LinkedIn adds internal mobility features to help employers retain talent

The millions of workers who rely on LinkedIn to apply for new jobs may soon find themselves taking new gigs at their current employer.

LinkedIn is trying to make it easier for companies to hire existing employees for open jobs and reduce turnover in the process. With its recently released internal mobility tool in LinkedIn Recruiter,  employers will be prompted to consider internal candidates for open positions.

Though internal mobility isn’t a new concept, it has become more widely recognized amid the tight labor market as an important retention strategy. With this tool, the Microsoft-owned networking giant joins a growing list of companies—including applicant-tracking systems iCIMS, SmartRecruiters, and Jobvite, and talent marketplace Gloat—in the internal mobility space.

What’s new? When searching for candidates for open roles, LinkedIn Recruiter will now highlight internal candidates alongside external ones to recruiters.

To encourage internal candidates to apply for open roles, LinkedIn has also introduced what it calls “role guides.” With this new feature, recruiters can outline in job postings the exact skills they are looking for in candidates. It isn’t meant to replace job descriptions, but rather supplement them in a way that LinkedIn hopes will get internal candidates to apply to jobs based on their competencies, not their past positions.

So, for example, a cashier at a retailer might have the skills required for a corporate sales role, but their most recent job title might disqualify them from consideration. By emphasizing skills over titles in the hiring process, recruiters may see them in a different light.

Why this? Why now? Recent reports from McKinsey and Pew Research Center found a lack of internal mobility opportunities to be among the top reasons for employee turnover in 2021. During the Covid-19 pandemic, some companies used internal mobility to reduce turnover and staffing shortages in key areas.

“Today’s leaders need to embrace internal mobility and make it part of their holistic hiring strategy,” Hari Srinivasan, VP of product at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post announcing the product changes. “This lies not only in making internal hiring the norm—encouraging recruiting teams and hiring managers to tap into the qualified talent pool they already have to fill open roles—but also creating internal growth pathways that align with employees’ career goals.”—AK

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