Move on up: Making internal mobility work

Managers who are fearful of losing talent need to be brought on side, says Nadia Alaee, who works for the hiring platform Deel

The economics of promoting from within make much more sense than recruiting externally, so why aren’t we doing it? Dan Cave investigates.

It was 1988 – an era of acid-washed jeans, shoulder pads and wide lapels. Rain Man dominated the box office, The Simpsons was just getting started and Michael Jackson and George Michael were in the charts, the latter with his song Faith, a pop hit about knowing when to move on.

In this era of moonwalking and pop ballads, Elliot Hill, then a little-known athletics trainer from Austin, Texas, had just secured his first position at Nike, as a sales intern. It was a career move that wasn’t that standout. Yet Hill would methodically go from promotion to promotion: manager, director, VP and then president, presiding over different areas of the business as he rose.

Just a couple of months ago, Hill became Nike’s CEO. It represents an almost perfect progression from the ground floor to the C-suite, across three decades in the same company. Nike’s tagline is Just Do It, but Hill might say, when it comes to careers: “I’ve done it.” Period.

The rarity of mobility

Such a career, in just one company, is rare. When Hill landed his latest position, LinkedIn lit up with stupefied commentators and posts. He’d gone viral because this just doesn’t happen.

Getting different positions at the same company, whether laterally or linearly upwards, isn’t the norm: consultancy Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH)’s research found that a mere 8% of employees seek internal opportunities for progression. This is despite more than two thirds of employees believing that companies should seek to help internal talent into new roles within the organisation.


Read more: Up the corporate ladder: strategies for boosting internal mobility


Deloitte’s latest Human Capital Trends report shows that three quarters of companies know that internal talent mobility is important. Companies understand that it helps them utilise all of an employee’s skills (not just the ones they use in a current role), it saves on recruitment costs (upskilling costs one sixth of a new hire) and is correlated to strong business growth.

In addition, strong opportunities for talent mobility have been linked to better business-skills alignment, better engagement and a reduction in turnover and onboarding costs. But just 6% of companies believe they’re doing enough to get their talent from one position to another (10% to 20% of staff moving to new positions is considered a healthy range).

Even progressive HR departments often have a blind spot when it comes to figuring out if they can retain a key employee, explains JC Townend, CEO at LHH, which helps people move companies and learn new skills during restructures.

She says: “One CEO has told me: ‘We spend millions on helping people reinvent themselves and leave the company but zero on our internal mobility’.

“That really stuck with me.” Indeed, it feels like an expensive problem.

The mobility conundrum

Often the internal mobility issue is more than just a blind spot. Stories like Nike’s Elliott Hill stick out for a reason. Average employee tenure at a single company is 3.7 years on average (according to 2024 data from the software business Vestd). Thirty years is a big anomaly.

This isn’t to say that HR should be trying to turn every employee into a Hill-style ‘lifer’, explains Nadia Alaee, senior director of people at the hiring platform Deel. Engaging younger talent cohorts often means accepting that many want to try different roles in different firms, and The Telegraph reported that many Gen Z-ers aspire to being their own boss.

Supporting internal mobility structurally and culturally is a great engagement tool, explains Alaee. “It can help retain ambitious employees who want to feel challenged,” she adds.

The stats support this. Gallup consultancy data shows that almost nine in 10 Millennials believe their company should support their development. Recruitment agency Robert Half highlights that 75% of employees under the age of 34 believe that switching jobs will improve their careers.

The subtext? There’s huge potential for companies to keep their most ambitious people by setting up internal mobility opportunities. So what’s in the way?

Immobile leaders and their immobile organisations

In a few words, Mira Magecha, founder of coaching consultancy Play for Change and a former FTSE CPO, explains that pretty much everything is blocking better internal mobility. Leaders often misunderstand talent, focusing on short-term needs rather than the bigger picture, she says. Leaders also feel under pressure to deliver short-term results and safeguard their own performance reputation, and C-suite leaders aren’t helping managers develop the skills to promote their own employees.

In many businesses, she adds, internal mobility isn’t even a business health metric: “It’s obvious that managers hoard talent, fearing the impact of losing high performers. But this short-term thinking stops employees from moving to roles that would benefit their career growth.”

