Nigel Cassidy (NC): External hiring, not delivering, time to fill more of those skills gaps from within. I'm Nigel Cassidy and this is the CIPD podcast.
They think encouraging your existing staff to move onwards and upwards into new roles or projects would be a no-brainer. Yet some organisations put up conscious and unconscious barriers to internal mobility. And when workers struggle to see any real future for themselves, where they are, well, they just leave. And it's then that replacing that lost talent can prove tricky. Nearly 6 out of 10 employers have told the CIPD they expect trouble filling vacancies. So, if vibrant in-house career progressions the answer, I wonder what does it look like in practice? How do you spot and get rid of internal barriers to it working properly? And what can people, professionals do to empower employees and nurture homegrown talent?
With us for our first CIPD podcast for the new year, a senior HR leader with, as one LinkedIn fan put it, an incredible ability to identify talent and know the secrets of retaining it. She's the HR head at the Green Spark Group who help companies embed sustainability. It's Laura Ibbotson. Hello.
Laura Ibbotson (IB): Hi, good morning Nigel.
NC: With her we have a noted remuneration and employee experience specialist, director and consultant at the rewards advisors Innecto.
She says it's time to ditch the opaque job processes buried in HR systems to show employees a future rather than a single job. It's Sarah Lardner. Hi, Sarah.
Sarah Lardner (SL): Hello, Nigel.
NC: Now, I'd love to ask both of you, just before we get really cracking, what's the most ludicrous barrier to internal movement or promotion that you've ever come across? I mean, either personally or just in the course of your work.
LI: For myself, Nigel, many years ago, I had a director that wanted to internally promote a team member and they couldn't believe that the team member was considering the opportunity or not, but because it boiled down to cost in terms of petrol, because the opportunity was about another half an hour top of their journey. And I had to explain that finances for some individuals is more important than others and has a bigger impact. And that by removing that barrier by saying, could they work from home two days a week would allow them to then access that opportunity. So sometimes I think it's guiding our managers and directors to think quite openly in terms of how can we remove those barriers in order to enhance that internal talent's success.
NC: I wouldn't mind betting when you've seen similar kind of barriers, you'd be very quick to do something about it. Sarah, what about you?
SL: I'm probably going to go down a very personal route in terms of a barrier that I experienced, but back in the 80s. And luckily, things have changed since then. But I went to a careers fair, wanted to become an engineer, and I was very politely angled towards a secretarial type of role. Interestingly, one of my first jobs was as a secretary within an engineering company. So a bit of a double whammy then. But I suppose having done that, I wouldn't be here talking to you or in this podcast today because it's taken my career in a bit of a different direction. But I suppose that's more of the sort of bias in the early days.
NC: So we're talking internal mobility. It's quite a stark phrase. What is it about? What does it mean?
LI: For me, it's around developing internal talent. To ensure you have a pipeline there, not just for current opportunities, but also future opportunities within your organisation.
SL: Well, Laura explained it really well there. And I think for an employee, it's to understand absolutely what they need to do in order to progress their career, whether it's going through the levels or whether it's a lateral move and understanding how they can move into another role. And that could be through understanding their actual skill set, what they have currently and what's missing in terms of any future roles that they might have on the horizon and then knowing how to fill that gap.
NC: So Laura, going back to you, your story at the beginning, I mean, most of us have experienced that frustration when an external candidate beats us to a post that we know we're more than qualified to do. And then quite often a few months later, it's painfully obvious they weren't a very good choice. But I mean, you say something is happening out there that is causing employers to think more about the people already in their backyard, that they're beginning to tweak. They've got to do something about this.
LI: Yeah, absolutely. The recruitment market is as intense as it's ever been. The war on talent is real. In order to be successful, any organisation, it's critical that they do look internally and don't overlook their internal talent. They have the knowledge, they've got the experience, they've built the relationships, they've got the connections with the client. Some organisations do not have the available funding to consistently go to agencies, consistently retrain or train people into your organisation. You have an incredible talent pool within your own organisation. And by considering that, looking at different opportunities, sometimes you may have to tweak a role or may have to look at what are the barriers, what can we do to remove those. But by sometimes making those simple adjustments can result in significant success.
