Standard Chartered is using an artificial intelligence-based Talent Marketplace, developed by New York-headquartered Gloat, to match employees’ skills with project-specific internal gigs. Using a “skills passport,” employees can apply for projects, enhancing their skills and unlocking opportunities to participate in more internal roles.
Following an initial 12,000-person pilot in India, which resulted in the biggest increase of year-on-year career satisfaction, it has been used by 39,000 employees, generating $8.5 million in productivity through 2,700 projects to date.
When employers talk about “the ‘war for talent,’ it is a ‘war for future skills’ that will disproportionately impact business growth and client outcomes,” wrote Tanuj Kapilashrami, chief strategy and talent officer at Standard Chartered, in a blog post. “Technology is disrupting the way we work so quickly that businesses like ours will have a massive responsibility to start focusing not just on employment, but employability.”
This is backed up by the World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Jobs Report, in which nearly half the companies surveyed highlighted building a learning culture and improving talent progression as the most promising ways to cultivate talent availability in the coming years.
Kapilashrami adds that the “skills passport” offers opportunities to reskill or upskill employees.
According to Gloat, talent-matching platforms work like Netflix recommendations: By collecting data about user preferences, they can make tailored recommendations based on an employee’s experiences, the skills they want to build, and what they want to achieve.
In an HR Tech conference opening keynote, Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of HR consultancy Josh Bersin Company, noted, “Internal mobility and talent marketplaces and identifying adjacent skills for employees—allowing people to do gig work—are life-or-death survival strategies in an economy like we’re in today.”
Schneider Electric, a Gloat client, says its marketplace created savings of over $15 million, while fellow client Seagate witnessed a 58% increase in the participation and assignment of women to open internal positions. From cost savings to more agile cross-functional teams, talent marketplaces are future-proofing businesses, aiding career development and improving mobility.