work environment for everyone.
Most people are looking for more than just a job. They want opportunities to develop new skills, grow their careers, and make meaningful contributions to their organization.
At the same time, your HR team and organization needs agile, flexible, and engaged employees who can adapt to shifting business needs.
Enter the talent marketplace.
These digital platforms connect employees with roles, projects, and learning experiences that align with their skills, interests, and career aspirations. With AI enabling better matches of people to work, along with real-time workforce insights, talent marketplaces make internal mobility more seamless and strategic.
When done well, the positive impact of a talent marketplace is felt throughout the entire organization, helping retain top talent, close skills gaps, and foster a culture of continuous development. Employees gain greater visibility into career opportunities, helping them take ownership of their growth.
Here, we explore the benefits of an internal talent marketplace. These can help you bridge the gap between workforce supply and demand, and are a critical component of architecting a modern talent strategy that serves HR, employees, and your business.
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How a talent marketplace works
Talent marketplaces use AI-powered technology to identify internal opportunities. This makes it easier for you to find employees ready for something new, and gives your employees the visibility to find new work inside your organization, making career opportunities more personalized and accessible.
Here’s a breakdown of what a talent marketplace can do:
- Collect and map employee skills
- Employees create profiles that include their skills, experiences, interests, career goals, and learning preferences.
- AI and skills-matching algorithms assess this information to understand each employee’s strengths and potential career pathways.
- Connect employees with new opportunities
- Talent marketplaces continuously analyze open roles, projects, and gig work within your organization.
- AI-driven matching recommends opportunities that align with an employee’s skills and aspirations.
- Managers can also use the platform to source internal talent for short-term gigs, cross-functional projects, or permanent roles.
- Enable learning and upskilling
- Talent marketplaces often integrate with learning and development (L&D) platforms, offering employees suggested training to bridge skill gaps for future roles.
- Employees can proactively upskill and prepare for new opportunities without waiting for traditional career progression.
- Drive internal mobility and retention
- Employees can explore career moves within your company, reducing the need for external hiring.
- Organizations retain top talent by providing clear growth paths and new challenges.
- Talent marketplaces promote a culture of agility, allowing your organization to quickly pivot into new areas as business needs evolve.
- Provide data and insights for workforce planning
- HR and leadership gain real-time visibility into workforce capabilities, identifying skill gaps and trends.
- This data helps shape talent strategies, succession planning, and workforce development initiatives.
Talent marketplaces make it easier for employees to find great work opportunities within your organization. On the flipside, your organization can use a talent marketplace to align best-fit talent to the work at hand. When employees are engaged with work and optimistic about their career options, they tend to stay, which reduces turnover and helps you build a workforce ready for anything.
RELATED CONTENT: Salesforce shares how they’re elevating the employee experience with talent marketplaces to give employees more visibility into internal opportunities.
How talent marketplaces help employees
Talent marketplaces offer several pathways for your employees to grow their careers, including developing new skills and exploring internal opportunities.
Here’s how a talent marketplace unlocks potential and drives workforce development.
Upskilling
Upskilling initiatives help employees stay relevant in a rapidly changing work environment.
- How it works: The talent marketplace assesses an employee’s current skills and compares them to those needed for emerging roles or organizational priorities. It then suggests relevant learning resources, including training programs, certifications, or on-the-job opportunities to close the gap.
- Benefits:
- Employees feel empowered to drive their development with clear, actionable steps.
- Organizations can proactively prepare workforces for shifts, like digital transformation or AI adoption.
- A talent marketplace supports a culture of continuous learning, which keeps your organization competitive.
- Example: A customer service representative could be guided through courses on data analysis and automation, preparing them for a future role as a customer insights analyst.
Internal gigs
Internal gigs connect employees with short-term projects, stretch assignments, or task-based opportunities.
- How it works: Managers or teams post gig opportunities, like helping with a product launch, developing a marketing campaign, or leading a cross-department initiative. The talent marketplace matches employees with opportunities that align with their expertise or growth goals. Usually, there are opportunities to self-select gigs too.
- Benefits:
- Employees gain diverse experiences and build new skills without leaving their current roles.