You have an incredible opportunity with your own internal team members. So by focusing on what's important to them, and it can be different for individuals, and being open to making those adjustments could save a business an incredible amount of money from agencies to training staff to also then, like you just alluded to that, Nigel, losing key staff, key team members from your organisation because they did feel overlooked. And like you said, it became very apparent very quickly that the external candidate wasn't as skilled, passionate, experienced as the internal one. And then that can then impact your employee turnover.
NC: Maybe we can touch a bit later on why the right spec isn't being put out, why people don't actually recruit for the right things. But let me just stick with this idea of why people leave, Sarah. I mean, this seems pretty obvious, but you need to know why people leave, and I guess exit interviews are not what they should be.
SL: No, I think a lot of is hidden with the exit interviews. Quite often when you analyse the outputs of the exit interviews, they will, they will sort of put down reasons such as pay. There are sometimes the line management piece, the cultural fit. And then they will say about career, the lack of career progression, and they'd be given an opportunity in another organisation. But it's getting underneath. Why? Because quite often the way that career progression and mobility is just viewed internally is, it's the only way is up. They only look at the roles above within the function that they recognise.
So if a line manager would often just think, well, there's a ceiling here. There is nowhere to go. Somebody has to leave before you can do that job. But quite often there are opportunities outside of the department in which that individual works. They've got really key transferable skills. As Laura said, there would be a really great fit for other roles within the organisation, but it's that lack of understanding.
So, you know, it's about getting underneath their reason why they were leaving in terms of that career progression and their perception of the lack of opportunity and trying to actually fix that. Because there is, again, Laura talked about the cost to the organisation. There's a significant cost in recruiting and replacing that individual and that could have been completely avoided. And it's just about making sure that there is that real awareness across the organisation of other opportunities and where skills are transferable and where they fit and where their capabilities lie to really understand those opportunities. Which will give a really positive impact for the organisation and the employees as well.
NC: So it's pretty clear from what Sarah says that it's the prevailing culture, the custom, the practices within an organisation that might be the barriers to not, you know, looking for people's potential. I just wonder sometimes, Laura, whether it might be quite simple things like, I don't know, the need to get an internal application, signed off or approved or fixed silos or pyramids within organisation where there are paths upwards, but not sideways into different roles.
LI: Yeah, absolutely. And that's where your relationship between your HR function and operations is critical. That as a profession, we have a responsibility to ensure that we do understand the business. We have those established relationships so that we can help steer those conversation and open those doors. I think another area to consider when Sarah's mentioned there around the exit interviews is that sometimes team members will allude to exactly that pay, flexibility. But when you dig deeper, they can be barriers such as imposter syndrome and confidence. And I've had numerous conversations with team members where they haven't gone in for an internal promotion because they felt that they couldn't do the role when I knew they were absolutely fully capable.
So then you need to look at things like coaching and helping support the team members with their confidence, or if it is imposter syndrome and helping them to unlock that potential and confidence in themselves.
And again, as a HR profession, we've just got to steer those conversations in the right way because they have the answers, they have the talent. It's just giving them the confidence to apply and be confident that actually, yes, they can do that role. They can look at a promotion within a business that's not within directly in their own department. And I think that's something Nigel and I, we discussed previously in an organisation.
I introduced an internal assessment centre, which I've never heard of before. And the reason I did that was I was concerned around our talent was being seconded to a different country because we'd won a huge contract. And I had concerns around What did that mean for the UK business and what impact that would have on our clients? We had a very talented workforce and I was convinced that a lot of our team members had skill sets and experiences that we weren't quite aware of. And I can remember at the time my CEO wasn't convinced, but they went with it. They went with my crazy idea.
NC: Well, because this was relatively bold, you were, suggesting going through all the sort of hoops and tests that you would do for potential new hires…
LI: Yep
NC: …but you were doing it on your existing workforce.
LI: Absolutely, which is, it was unheard of. And yeah, it was a little bit of a risk, but I was convinced that the output would be worth it.
So just like you would do an external assessment centre, exactly the same, we had presentations, we had team exercises, we had profiling and it absolutely had the required results that I was looking for in that we established that some of our team members who were successful in our role, but actually from a profile point of view, were better partnered in a different team or that we established that some of our team as they spoke languages that we weren't aware of. They had different qualifications that we weren't aware of. And it did, the success of that was that it did allow career progression for our internal team members that we'd previously not considered.
