Some of today’s most progressive businesses have discovered the benefits of establishing internal mobility programs. According to Deloitte Insights, these organizations have maximized their resources and coped better with changing businesses environments through a shift in focus from external to to internal recruiting.

Consider some common examples of how internal mobility programs work to benefit companies:

• Internal mobility programs help companies by ensuring they find the best candidates for open positions from among their current workforce, so they can depend less upon less-efficient outside recruiting.
• In turn, this focus can help businesses function better while improving their talent pool and employee morale and retention.

Businesses that hope to realize all of the benefits of their mobility program should consider using talent mobility software. Not only can an internal mobility platform help match people with positions, they also help the company’s leadership spot new talent. Good Internal mobility tools also come with built-in collaboration features. This way, everybody can work together to keep developing employees and supporting various staffing needs.

For instance, hiring managers can work with human resources and employees to achieve the highest levels of transparency, satisfaction, and efficiency. In this way, technology and people work together to simplify what could have become a very complex and error-prone task in larger organizations.

Many companies face a “talent gap” that they might better help solve by recruiting from the inside instead of always looking outside. As businesses struggle to retain employees and compete for talent, one Wharton study discovered that companies with internal mobility programs can benefit in multiple ways:

• Internal hires tend to perform better than external hires when they start their new jobs.
• Recruits from within also earn average salaries about 20 percent lower than outside recruits.
• In addition, offering employees a chance to gain a wider range of experience and skills can help improve their career prospects and encourage loyalty.

In the past, employees may have thought moves always had to include promotions to benefit their careers. Really, one purpose of internal mobility can include solving skills shortages by training current employees in the skills they need to be more useful in an increasingly demanding environment. Employees may move somewhat laterally to a job with a similar title and pay but still benefit both themselves and their company.

As an example, a customer service representative might have demonstrated her excellent communication skills and product knowledge, so she might be a great candidate to move to inside sales. If a lot of the training for the inside sales job involves learning about the products and company policies, it seems obvious that a successful customer service representative would have an advantage over an external recruit.

While this example employee didn’t initially move to a higher pay grade, gaining knowledge of both departments should increase her value and chances for a promotion later, especially in a company where sales and service are tightly aligned.

Any business needs to develop their internal mobility policy to help them avoid some potential pitfalls. As an example, Harvard Business Review mentioned a large and unnamed company that suffered because their own internal mobility process involved moving a select group of identified “leaders” quite frequently.

For instance, new projects generally took from three to five years. At the same time, the rotating decision makers seldom stayed on any one project longer than 18 months. This caused two problems:

• Very often, the people they hoped to groom never stuck around long enough to see projects through or for the transient employees to have much accountability for long-term results.
• The bulk of employees who weren’t selected for grooming felt stuck in their positions, and of course, they were the ones who had to take responsibility for the projects.

As a result, quality suffered. In fact, internal auditors found that the company’s version of “internal talent mobility best practices” probably cost the enterprise at least $1 billion a year. To overcome this challenge, the company decided to make a couple of changes that helped turn them around:

• They began extending the needed time in place to meet the demands of various projects, so their mobile talent could see them through.
• They also increased in-place performance rewards, so people who did not get moved around still had a way to benefit.

Situations in various companies differ; however, it’s important to set internal mobility policies that focus upon benefiting the entire company and all employees and not just the careers of a select few.

Despite some potential obstacles, plenty of internal mobility statistics unveil the potential for solid strategies to benefit businesses. For example, one Lever study found that hiring internal has proven three times more efficient and twice as fast as trying to recruit new employees.

For one more benefit of a strategy for internal mobility example, consider that replacing talent that left because they didn’t care for their job prospects at their current company can cost up to double their annual salary. The program itself can help keep employees loyal and engaged. Thus, an internal mobility strategy should include considering employees first for talent hunts, offering employees a clear and somewhat democratic path to inside moves, and keeping an archive of all inside talent.

Of course, talent mobility tools can help implement all stages of this strategy. They display positions and talent in a place where the right people can access and use the information.

While businesses might supply all employees with an internal mobility PDF to make sure they understand how the program works, they can use an app to actually implement the program. The app will keep the archive of employees and their skills and of open positions. This kind of software can automatically display jobs for employees to apply for an also, offer managers a view of internal recruits to contact.

Developing a talent mobility program can even help shape a company’s culture by giving employees a better view of more facets of business and of course, letting them know that they don’t have to leave to find a different job. Just a few results include lower turnover, more efficient recruiting, and less concern over skills gaps.

In turn, these can all translate into the very tangible benefits of reduced expenses and in the case of improved morale and productivity, higher quality and performance. Indeed, businesses should devise their talent mobility programs with these goals and internal mobility metrics in mind.