“Hot Jobs has been a great initiative,” said Suzan Vulaj, NBCUniversal’s VP of global talent acquisition, “to get in front of the employees, create awareness of our internal opportunities, and demystify the internal application process.” The listings include the names of the recruiter, links to their email address, the hiring manager contact information, and the location of the job.
Finally, because employees often need skills to move into a new job, the Talent Lab, NBCUniversal’s corporate university, offers Career Core Labs, half-day virtual or in-person labs that provide career development tools and deepen business acumen so employees can navigate their next career move within or across NBCU’s portfolio of businesses. So far, the company has held 65 of these labs for 3,500 employees.
How is all of this working? In the most recent annual survey, employees were asked whether they believed their manager would be supportive of them making a move internally. A whopping 81% said yes.
Schneider Electric: Working on skills-based internal mobility to tackle retention
In 2019, Schneider Electric — which has 140,000 employees worldwide — wanted to solve its retention problem. “It was easier to leave Schneider and get rehired,” said Jean Pelletier, Schneider’s vice president of digital talent transformation and global talent acquisition, “than to find a job within the company.”
So the energy management company launched a talent marketplace, Open Talent Market, that allowed employees to find internal roles. Schneider workers entered their business titles and the marketplace used AI to match those titles to new roles, gigs, and mentorships. Employees were thrilled. So far, 85,000 have registered.
But managers? Not so much. “I have answered a number of calls from managers who’ve said, ‘You need to shut this down,’” Jean said. The talent team persisted, with the idea that managers’ mindsets would follow.
As part of this effort, the talent team updated the marketplace to focus on skills and created a skills management team to oversee the shift to skills-first. This team researched transferable skills and found that, among other things, Schneider’s financial analysts had 50% of the skills needed to be a data analyst — which meant people could be moved across functions.
Around the same time, the team began working on a skills taxonomy, to help with both internal and external hiring. “The first thing we discovered is we have a zillion taxonomies in our organization,” Jean said. “Global supply chain does their own. Finance does its own. Rewards does its own.” So Schneider formed a skills management initiative, with the intent of bringing together the talent, rewards, and learning teams to create a common language — an effort that sounds a lot easier than it actually was.
It’s slow-going but it’s paying off. Eighty-five percent of eligible employees have registered in the Open Talent Market, making it much easier to find a job within Schneider now. This year alone, 1,500 employees “were given visibility” to more than 14,000 open roles. On top of that, 4,000 employees have found mentors and 3,000 employees have worked on internal gig projects.
Final thoughts: The goal should be progress, not perfection
If one thing was clear at Talent Connect, it’s that no company has (fully) aced internal mobility. When Schneider first launched its marketplace, for example, they used business titles instead of skills to match people to jobs because their system wasn’t yet set up to handle skills. When they tried to get the learning and rewards teams together to work on a skills taxonomy, it took an entire year.
“We realized that if we waited for our internal infrastructure to be perfect, we’d never get there,” Jean said. “We’ve definitely learned things and made mistakes along the way. But we started it, and just embraced progress, not perfection.”