- Managers access untapped internal talent, speeding up project completion and reducing reliance on external resources.
- It encourages collaboration across teams and departments, fostering innovation and breaking down silos.
- Example: A software engineer might take on a gig to mentor junior developers or work with HR on a diversity initiative, expanding their professional network and capabilities.
Mentorship and coaching networks
Talent marketplaces should include a structured program that connects employees with mentors or coaches to support career growth, leadership development, and skill-building.
- How it works: Employees are matched with mentors or coaches based on their skills, career goals, and areas of development or interests.
- Benefits:
- Strengthens leadership pipelines and diverse relationships.
- Enhances knowledge sharing.
- Fosters career development at all levels.
- Example: A junior marketing analyst looking to move into product management is paired with a senior product leader for six months of guided mentorship.
Cross-functional rotational programs
A talent initiative that allows your employees to work in different departments for a set period, helping them gain diverse experience, develop new skills, and enhance business acumen.
- How it works: Employees rotate through structured short-term assignments in three or four different departments, giving them new experiences while filling critical business needs.
- Benefits:
- Encourages workforce agility.
- Breaks down silos.
- Helps employees build diverse skill sets for future roles.
- Example: A finance professional in a yearlong program might rotate through supply chain and operations, sales and revenue operations, product management, and HR and workforce planning.
These are only a few ways talent marketplaces can create opportunities for your employees to learn and grow while creating a more agile, responsive, and connected organization. You’re creating an environment where they can thrive, while ensuring your business has the right talent in place to achieve your overall goals.
Talent marketplace benefits
Talent marketplaces that use AI can significantly enhance the way employees are matched with opportunities, providing personalized recommendations that align with their skills, aspirations, and career goals.
With the ability to analyze large volumes of data in real-time, AI-powered platforms enable you to move beyond traditional methods of matching employees to work, making talent allocation more strategic, efficient, and responsive to your business’ needs and employee development.
Here are five reasons why your organization needs a talent marketplace:
- Talent marketplaces improve employee engagement and retention. Employees are more likely to stay with your organization if you actively support their career growth and development. Talent marketplaces provide employees with visibility into new and nontraditional opportunities, making it easier for them to advance their careers without leaving, ultimately boosting engagement and reducing turnover.
- Talent marketplaces drive a skills-first approach.
Traditional job structures often focus on roles rather than skills, limiting workforce flexibility and growth. Talent marketplaces shift the focus to skills-first talent management, allowing your organization to deploy employees based on their capabilities rather than rigid job titles, fostering innovation and adaptability. - Talent marketplaces bridge skills gaps.
As industries evolve, organizations face growing skills gaps that can hinder innovation and productivity. By connecting employees with upskilling programs, mentorship, and experiential learning, talent marketplaces help businesses develop the skills they need internally rather than relying solely on external hiring. - Talent marketplaces improve workforce planning.
Your organization needs real-time insights into your workforce’s skills, aspirations, and availability to make strategic talent decisions. Talent marketplaces provide valuable data that helps you proactively address skill shortages, succession planning, and future workforce needs. - Talent marketplaces increase diversity best practices. Talent marketplaces create equitable access to opportunities by ensuring career advancement is based on skills and interests rather than networks or visibility. By offering transparent pathways for mobility, mentorship, and upskilling, these platforms reduce biases and create a more inclusive workplace.
What makes up a talent marketplace
Four key components drive a successful talent marketplace and ensure seamless internal mobility.
Here are the four components that work together to unlock the full potential of your talent.
- Skills assessments
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- A talent marketplace relies on accurate data about employee skills, capabilities, and potential, as well as skill and proficiency levels for each opportunity. Understanding your employees’ skills and proficiencies will provide a foundation for matching talent to opportunities.
- Implement self-assessments where employees log their skills, experiences, and interests. Managers assess the skills and the proficiencies needed for the positions on their team(s). Encourage regular conversations between employees and managers to assess gaps, growth, and areas of interest.
- AI technology
- AI technology ensures the talent marketplace is efficient and reduces bias by analyzing employee profiles and opportunities to identify best matches based on skills, preferences, and potential.
- It’s important to choose the right technology to support what you are trying to accomplish.