And as a result of the success, we then applied that in another part of our business. And we were running a second internal assessment centre. And from the first uptake, as you can imagine from our team members, there was a little bit of a fear of, oh, what's this? Is this about losing our jobs? So I had to really encourage team members for the first assessment centre to apply for it. The second assessment centre, we were oversubscribed because they heard about the success from the first one.
So it was a great internal success in terms of removing those barriers, understanding skill sets and experiences that we would never knew about and allowing us to have an even bigger talent pool than what we have previously.
NC: I can see you nodding, Sarah. Have you come across anything like this or is there some other way you could achieve the same result?
SL: I think it's great what Laura did in the organisation and it's a shame other organisations don't do something similar. You know, there is that sort of hidden talent and Laura was able to get underneath that and really understand where that was and do some sort of right sizing. You know, it enables organisations to right size the roles within the organisation and the right talent within that.
When we developed Pathfinder, which is a career progression tool, to do what Laura's done in an organisation, and that's just to make things really visible, and give employees also ownership. Employees are asking for ownership of their careers. They want to understand how their skills can translate or be mapped into another role. And quite often job titles, and you know, Laura, you might find this as well, but job titles hide the core attributes of that role.
NC: Can you give me an example of that? I'm just trying to get my head around that.
SL: Yeah, so job titles can be inflated. You know, you could have sort of director in the title, but they're not a director. They could be very opaque, a bit woolly, where you can't really get underneath what the job does. So job titles are, I suppose becoming, there is a little bit of a trend and theme at the moment where they're trying to have less emphasis on job titles and really try and understand the role attributes, what is the role there to do, and the skills and the capability that's required within that. Because quite often you could have marketing executives. If you're not in marketing, you might not know what a marketing executive is. That's just an example. I'm not suggesting that is a wrong title. But it's just if you are in engineering, you might not know what that means. And if you're a role that's in, for example, you're a junior graphic designer, you might be interested or your skills might very easily map over into a UX designer and developer department. And that might be something that they would be really keen to do, but they won't know it's an opportunity. So it's just making things very visible. And that's what Laura did in the organisation as well.
NC: Now, clearly, all these opportunities need to be communicated. And I know, Laura, you were chatting when we were speaking beforehand about some work you'd done to text people about possible vacancies because they might not look at online job boards or something like that. So what was the problem you were trying to solve? And how is it helpful to be a bit unconventional about how you spread the word about internal opportunities?
LI: Yeah, again, it's an HR team, it's looking at alternative opportunities and communication methods. So in a previous business, we were really struggling to recruit engineers to find talented, engaging engineers within different areas of the country. They just, they weren't coming through the usual apprenticeship and talent pipelines. So, what we looked at our current team members and our engineers, yes, they had tablets and they did use laptops, but not very often. So I was concerned that when we were sending out our weekly internal recruitment opportunities, they were never reading them, they were never seeing them. So then maybe that was a reason they weren't applying.
So we, under our HR system, we use a great system, Cascade. We allowed us to send text messages to our team members. So once a week, when we sent out our internal recruitment opportunities, we also text them. So that our engineers not only would potentially would they apply, but they discuss it amongst each other and encourage each other to apply. So again, it was just removing that barrier of we don't believe the current communication is working. What can we do differently? And we did see an uptake in applicants internally as a result.
NC: That's genius, Laura.
LI: Not really.
NC: So simple, but I can see that it will work.
All of this, Sarah, rather pre-supposes that middle managers, what managers in general within the business of different teams are kind of on board with all this. And we hear about this thing called talent hoarding. This is where gatekeepers resist releasing people, you know, because backfilling is going to be a pain or disruptive or people might fear their manager might take it out on them in some way for their disloyalty. So it is about educating middle managers, isn't it? And I wonder how you do that.
SL: I think it's about educating and it's about awareness. And I think the talent hoarding is not always because there is a selfish rationale behind it. It could be that they don't understand that there is another pipeline of talent that potentially could be coming into that role and understanding the impact. And that is good for the organisation. It's just having that wider understanding and visibility. So education is really important around it.
