Understand Your Roots

One of the greatest indicators of success for an organization is how well it retains talent and moves it up and out through the organization. To do this optimally, HR must understand what our data tells us about our internal mobility.

The easy early victory in mobility analytics is correlating mobility to turnover and performance. When in an employee's career does job stagnation lead to turnover? How does a transfer typically impact performance? What about promotions? When you understand the right times and places to leverage internal mobility in order to bolster organization effectiveness, you've already delivered strategic value with analytics.

Build a Success Profile

One of the most powerful things a company can do is understand the correlation between pre-hire data and post-hire success. Mobility, like retention and performance, is an indicator of success for an employee. When you're able to understand what's behind a successful employee for specific functions, you can use that data to improve quality of hire.

Use Mobility as Branding, Internally and Externally

Not every organization has a barista that doubles as a receptionist and air hockey tables in the lobby. For those that don't (and those that do), you've got to set yourself apart from your competition in some other way, in order to attract and retain top talent. Several of our clients are using their mobility analytics to do just that.

When HR has the data to understand which parts of the organization, or which managers, are nurturing and promoting top performers up and out into the rest of the organization, they can promote those behaviors. Oftentimes managers' gut instinct is to hang on to their talent for dear life. By rewarding and promoting managers and groups that promote mobility, HR can change this for the positive.

Furthermore, arming your recruiters with data can be a huge competitive advantage. A client of ours puts a lot of effort into hiring salespeople in a very competitive marketplace. It's a constant battle for the top talent. Our analytics showed that the sales group has the highest internal promotion rate in the entire company. After two years, over half of the salespeople had moved up at least one level, and over 20% had actually moved on to a completely different role. Part of the recruiting pitch became "if you join us in sales, you have a tremendous opportunity to advance your career with us". Sure, everyone says it, but your competitors probably can't show the data to back it up.

This client has seen tremendous positive results from the effort