Talent Marketplace

An important role remains unfilled while an experienced employee in a neighboring department is looking for a new opportunity. HR knows her current job title, the LMS records her completed courses, and her manager knows her project experience. Yet the staffing need and her potential remain disconnected.

• Skills matching considers capabilities, interests, and the requirements of specific assignments.
• A missing skill entry may be a data gap. Check existing capabilities before assigning additional training.
• Learning paths combine knowledge, practice, on-the-job application, and verifiable evidence of competence.
• Internal mobility requires available time, fair selection, and clear handoff commitments.
• Employee retention grows from attainable development opportunities and real options to move internally.
• When consolidating software, assess the entire process from role requirements to the updated skills profile.

An internal job board lists open positions. A talent marketplace builds on this approach: Employees maintain their skills and goals, while departments describe tasks and requirements. The system brings both sides together and, depending on its features, also recommends projects, mentoring, or development steps. Many solutions use AI to do this. However, the underlying matching logic can also be implemented using clear rules.

A job title captures only part of the picture. A customer service employee may also be able to analyze data, deliver training, and improve processes. These skills open up opportunities in other departments, even if her current job title has little in common with the target role.

When selecting candidates, it helps to distinguish between three situations:

Ready now: Critical skills have been verified, and interest and availability align. Plan the selection interview, handoff, and role-specific onboarding.

Ready after targeted development: A manageable gap can be closed in time. Agree on a learning path, a supported assignment, and an assessment.

Evidence still needed: Reliable information about essential skills is missing. Use a work sample or a structured discussion of the person's expertise.

A high match score is not enough to make this decision. Ask the system to show which requirements align, what evidence is available, and which gaps remain. Location, working hours, required authorizations, and personal interests complement the skills profile. In this way, the talent marketplace supports internal mobility within the companywithout reducing people to a score.

Start with a few relevant roles and a shared language for the skills they require. A skills taxonomy organizes terms and synonyms. The European classification ESCO provides one possible foundation, with descriptions of skills concepts in several languages. Add company-specific processes, products, and requirements.

Five data areas are essential for a workable pilot:

1. Roles and projects: Tasks, expected outcomes, must-have skills, required proficiency levels, start dates, and time commitments.
2. Employee profiles: Skills, experience, interests, development goals, and available capacity.
3. Evidence: The source of an assessment, its date, the context in which the skill was applied, and its validity period, where applicable.
4. Learning opportunities: Target skill, entry-level requirements, learning objective, time commitment, language, practice format, and assessment.
5. Responsibilities: Who maintains requirements, verifies capabilities, makes staffing decisions, and updates profiles?

An AI inference from a resume, a self-assessment, and observed job performance carry different evidential weight. Keep the source of each assessment visible. Even a verified skill needs context: Someone who confidently gives presentations to their own team is not automatically ready to deliver demanding customer training.

When conducting a skills gap analysis, check whether a capability is actually missing or simply lacks evidence. Otherwise, experienced employees may end up in unnecessary introductory courses. Also agree on triggers for updates, such as project completion, new assignments, and reviews by subject matter experts. Trying to capture every skill before the first assignment delays the benefits.

Learning & Development translates the requirements of a target role into an achievable development path. L&D and the relevant department first clarify what work the person must ultimately be able to perform independently. This forms the basis for personalized learning paths with relevant content, opportunities to practice, and verifiable outcomes.

Consider a simplified example: A customer service specialist wants to deliver internal product training. Her product knowledge and experience handling customer questions already fit the role. She still needs to develop her ability to design a learning session and facilitate groups. A general training catalog offers limited help at this stage.

Instead, L&D and the department design a specific path:

1. Assess prior knowledge: A brief work sample reveals which instructional foundations she already has.
2. Focus the learning: She completes relevant modules on learning objectives, structure, and facilitation, then develops her own training segment.
3. Apply learning with support: She observes a training session, delivers part of one herself, and receives feedback from an experienced trainer.
4. Confirm readiness: She delivers a session independently. The department assesses her against previously agreed criteria and updates the evidence of her skills.

The LMS organizes content, schedules, and learning progress. Assessing actual job performance also requires subject matter expertise and accountability. Before the learning path begins, agree on who will supervise the practical assignment and when time will be available for it.

Completing a course initially demonstrates participation or the knowledge assessed within it. Applying that knowledge also matters for the target role. The European guidelines for validating non-formal and informal learning provide a foundation for systematically identifying and assessing skills acquired outside formal education. For a workplace learning path, this means defining evidence that matches the actual task.

A project can serve as both a learning opportunity and evidence of competence. Be clear about whether you need experienced professionals or are offering a supported developmental assignment. Otherwise, learners compete with people who have already mastered the task and miss out on the very experience they need.