So if they are in a position where they could release somebody to go and work in another role within the organisation, that is a really good fit for them, that requires their level of skills and expertise, and they have, the work that needs to get done, then there needs to be an understanding of actually what that succession looks like, because succession planning is all about that senior leadership piece, but there needs to be that talent pipeline. Where would the person that would come into that role? Because that could open an opportunity for somebody else who is looking to come into that function.
So it's just about a lack of awareness that managers have about outside of the area that they are working within. They don't always see the opportunities and the implications across the organisation.
LI: I think again, it's about that confidence piece and also looking at where the flexibility is. So when I've had managers literally fighting over a talented team and previously, it's about coming to an agreement, okay, well, is there flexibility in the handover period? So rather than it just be they start next week in the new department, is it that it could be over a four-week phased approach? Or is it that yes, they can go over in two-weeks’ time to the new department, but with an agreement that should the new team have questions, new team member have questions, that they can still access the internal employee. And I think that again is where you have that selling point that if we don't give this talented team member an opportunity to develop in our business, their likeliness is that they will exit our business and we completely lose that knowledge and that skill set. Where if we provide opportunities and encourage that development and promotions, you retain the talent, you enhance the talent, and then you can also bring in new talent to the business. So again, it's selling it to the managers and directors of this is a win-win. This is about us as an organisation succeeding. By offering opportunities and retaining our key talent, especially those in business critical roles. So more often than not, it is those business critical roles. So again, by explaining, if your team member wins the Euromillions on Friday, who's going to step into their shoes on Monday? So it's essential that you have your talent management and you have your succession planning in place to safeguard the business.
NC: So for HR, this is starting to look rather different, Sarah, isn't it, from the old approach to talent manager? In essence, HR have got to become kind of mobility stewards rather than gatekeepers.
So can we sort of be practical? What sort of things should HR be doing to deliver on some of the things we've been talking about?
SL: Yeah, I think my experience, what we see with organisations, and it's definitely not with what I'm seeing with Laura's organisation from what Laura shared with us today. But quite often, there is a real desire to do that. And that talent mobility is understood within HR, absolutely. They get it, they're having the conversations. But I think what happens is there's something missing in that process where there isn't that real line of sight, that visibility. So, it's how do you give employees ownership also of their career and identifying opportunities and really understanding where their skill set lies, what their ambitions are. But equally, the line manager, having a real clear understanding.
I think it starts with the structure. It starts with, being able to articulate really clearly where roles sit within the organisation, where they are similar to other roles and they share the same attributes and they share the same skills. And having the framework with the communication and the strategy around that to enable all of the levels across the organisation, whether you're an employee, whether you are a line manager, whether you're in HR, whether you're a senior leader, to have that visibility. So it's not all on HR to try and find the answers all the time and be prompted for those conversations because quite often somebody will leave and HR wasn't aware, wouldn't be aware at all and it's too late. It's done. But it's bringing that to the fore.
And quite often organisations, and particularly within HR, will think that everything needs to be perfect before they do that. A perfect grading framework, say, for instance, perfect career families, you know, everything needs to be absolutely spot on before we can go out there with a very visual, clean, well-communicated framework. But it doesn't have to be.
NC: So what are you saying, Sarah, that utopia never comes?
SL: It doesn't. It doesn't. And I think there's an adult type of approach with this for, even for employees and line managers to say it's not going to be perfect. But if we wait for utopia, we're never going to have anything. It's not going to happen. So one of my clients explained it in a really good way. They said, when they map out all their roles across the organisation within the job family, so that there is a clear career pathway and the skills and the attributes of the role are on show, it's like a library. It's growing. You might not have all the genres, you might have missing books, But that's okay, because there will be something a book for everyone and we will just improve it as we go along. But it needs to be accepted that there are gaps and there is not that perfection, that utopia.
NC: So in terms of things you can do to make things better, heard an awful lot there from Sarah. Laura, what would you have from your own experience?
LI: As a profession, we need to think creatively. And I've worked for very cash rich businesses and businesses where the HR budget is non-existent. And so depending on where you are as business, obviously the approach you can take are two very different things. Where I've worked for cash rich businesses, I've looked at things like coaching and development plans. And I've worked with an incredible coach, Jane Rawdon, and she really helped our team members access opportunities by supporting them with their confidence, with barriers that we spoke about earlier.
