Defining Internal Mobility
Internal mobility, like most good things in the HR world, doesn’t happen by accident. And right now, amid record high quit levels, employers need to get serious about strategies that can improve employee retention, like internal mobility. Investing in this area can also boost employee engagement and satisfaction and contribute to your external talent acquisition efforts. Virtual events play an essential role in bringing internal mobility goals to life, in ways that employees truly appreciate and can easily utilize.
Employees Want Opportunities to Advance
Career advancement (or rather, lack of or uncertainty around) is one of the top reasons your employees might quit—or already have. We know record numbers of employees are quitting each month. Employers lost 2.9% of workers in August, 2021, setting an all-time high record. And more workers are still planning to quit in the coming months. Of the 26% of workers planning to leave their employers after the pandemic, 80% are doing so because they’re concerned about their career advancement, according to Prudential Financial’s Pulse of the American Worker survey.
It’s not enough to say you value your employees, offer no or low-cost perks, and commit to remote or hybrid work schedules. If you want to retain the employees you have—and be able to recruit new talent effectively—you need to act. Employers that take swift action to show employees there is a viable future within the organization will be able to retain more workers. This means more skills training, more defined and transparent career paths, mentoring programs that actually work, and better internal recruiting processes.
How Virtual Events Support Internal Mobility
Virtual hiring events can help you improve internal mobility by increasing transparency, revealing hidden or overlooked talent, upskilling your employees, and helping to develop tomorrow’s leaders.
Type of Internal Mobility Events
Here are three examples of virtual internal mobility events to add to your employee engagement strategy.
Internal Career Fairs
This is perhaps the simplest and fastest way to let employees know they have options. Host internal recruiting events, advertise them widely across your employee population, and make sure they get meaningful feedback after any interviews. Virtual internal hiring events are an effective way to be more transparent about internal mobility, and discover more talent within your organization.
Training & Development
You can use virtual events to host hard and soft skills training sessions that support employees’ progression into future roles. More than two-thirds of workers say they want to learn skills for new roles that offer more job security and opportunity, and you can show them that those new roles can be within your organization by outlining clear career paths to desired roles at the senior and leadership level.
Career Mentoring Programs
Mentoring helps employees stay engaged and envision a future with their employer. The best mentoring programs pair employees with someone in a more senior position who shares a similar background (i.e. same gender and/or ethnicity whenever possible). Scheduling regular mentoring check-ins with a clear agenda also helps employees feel that you value their potential. Mentoring can also improve employee satisfaction: nine in 10 workers who have a career mentor say they are happy in their jobs.
Internal Mobility Strengthens Employer Branding
One Brazen customer recently hosted their first virtual internal recruiting event in an effort to improve employee retention. In their organization, already known as a flexible workplace with lots of career opportunities, they found the virtual event helped highlight this fact and demonstrate their commitment to career advancement in a very tangible way. The event was successful in engaging with current employees, many of whom were hired out of college and have little or no experience finding a new role. But now, they plan to advertise their internal mobility events with external candidates as well, to illustrate that employees won’t be stuck in the role or department they are hired into. They support this with an internal mobility site that lists opportunities, and a career mobility team that helps people find out where they want to be.
Talent: Move It or Lose It
Let’s face it. There’s a certain percentage of the worker population who will quit their jobs because their employers either aren’t giving them opportunities to learn, grow, and advance or have left employees in the dark about what their career path could look like. Creating an internal mobility strategy, using virtual events and hiring platforms to facilitate internal career fairs, training sessions, and mentoring programs, gives employees a very clear picture of where they could be headed, if they desire, and that insight into the future could convince them to stay with you longer, rather than looking for greener grass elsewhere.
Like this post? Try these!
- Hosting a Virtual Benefits Fair with Brazen
10+ Virtual Event Ideas to Boost Employee Engagement
- 6 Virtual Event Ideas for Internal Corporate Events
Stay in the Loop. Join 10,000+ Talent Acquisition Leaders