Pavan Bilkhoo, director at transformation consultancy Lace Partners, points the finger at a “very complex array of [internal mobility] barriers” and broadly agrees with Magecha, saying that cultures lead to managerial talent hoarding, whereby managers can often block opportunities.

She says: “Although the workplace is changing and a manager is no longer solely responsible for an employee’s development and career, I’ve seen processes where internal hiring is based on a manager approving an application for another job. People should own their careers, not managers.”

This is a cultural issue, says Bilkhoo, but also a developmental one. “Organisations regularly ask: how do we make better people managers who have development at heart, enabling people to build the career of their choice?” she adds.

It’s the culture issue that Marc Howells, VP of global talent and development at pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca, believes can get in the way of both individual development and business processes, eventually impacting growth. “Managers often view mobility as a transfer of valuable resources rather than an opportunity to strengthen the organisation and help build resilience, agility and teams that effectively respond to change,” he says.

Old-school structures and design problems

Where opportunities for internal mobility are supported, Magecha sees issues with how these are distributed. “Internal mobility opportunities are often based on informal networks or senior decisions, private decisions, undermining transparency and HR processes,” she says. This old-school way of doing things is a barrier to growth, she argues. It could impact diversity and inclusion efforts which can boost tenure and engagement.

Furthermore, Magecha adds, fragmented organisational structures, compounded by verticals operating in silos or merger and acquisition activity disconnects teams and leads to companies ignoring their own mobility and succession plans. “This makes it difficult for employees to move across divides,” she adds, noting that even when it does happen there can be a dearth of support to make the move successful.

Magecha’s view intersects with what consultant Paul Taylor-Pitt describes as old-school, formal, hierarchical organisational structures getting in the way of mobility. Taylor-Pitt argues that more fluidity and systems thinking (viewing talent and business verticals as part of a wider systems whole) are needed to get past this.


Read more: Hierarchical cultures stifle innovation, say experts


Deel’s Alaee adds that learning and development, or the lack of it, can also get in the way, meaning that employees often don’t have the skills to take a leap. There may be a lack of skills development, access to opportunities outside an employee’s primary function, as well as lack of technology (such as analytics to identify business skills gaps and where individuals need development, aligning the two) to help their employees access lattice-direction moves. “This can seriously impact employees’ confidence in seeking out new roles with their employer,” she says.

But for all the areas where companies may improve talent mobility – remember, only 6% think they are doing well at talent mobility – there’s only so much that is possible, says Alaee, due to how businesses are set up. Larger companies might have more avenues for mobility due to multiple departments. They might even offer global mobility, which can come with its own issues of setting people up and helping them settle in.

But many companies simply aren’t big enough. More than 99% of businesses in the UK are SMEs that won’t be able to move staff. “SME employees won’t have as much access to other business functions and therefore have less ability to move between them,” says Alaee.

Getting past hurdles

With so many blockers, some of them baked into the very structure and size of a company, HR might legitimately ask: how do we get our talent mobile then?

For starters, Magecha believes that HR has a central role in upturning the status quo: building internal talent pipelines, prioritising internal talent ahead of outside hires and creating fair developing opportunities that are more than lip service.

In her view, it means training and rewarding leaders to push talent mobility. “This drives engagement and keeps employees motivated by providing clear paths for development within the company,” she adds.

In Townend’s view, it’s about HR creating processes and development opportunities so that employees “can be taught how to reinvent themselves and brand themselves for the jobs of the future”. This means HR being proactive – not just offering alternate opportunities at moments of change in the business lifecycle – and creating ontologies and frameworks.

She says: “It’s not about forcing retention, as that creates resentment, but setting up pathways so that talent can interview internally, and people have skills to sell themselves in a compelling way, and see what transferable skills they have.”

Townend adds that for this to work, HR needs to thoroughly understand the business’ talent needs, properly get to grips with skills-based hiring and consider gig-based internal assignments. She also explains that a proper understanding of the benefits of internal mobility would be useful, too.

This, adds Alaae, should be backed by an HR function which “fosters a culture that encourages people to build upon their skills to pursue their passions”. She adds: “It is also crucial to ensure internal mobility programmes are well advertised and recommend strong candidates from internal networks.”