In other businesses I've worked in, I haven't had that luxury of a budget to bring in a fantastic coach. So what I've looked at is things like skills bank. So you'll find that your local skills bank, there are opportunities there for funding. And some of them will allow you to put on that framework your trainers that you've worked with previously or your coaches. So you can get the same result, but sometimes you've just got to think a little bit more creative as a HR department, depending on the size of your budget, which I know can be a huge constraint.
So I would say access your network. You don't have to have all the answers as the HR business partner, HR manager, head of HR, but you will have a network that are very supportive and that do have the answers and do have the experience. So don't feel afraid to reach out to your network to say, hey, what did you do? What was successful for you? What were barriers that you removed?
NC: Great. And in terms of, you talked about the coaching, but in terms, Sarah, of making people more confident to go for things and to see where they could be in the future, any other things you can do to enable that?
SL: I think it is that cultural peace and it's being able to have the right conversations with the manager at the right time because we know some of the career conversations happen just once a year. That review time. It's quite often a transactional type of conversation. And I think it's all that time is way, that year has passed by and there's that conversation about the year ahead and what their aspirations or, you know, their sort of development opportunities are. And I think that it doesn't, lends itself to a honest conversation.
And if you imagine, a really good line manager has open conversations with an employee who is very open back, might say, I absolutely love working here. I like my job at the moment, but my ambition is here. And this is where I want to go. And I can see that I will be in this role for, a few years, but that's where I want to head. And I really want to do that within this organisation. I don't want to have to go anywhere else. And then that's where the line manager, if they have that open dialogue, can really think about, okay, this person has got aspirations. It's on the table. There is a two-way street here. I can support them in terms of helping them get where they want to be. And this is what I expect in return in terms of performance and productivity and expectations. But they can have conversations about where the skills and capability match.
If we take that junior graphic designer I explained earlier, they might have that desire to go into the development team. And a really good line manager who wants the best for their team and wants to make sure that they have got a team of fully fired, ambitious, high performing, turning out really great productivity team members will be really open for those conversations about it, knowing that they will be ready to move on in a few years.
NC: Right. And Laura, we should mention neurodiversity here. I'm saying you yourself said you were dyslexic and I think you just had a diagnosis of ADHD, which must have been a bit of a shock, but maybe explained a few things. Managers have to take this into account because it is important, isn't it, in encouraging people to move on and understand what they can deliver and have managers understand them as well.
LI: Absolutely. And again, it's that educational piece that you may have somebody that's dyslexic, but it's not about looking at what that in terms of their development areas that rings with that, but looking at actually because they're dyslexic, they have all these skill sets that complement our business that can really help strive and take projects forward and help the business become successful. So it's an educational piece, removing that fear, implementing that understanding of how it can benefit the business.
NC: Absolutely. And it's, as we've heard several times, all about giving staff agency autonomy.
LI: Yeah, absolutely. And just encouraging CPD as well. So I know a top tip of mine would be I always encourage my team members directly, my team members, but also in the business, giving them the opportunity to develop, because they may not be ready for that internal promotion within the next six months, but actually by allowing them that time to access CPD. So that could be as simple as a Excel training course, it could be going to a different city to network and gain a broader understanding of a certain product or service. So not being afraid to invest in that time in your team members, because again, the output will be significant.
NC: And a final thought from you, Sarah.
SL: Yeah, I think where my head went to just then when Laura was talking was also about the sort of balancing capacity, I think is a really important point. I think talent needs to be levelled across the organisation to avoid, inefficiencies, avoid burnout, to be fair, inclusive, and all of those elements. And it's about just right sizing the allocation. It's about just really leveraging people's skills and capabilities within the organisation.
NC: Well, thank you both. That's Laura Ibbotson from Green Spark Group and Sarah Lardner from the reward specialist Innecto, both with great advice on making better use of the human resources that you already have. What have we learned? Well, as the CIPD points out, when done well, internal mobility supports retention, it builds capability, strengthens those succession pipelines and adaptability to change. And obviously how you handle it is going to tell people a lot about your organisation, as we've heard about its fairness, its skill transparency, its manager capability and culture.
So do check out our back CIPD podcast catalogue. There's some great recent learning content on boosting productivity, handling the renaissance of union power and tackling loneliness at work. Just three topics we've covered quite recently on CIPD podcast, but for now from me Nigel Cassidy and the whole crew, it's goodbye.