A good recommendation in a talent marketplace does not move anyone into a new role on its own. Selection, approval, handoff, and, where needed, training sit between a match and a move. Assign owners and timelines for these steps. HR coordinates the process, the receiving manager defines the need, and the current manager organizes the transition. L&D and the department share responsibility for the development path.

This behavior is known as talent hoarding. A study by Ingrid Haegele published in 2026 examines the relationship using personnel data and surveys from a large company. In an accompanying research interview , she explains that 75 percent of the managers surveyed confirmed that talent hoarding occurs at least occasionally.

The practical implication is to support managers with handoffs and backfilling, and to recognize successful talent development in their performance evaluations. Provide a confidential way for employees to explore internal opportunities. Clearly define when the current manager learns about an application and how HR resolves blocked moves.

An internal move does not automatically create additional capacity. When the customer service specialist becomes a trainer, her hours are initially lost to the service team. Assess the entire transition: Which tasks can be eliminated, which can the team absorb, and which require a replacement?

The same applies to projects alongside an employee's main role. Agree on a realistic time allocation and reduce existing duties accordingly. A developmental project that is continually added on top of a full workload undermines acceptance and learning outcomes. Clarify capacity before committing to the assignment.

A talent marketplace makes career opportunities within the company accessible. These include deepening specialist expertise, taking on temporary projects, and making lateral moves. Employees who can actually use these opportunities have a concrete reason to plan their future within the organization.

A 2024 LinkedIn analysis reports 53 percent longer employee tenure at companies with high internal mobility than at those with low mobility. The analysis compares the top and bottom ten percent of the companies included. It shows an association; it does not prove that introducing marketplace software causes this effect.

For employee retention , what matters is the experience after logging in: Do I receive feedback? Am I allowed time to learn? Does my development path lead to a realistic opportunity? A desirable role that is visible but out of reach can be disappointing.

Also consider who has the opportunity to make their skills visible. Shift workers, part-time employees, and people without extensive digital profiles also need access to guidance, practical assignments, and profile updates. Allow applications beyond automated recommendations and explain rejections in terms of specific requirements.

An LMS manages learning: content, assignments, schedules, assessments, and records. A talent marketplace manages access to internal opportunities. A shared skills data foundation connects the two. These functions can sit within a single product suite or work together through integrations.

Not every LMS offers a talent marketplace. These capabilities are mainly found in larger HR and talent platforms. Specialized solutions that connect to an LMS are another option. The LMS supports learning and skills development, while the marketplace connects employees with suitable roles and projects.

Cornerstone brings together learning, skills, and talent development under the name Cornerstone Workforce AI. Its offering includes a talent marketplace that recommends internal development opportunities based on employees' capabilities. For L&D, this creates a concrete link between training and the next career step.

In addition, Docebo offers a talent marketplace as an add-on through its skills intelligence solution, 365Talents. It matches skills and development goals with internal jobs and projects. Missing skills can be linked to relevant learning opportunities, making it clear which training prepares an employee for a specific internal assignment.

When consolidating your software landscape, review existing capabilities and duplicate data maintenance. A shared interface is only part of the picture. What matters is whether roles, skill labels, proficiency levels, and evidence have consistent meanings and flow reliably between systems.

Include a concrete workflow in your LMS requirements : An open role triggers a skills comparison; a confirmed gap leads to a learning path; evidence from practical work updates the profile and improves the next recommendation. Ask vendors to demonstrate this workflow, including permissions and data export. Compare integration, migration, and operating effort as well as licensing costs. This comparison will show whether a suite or a combination of specialized systems is more cost-effective.

Choose a job family with recurring staffing needs, suitable internal candidate profiles, and manageable learning gaps. Also check whether enough real jobs or projects are available. A talent marketplace without attractive opportunities quickly loses relevance.

Start with a complete workflow: Describe the need, review profiles, approach interested employees, agree on development, enable the assignment, and evaluate the outcome. Involve IT, data privacy stakeholders, and the works council early in the design. Clarify visibility, correction options, and the handling of sensitive development data before using that data for matching or selection.

Measure separately how long it takes to generate suitable recommendations, select candidates, secure approval, complete training, and hand over responsibilities. Also track the time until the employee can perform the work independently. An early transfer agreement is of little benefit if the department then has to wait a long time for usable capacity.

Compare similar roles and account for learning time, support, and any backfilling required in the employee's original team. Also track successful assignments and retention after the move. Clicks and completed profiles describe usage; they do not yet demonstrate better staffing outcomes. For employee retention, differences in starting conditions make a simple before-and-after comparison difficult.

For an initial business assessment, weigh the expected benefits against the costs of training, implementation, and ongoing operations.

chemmedia helps connect skills, learning design, content, and platform operations. Independent LMS consulting clarifies which foundations are already in place and which additions support your specific development process.

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