Feature
Pretty much no one goes into their career hoping to have the same role forever. Promotions, new opportunities and greater seniority are a goal for most employees, whether that happens within their current organization or at a new one. Unsurprisingly, employers prefer the former.
Internal mobility has a number of well-documented benefits and HR leaders are paying attention. LinkedIn found internal mobility is up 30% since 2021, and a staggering 86% of HR leaders said internal mobility is a priority for their organization in 2024, according to an iCIMS report.
Yet although overall rates of internal mobility are up, current economic pressures are leading some employers to make less than strategic choices about hiring and promotions, according to experts. Let's examine the attitudes, behaviors and practices that are limiting employers' ability to move talent internally.
Doing More With Less
“What I've been reading about a lot is this idea of dry promotions, where people are getting more responsibility, but not the title and the money to go with it,” said Malvika Jethmalani, co-founder of the Atvis Group and HR consultant.
Joe Makston, a leadership consultant and former director of employee experience at Early Warning, said that quietly adding on to employees’ roles without any benefits or formal development paths will only lead to disengagement, particularly among younger employees, who will either push back or simply leave.
“It would be beneficial for us to learn from them and find a balance,” he said. “We can't keep saying do more with less, because at some point less is just less.”
In the same vein, Makston said that we’re also seeing many companies downgrade roles in order to hire in someone cheaper from outside. This is despite the fact that hiring internally reduces or even eliminates costs associated with onboarding and ramp-up periods. Why?
“Organizations for the most part are so focused on meeting the bottom dollar,” Makston said. “If you take somebody off the project to train them to do something else, you're losing productivity, and executive teams are focused on the number instead of the quality of the employee.”
Related Article: Navigating the Great Gloom
Talent Hoarding
The fear of letting employees go results in talent hoarding, which has seen a rise in recent years due to labor shortages. This isn’t necessarily new, according to Jethmalani, and happens for a number of reasons.
Jethmalani pointed to manager burnout as one: She explained that many leaders today are contending with too much in a “do more with less” culture to even think about developing their direct reports. In fact, in 2023, 79% of middle managers said they were at risk of burnout from the stress of managing people.
“You’re just constantly in this state of overwhelm,” she said. “I don't like that talent hoarding happens, but I think it's important for us to understand the context of why it happens and why it may be getting worse — because the manager job is getting worse.”
Furthermore, most managers simply aren’t incentivized adequately to develop and release their talent across the organization, according to Makston.
The Right Job Architecture
Having the right systems in place can certainly help ensure employees have access to open opportunities within the organization, Makston said. According to iCIMS, 37% of HR leaders said they’re investing in new technology to support internal mobility initiatives.
But more importantly, Jethmalani said, many small to mid-sized companies are missing the right job and skill architectures that could help employees envision what their career path could look like, as well as where outside of their current focus or department they have the necessary skills to succeed.
“Job architecture is not a new concept, but the skills piece of it is still fairly new and still in the nascent stages of being developed,” Jethmalani said. “Until we get to this point where we have clear job architectures and clear skills taxonomies, only then can we then start to make meaningful improvement in internal mobility.”
This itself is a big process, however, because your HRIS system is only as good as the information employees are willing to enter into it, according to Makston: “A lot of times it’s garbage in, garbage out.”
Jethmalani reiterated this, noting that trying to create and update job profiles and skills taxonomies for just 100 employees would be a massive project and require significant change management – especially in a time of cost-cutting.
Related Article: Times When Your Job Architecture Will Need an Update
Some Tips to Move the Needle on Internal Mobility
Although current conditions and boardroom attitudes might be limiting internal mobility, understanding how to work around them can go a long way without breaking the bank. Jethmalani and Makson suggested some of the following ideas to start making change:
Celebrate Mobility
Jethmalani said that it’s important to celebrate moves when they happen to incentivize leaders to export talent.
“Every time you have an internal promotion or move, announce it, celebrate it, make a big deal of it,” she said. “And recognize the leaders who made that happen so that your leaders start to see that this is the behavior that's rewarded here.”
Conference
Sep
16
HR Tech Conference Las Vegas 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Create Accountability
Likewise, there needs to be accountability in order to encourage leaders that the benefits of letting talent move outweigh those of hoarding them.
“I've been in companies where as a leader, you basically cannot get promoted until you've developed your own successor,” she said. Making talent development and mobility a part of annual goals and KPIs can help here.
Let AI Help
Although AI can’t solve all the issues that come with creating job and skills architectures, it can help save time on such a project.
“It could be a step in the right direction to reduce the administrative burden as long as you supplement it with some level of human verification or validation,” Jethmalani said.
Makston agreed, noting that it can also proactively identify internal opportunities for employees before they have the chance to look externally.
Consider Projects and Gigs
In the absence of available positions to move employees into, Makston said that employers can consider gig work or other short term projects.
“A time-bound project is a great way to see if those high potential employees are going to show up, perform quality and then ultimately create something that benefits the organization,” he said.
Help Out Individual Contributors
Considering that managers and executives are twice as likely to move internally than individual contributors, it’s worth encouraging their mobility. Makston said that higher-ups should take the time to connect with employees at the entry-level or frontline, and advocate for them.
“So managers and leaders have a responsibility to talk about their team because it's the team that makes them successful,” he said. All of this also helps build better connections across an organization, which encourages mobility.
“Although it’s extremely important, we're spending too much time on the money piece and not enough time on the people piece,” he said.
