AMS Talent Climate report warns of 16% reduction in internal hiring in just three years
September 13, 2023, Cleveland, Ohio — Latest research by global talent solutions business, AMS and The Josh Bersin Company indicated that global internal hiring rates have slumped over just three years. With global talent shortages in many sectors and a lack of skills still holding back many organizations, a lack of focus on internal talent is in danger of hindering productivity and growth.
The Talent Climate series, a set of quarterly reports explores the current turbulent world of talent, providing up-to-date and in-depth insights, trends and solutions on how to tackle changing global conditions. The second in the series focuses on global “internal hiring” rates which have slumped from 40% of all hires in 2020 to just 24% in 2022 and a continued downward trend into 2023.
It means that very often companies are losing the talent they have trained, invested in and nurtured and in a cost-conscious market, with time-to-hire rates on the rise, the perfect candidate for that open role, could be right under their noses.
The talent experts at AMS have developed a five-point plan to make the most of that internal hiring strategy.
- Map your available skills: use talent intelligence to drive your internal hiring strategy and understand the skills and experience you have within your teams. Find the adjacent skills to your open roles and understand how you can upskill or reskill talent to meet your requirements.
- Create a culture of talent mobility: Reward managers that develop and progress talent over those that hoard talent. Create a culture where internal mobility and internal talent is prized and celebrated.
- Empower your TA function: treat your internal talent like external candidates and ensure they have access to open roles and opportunities across functions and teams. Empower your TA function to identify and engage with potential internal talent in the same way that they would for external talent
- Invest in your technology: technology is nothing without a clear strategy to drive it but once you know the direction you’re going in, it is invaluable to helping you collate skills, match candidates, understand attrition rates and ultimately retain your expensive and hard-won talent.
- Embrace a skills-based approach to hiring: working with hiring managers to help them understand a skills-led over experience-led approach to open roles can be transformative to improving internal hiring rates. Often that institutional knowledge can go a long way to speeding up on-boarding and allowing an individual to find their feet in a role, team or function which is otherwise completely new to them.
Jim Sykes, Global Managing Director of Client Operations at AMS said: “The latest Talent Climate series data will make challenging reading for many talent acquisition teams who have spent so long bringing great talent into organisations only to see it walk out the door to find new opportunities.
The slump in internal hiring is driven primarily by three factors, a lack of internal technology infrastructure to really help companies map skills and understand career paths, a perception managers “lose” talent from their teams if individuals move, even internally, and the difficulties many hiring managers have in embracing the advantages of a skills-based hiring approach.
Our five-point plan can help create a strategic internal candidate programme which gets to the heart of driving improvements in culture, retention of key skills, reduction in time-to-hire rates and crucially in this market, cost. Top talent is hard won in this environment and with the skills organizations seek often hidden in their current employee base, internal hiring deserves to move higher up the talent agenda.”
Read the report in full here: The Talent Climate Series - AMS
Join our webinar for further an in-depth discussion with Talent leaders from across industries:
The Talent Climate: Internal Mobility – A Bright Spot in the Storm