- Employee personalization and differentiation
- Personalization ensures that the talent marketplace caters to employee needs, career goals, and aspirations. By offering customized opportunities based on an employee’s unique skill set, past experiences, and preferences, you can create more engaging and relevant experiences that help employees feel more connected to their growth path.
- Differentiation enables employees to choose opportunities that align with their individual strengths and future ambitions, fostering a more motivating and fulfilling experience.
- Analytics and insights
- Analytics provide insights into marketplace performance, employee engagement, and workforce trends, enabling data-driven decisions.
- Include dashboards that track metrics such as profile completion, usage rates, successful projects/gigs completed, internal movement, and employee satisfaction. Use predictive analytics to forecast talent needs and plan upskilling initiatives.
Together, these main components are essential for creating a talent marketplace that is effective, adaptable, and responsive to your organization’s needs.
Talent marketplace best practices
Building an effective talent marketplace requires careful planning, the right technology, and a clear alignment with business goals. It’s not just about offering employees access to opportunities, it’s about creating a platform that fosters transparency, drives engagement, and empowers leaders to make more informed decisions.
To be successful, you need to define the purpose of your talent marketplace, select the right tools and technologies, and ensure your leadership is on board to support it.
Here are the steps involved in building a talent marketplace to meet your organization’s needs and create a positive, growth-oriented experience for employees.
Best practices for implementing an effective talent marketplace:
- Define goals
- Clarify what success looks like for the talent marketplace. Is it about improving internal mobility, closing skill gaps, or fostering inclusivity?
- Align these goals with broader organizational priorities, like digital transformation or retention strategies.
- Select technology partners
- Choose a platform that fits your organization’s size, complexity, and goals. Look for features like AI-driven recommendations, easy integration with existing HR systems, and scalability.
- Ensure the platform has strong data security protocols to safeguard employee information.
- Ensure leadership buy-in
- Engage leaders early, highlighting the marketplace’s alignment with business objectives like agility, retention, and innovation.
- Showcase success stories or case studies from similar organizations to build confidence.
- Empower leaders to champion the initiative, encouraging their teams to adopt it.
Common talent marketplace objections and how to address them
Here are five common objections to creating or adopting a talent marketplace, along with strategies to overcome them:
1. “It’s too complex and time-consuming to implement.”
Solution: Start small with a pilot program that focuses on a specific department or role, then scale over time. Choose a user-friendly platform and integrate it with existing systems to minimize disruption. Demonstrate early wins to build confidence and show the value of the marketplace.
2. “Employees will resist change and be reluctant to use the platform.”
Solution: Engage employees early in the process by communicating early and often. Share the benefits of the marketplace and how it supports their career development. Offer training and incentives to encourage participation, and ensure that the platform is intuitive and easy to navigate.
3. “There aren’t enough opportunities to justify the platform.”
Solution: Build the marketplace with a variety of opportunities in mind—temporary projects, cross-functional roles, learning initiatives, and leadership development. Over time, the marketplace will grow as employees begin to take advantage of it, creating more opportunities for others.
4. “It will undermine traditional HR processes and hierarchical structures.”
Solution: Position the marketplace as a complement to existing HR processes, not a replacement. Highlight how it helps identify high-potential talent, improve internal mobility, and foster more agile workforce planning, all of which benefit organizational growth and leadership development.
5. “It will create inequalities or favoritism in role assignments.”
Solution: Use data-driven AI-matching algorithms that consider skills, performance, and interests to ensure fair and unbiased opportunities. Regularly review marketplace data, and gather feedback to ensure transparency and address any concerns related to fairness or favoritism.
Choosing the right talent marketplace
Talent marketplaces are essential for driving employee engagement by providing employees with personalized opportunities for growth, mobility, and development within your organization. These foster a dynamic environment where employees feel valued, empowered, and connected to their career progression.
Now is the time to evaluate your organization’s readiness for implementing a talent marketplace. Assess your workforce’s needs, technological capabilities, and leadership alignment to ensure a smooth transition.
Investing in a talent marketplace is not just about enhancing talent management—it’s a strategic move toward building a more agile, adaptable, and future-ready workforce.
