There is power in giving your employees control of their career trajectory with you. It’s something we’ve been betting on with WORQDRIVE since we began. And wouldn’t you know it?… It works!

There are no good ways to lose your job. There are only better ways and worse ways. Emily had to experience an all-around mess, and unfortunately she’s not alone.

This year can be whatever we want it to be. It doesn’t have to be another year of record turnover, lagging engagement, hiring troubles, skills gaps, layoffs, and the like. We have the power to make 2023 something far better: a year of open doors.

Just about every employer has been quick to place blame on a so-called talent shortage, but that’s an unfortunate misreading at best and at worst a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation. It’s not like the talent has abruptly disappeared or gone into hiding. No, we’re looking at something different entirely here. We’re looking at a talent standoff.

Right now, companies executing layoffs are only openly communicating with employees when it’s too late to do anything else but cut them.

Most of the ideas in the ether are missing a HUGE element of what keeps people in their organizations: opportunity.

Up isn’t the only way to move, and not everyone wants to move up anyway.

There comes a time in every organization’s life cycle when it gets harder to keep track of talent.

Last year I set out to build software that makes it easy for people to stay at their current company. I’ve long believed that mobility is a missing link in recruiting and retention. For AGES, we have focused on dumping new names into the top of the funnel and has become (maybe it always was) an unsustainable model.

Employers have open jobs to offer candidates, and candidates look for open jobs with employers. This simple exchange is what’s left when talent acquisition is stripped down to its most basic level. When we think about what actually leads to a candidate pursuing, taking, and staying in a role, things get a bit more complicated.

We all experience a certain reality every time we get up and proceed through a workday. We know who the people are that work for and with us, we know what their jobs are, and we have some idea of what they do day-to-day. This reality is the one we know. It’s the way things are.

No matter what is going on in our world of work, nothing is in our control. We can influence. We can try, but at the end of it all, it’s out of our control.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE control. I love to be in control of my life and livelihood, it’s why I have chosen to start my own business. Just like 9 million others in the last two years.

It seems like change is the only constant in the workforce right now. Anyone who keeps an eye on the news can tell you that waves of layoffs and reports of job growth have been materializing side by side for a while now, with no signs of stopping. Every industry is shifting and changing with the times, growing in some areas and shrinking in others.

Data drives so much of everything that happens in our vast world of work. Every day, countless decisions are made based on data, those decisions produce more data, the new data leads to new decisions, and on and on and on.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are tasked with choosing between two internal candidates to move forward with in the search to fill a very important role at your company. How do you make your decision?

Managers don’t want to lose good people. Honestly, we get it. We wrote a whole post about just how difficult it is to watch rockstar team members leave said team. We also know, through statistics and experience, that managerial resistance is the #1 thing standing in the way of internal talent mobility.

Sometimes, finding the right person for a job requires casting the widest net possible. It goes without saying that the internal talent pool can’t be overlooked. Of course, the external talent pool is vast and worth exploring. There is one category of candidates, however, that doesn’t get talked about or tapped into nearly enough.

That category is alumni.

Everyone experiences rejection at one point or another. It’s an unpleasant yet unavoidable feature of living out life as a human being. It’s also what many people will point to as a negative and potentially disastrous side effect of embracing internal mobility.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: talent mobility is about so much more than promoting high performers. 

That conventional definition of mobility is the tunnel vision view. It’s far too narrow for its adherents to see any of the benefits that come with embracing the concept as a whole. Promotions, otherwise known as upward mobility, are just a piece of the puzzle.

I hear this one all the time when I am introducing WORQDRIVE to people.

“ We already have a solution”

My response every time is: And how is it working out for you?