Managers who are fearful of losing talent also need to be brought on side. Alaae says: “To mitigate the risk of certain departments being unduly impacted by transfer requests, businesses need a hiring strategy that prioritises flexibility, so gaps can be quickly identified and plugged.”

Mobility in practice

What does a good mobility strategy looks like in practice? Last year, AstraZeneca could boast that 30% of hires were from internal candidates. In 2020, 60% of top-level vacancies were filled by hires from within the business. At the broader employee level, 88% reported feeling like they have internal opportunities and pathways to develop.

How has this worked? Howells explains that a culture of psychological safety and inclusivity allows employees to feel they can seek new challenges. AstraZeneca’s leaders also coached managers on understanding that mobility boosts organisational resilience, which is good for everyone.


Read more: UK's approach to resilience and wellbeing not fit for purpose, say Lords


On the ground, this means a continuous-learning culture, where growth mindset coaching and regular checksin are a core part, mapped to a skills-based (rather than job-based) understanding of talent. Performance reviews have also been overhauled to focus on opportunity finding, all backed by technology that links business needs, employee needs and learning.

There are other blueprints, too. Pieter Schalkwijk, VP of people and performance, at manufacturer Kraft Heinz, believes that his organisation’s internal mobility is now so strong that “we consider our internal mobility as a key differentiator in our offering to employees”. Most (71%) employees across Kraft Heinz’ European and Developed Pacific Markets zone feel they have meaningful opportunities to develop and grow, according to the company’s own research.

For those who accept the challenge, Schalkwijk has a roadmap: get feedback from employees to understand how they view internal opportunities, then create a talent system that is less experienced and more fluid and function-agnostic. After that, start to advocate and help build different career paths.

“Recognising and supporting ambitious talent is now at our core, and we will continue to bet on our people, encouraging cross-functional and international experiences,” he says.

There are specific programmes at the centre of this. The company offers language skills support if people want to shift into different markets and countries, using technology that allows employees to advertise their career ambitions (which is looped back into performance reviews) and actively promoting ‘squiggly careers’. “We want to enable Kraft Heinz employees to grow in ways that are uniquely aligned with both their personal goals and the needs of our business,” he adds.

How mobility gives back

If organisations can start to implement initiatives like those of Kraft Heinz or AstraZeneca, the data suggests that the benefits are not insignificant. LinkedIn research shows that employees who make internal moves are 40% more likely to stay at least three years, and have 50% longer tenures overall.

As the latest LinkedIn Learning report suggests, internal mobility has an associated impact on lowering costs, boosting employee engagement and making the company appear more attractive. It also benefits the leadership talent pipeline: companies with the highest internal mobility rates see 79% more leadership promotions.

For Lace Partners’ Bilkhoo, internal mobility will only become more of a must-have, as the employment landscape rapidly shifts and is compounded by technological advances that change the way work is done. Getting on top of this will give employers a chance to retain ambitious individuals who demand flexibility.

She says: “A person’s career can span many, many different roles.These should be ‘punctuated’ by jobs and projects that people learn from.”

With the UK’s flexible working laws changing, organisations need to overhaul talent arrangements to meet this head-on Bilkhoo says, adding that conceptions around what a job is have changed, and employers need to be open to internal gig work, skilling workers to prepare them for future changes. They should also be open to employees being carers, parents or pursuing slide hustles.

This can help employers showcase they care, which can be a key differentiator. “Giving people a chance to grow within the organisation shows them how much their talent is valued and contributes to building loyalty among employees,” she says.

Designing an organisation geared up to support talent mobility might build loyalty, giving employees faith that they can build a career, learn new skills and get new opportunities all at the same employer.

As LHH’s Townend describes, loyalty and faith benefits HR, who, by setting up to boost internal mobility, will be able to better align with the business, better understand skills and show itself as a function that supports both individuals and the wider organisation.

In Townsend’s view, HR should show employees that there are new opportunities in the business, and support this with training and skills. But employees have a role to play.

“Employees [due to work cultures and ineffectual managers] can not know the things they should be doing to progress their career,” she says. “But they have responsibility for their career alongside HR, the manager and the business.”

After all, It’s hardly like the people profession can create those as ambitious and talented as Hill without employees helping too.

 

This article was published in the November/December 2024 edition of HR magazine.

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