Internal Talent Marketplaces and Cross-Functional Career Mobility

Karin Sanders

Internal Talent Marketplaces and Cross-Functional Career Mobility

Author(s)	Prof. Karin Sanders
Country	United States
Abstract	Organizations frequently possess substantial employee capability that remains invisible outside immediate departments, reporting structures, or established occupational categories. Conventional internal recruitment systems partially address this problem by allowing employees to apply for vacancies, yet they often preserve functional boundaries, depend heavily on managerial sponsorship, and emphasize formally vacant positions rather than broader opportunities for capability deployment. This study develops the concept of an Internal Talent Marketplace (ITM) as an organization-wide mechanism that makes employee skills, career interests, projects, developmental assignments, and internal roles visible across functional boundaries. Particular attention is given to its potential contribution to cross-functional career mobility. The study uses a simulation-based explanatory design because no real human-resource information system or employee-transition dataset was provided. A Talent Marketplace Maturity Index was developed around six dimensions: skills visibility, opportunity transparency, matching quality, managerial mobility support, equitable access, and transition-development support. Five synthetic organizational scenarios representing marketplace maturity from 20% to 100% were evaluated. The modeled results indicate that cross-functional employee mobility increases from 8% under a fragmented internal opportunity system to 37% under a mature marketplace architecture. Internal opportunity fill rates rise simultaneously, while median time-to-match and manager-blocked mobility decline. The findings suggest that the principal value of an internal talent marketplace lies not in digitizing vacancy posting but in reducing informational, structural, and relational barriers that prevent employees and organizational opportunities from discovering one another. The paper contributes to internal labor-market and career-mobility research by integrating established evidence on internal hiring, lateral movement, job rotation, employee learning, and internal job transitions into a transparent marketplace architecture. Because the analytical outcomes are simulated, they should be interpreted as theoretically grounded scenario evidence rather than empirical estimates of actual organizations.
Keywords	internal talent marketplace, internal mobility, cross-functional mobility, career development, internal labor market, job rotation, skills matching, talent management
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 4, Issue 6, November-December 2023
Published On	2023-12-28

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

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Internal Talent Marketplaces and Cross-Functional Career Mobility

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