One of the more interesting trends in HR technology lately is the push to help existing employees move internally into new positions to advance their career. A number of HCM players have added internal mobility features but there’s also a handful of stand alone software players currently serving the market.

Tracey Parsons is the founder of the newest entrant, a tool called Worqdrive. I caught up with her by email to ask her about internal mobility software.

Specifically I asked how the tool helps internal movement among employees? Here’s what she said;

From our lens, there are two big hurdles around Internal Movement. The first is ease of use. Most employees don’t know where to go to find their next role internally. And I know most of your readers have an internal job board, but our data tells us that internal talent is 5x less likely to convert on the internal job board. So, it’s there, but they either don’t know about it or don’t use it.

Either way, it’s a miss. We’ve simply repurposed a solution designed for someone else and said this is good enough for our employees. Well, it’s not working. Our tool makes it simple to match your current employees to open jobs at the company and apply in one click.

The second issue revolves around trust. Many employees feel there will be a backlash for looking for a new job internally. It could be a fear that the leaders may squash it, or it could be blowback from their manager for wanting to leave. Whatever the case, there is a sense that moving internally is a bit anxious. Our solution is completely anonymous for the employee.

When internal sourcers look to fill their reqs with internal talent in Worqdrive, all they see is the skills that person has and how they feel about the skills. They don’t see their name, current team, or manager. Just the skills. If the internal sourcer thinks this person is a match, they can send the employee an alert and allow the employee to decide what to do with this opportunity.

With Worqdrive, your employees are in control of their future, they can be easily matched to new roles or tapped by internal sourcing teams, just like they can anywhere else online, the difference is, they would rather stay, so we make it easy to do that.

Internal Mobility Mistakes Employers Make

I also asked Tracey what mistakes employers make when it comes to empowering their employees to use it? She gave me four reasons.

They retrofit old solutions to the problem. For example, the internal job board. They have an external job board, so, let’s make another one, but for employees. It’s not the right solution. Employees want to be treated differently because you already know them, and they already know you.
Employers often forget to design the solution for the employee. Most of the solutions in the HRTech ecosystem are designed to achieve the goals of the organization first, the audience second. We need to flip this to get adoption. People use things that are designed for their use case. For example, “gigs”. A lot of people are building tech so that internal employees can take on “gigs” inside the company. I am going to be honest; this is a use case for the organization. It says to me that we would like our employees to take on more work, or admit they have bandwidth for more work. Right now, talent is absolutely up to its ears in work. The gig use case is not designed for the employee. Our solution is designed for the employee first, with positive outcomes for the business as an offshoot.
We are trusting too many things to the robots. Now, I am all for automation and robots doing the tasks that are mundane and boring. I don’t think robots should decide what I want in my career next based on what I’ve done in the past. I think humans should have a heavier hand in this discussion and choice.
And one last thing – we also have a marketing problem when it comes to our internal mobility tools. Personally, I don’t like the idea of a talent marketplace. As an employee, it would make me feel like I am a commodity. Like a can of soup to be shopped for. We need to really think about what we call things and how it is approachable by the people we need to use these tools. Because I will tell you one thing, internal mobility tools cannot be successful without employees using them.

Internal Mobility Software Vendors

I researched a number of software tools that offer internal mobility functions, here’s the list in no particular order.

Standalone solutions....

Worqdrive: We are an internal mobility solution designed to make it easy for your employees to stay. | Link
Gloat: Internal Talent Marketplace helps enterprises democratize career development, unlock skills, and future-proof their workforce. | Link
Fuel50: Matches your people to new opportunities, vacancies, gigs, and learning based on their talents whilst giving your organization powerful insights. | Link
Anthill: Designed to reach all types of workers, from corporate to retail and manufacturing, Anthill’s software engages with employees via mobile app. | Link

Feature inside HCM suite…