Internal talent mobility remains a significant challenge for organizations despite widespread recognition of its importance. While companies understand the value of deploying existing talent to meet changing business needs, they often lack the scientific approach needed to make this work at scale. Many organizations collect a lot of data on people during their hiring process but fail to use it throughout the employee lifecycle, creating artificial barriers between departments and limiting career movement when it’s needed most.
So, how can organizations apply scientific principles to talent mobility to create more dynamic internal labor markets that benefit everyone?
My guest this week is Lucy Beaumont, Solutions Lead, Talent Management at SHL. In our conversation, Lucy shares valuable insights from her work applying scientific assessment methodologies to internal mobility challenges.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How are we defining “skills-based hiring”?
• The difference between perishable skills, semi-durable skills, and durable skills
• The three main barriers preventing effective internal mobility
• Mapping skills across the organization in a scaleable way
• Scientific approaches to balancing build, buy and borrow talent strategies.
• Building workforce resilience through talent intelligence
• What does the future look like for talent mobility?
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00:00
Matt Alder
Why do organizations know so little about the durable skills their own employees possess? Are we losing our best talent simply because we can’t see beyond their current role? The science behind which skills truly drive career mobility isn’t just important. It might be the difference between building a dynamic internal talent marketplace or watching your best people walk out the door. Keep listening to discover how to get it right. Support for this podcast is provided by shl, a talent intelligence company. From hiring and development to talent mobility and workforce planning, SHL’s assessment solutions and objective workforce insights take the guesswork out of people decisions.
00:46
Matt Alder
With more than 45 years of experience and proven results, SHL’s unique blend of science and data, combined with predictive analytics and AI are helping HR teams to transform their talent strategy, uncover hidden skills and potential in people, and redefine career opportunities. SHL can help you optimize performance and decision making at every stage of the talent lifecycle. Visit SHL.com to find out more. Hi there. Welcome to episode 694 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Internal mobility remains a significant challenge for organizations despite widespread recognition of its importance. While companies understand the value of deploying existing talent to meet changing business needs, they often lack the scientific approach needed to make this work at scale.
02:00
Matt Alder
Many organizations collect a lot of data on people during their hiring process, but fail to use it throughout the employee lifecycle, creating artificial barriers between departments and limiting career movement when it’s needed the most. So how can organisations apply scientific principles to talent mobility to create more dynamic internal labour markets that benefit everyone? My guest this week is Lucy Beaumont, Solutions lead talent management at shl. In our conversation, Lucy shares valuable insights from her work applying scientific assessment methodologies to internal mobility challenges. Hi Lucy and welcome to the podcast.
02:42
Lucy Beaumont
Hi Matt, great to be here.
02:44
Matt Alder
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
02:49
Lucy Beaumont
Yeah, sure. So I’m Lucy Beaumont and I’m the global talent management solution owner here at shl.
02:56
Matt Alder
Fantastic. Now we’re going to be talking about talentability and skills and all these kind of things. And before we start, I just want to be very clear about definition of skills that we’re using because I get into lots of conversations about skills based organizations and skills based hiring and also skills based mobility, those kind of things. And sometimes I find myself talking at cross purposes to people in terms of what we Mean, so talk us through your sort of definition of skills based hiring, all that sort of stuff.
03:26
Lucy Beaumont
Yeah, well I’m glad I’m not the only one because I definitely have the same the number of times I’ll talk to HR leaders about skills and realise we’re all talking about different things. So I think it’s a really good place to start and just sort of level set and I’ll even find it’s worth having that conversation within an organization to make sure even multiple stakeholders are having this consistent language around skills. So we have a framework that we use and I find it really helpful to give to organizations and say, hey, take this back in, talk to different stakeholders and use this to think about the different types of skills. Because it’s a big word, it’s, you know, certainly got a lot of tension in the last three to five years, more so probably than ever before.
04:06
Lucy Beaumont
But it does encompass a number of things. So the way that we try and look at it and bear with me here, but we think about it like a tree. And so on your tree you have your leaves and your leaves are your perishable skills. So hard technical skills. These are skills that are super important for can you do the job right now what we know is that they change quite quickly, in fact faster than ever before. Sometimes, you know, three, six 12 months time and the technology changes and the skills you need to perform your job change. So we refer to those as the leaves because they fall off the tree, you know, every three, six 12 months as the season changes and our technology changes. But super important, you know, and feed into different parts of your talent programs and talent management.
04:52
Lucy Beaumont
So you’ve got your leaves, then you move down into the trunk of the tree and this is your sort of semi durable skills. So things like functional skills, really important, a bit more enduring. They’re not going to change as quickly as our leads and our technical skills, but we do expect them to change and we see that as industry shift, the energy industry going through huge change at the moment. So we do see those change, but they’re really core to what you do and it’s almost that expert knowledge that you have coming into an organization. Then at the bottom of the tree you have what we would refer to as durable skills. So this could be human skills and people skills, some people call them soft skills. And so these are your more behaviorally based skills.
05:37
Lucy Beaumont
So these are critical thinking, the way you’re going to show up at work, how you’re going to interact with people, how you’re Going to manage others, teamwork, collaboration, all of those good stuff. And I think with those durable skills, when we come to look at different talent practices, they become super important as jobs and work is shifting so quickly. Those are the things that are going to be enduring. And so even if you think about World Economics Forum and they’re sort of saying what are the skills that are in jobs that are sun rising, those jobs that are growing quickest and it’s those human skills. So you know, they’re really getting a lot of attention right now. But all the different types of skills, all important, you’re going to need all of them in your talent programmes.
06:18
Lucy Beaumont
And it’s often about understanding what skills are we talking about? What skills do we need? And then creating your processes around that.
06:26
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. And as you mentioned, it’s a very sort of disruptive time in the world of work and skills and all that sort of stuff. I know that there are lots of talent acquisition people listening who are now finding themselves kind of increasingly working with, doing talent management style tasks. From an organization perspective, I mean, how can organizations balance internal mobility, upskilling and external hiring to sort of build the agile workforce that they need for these changing times?
06:56
Lucy Beaumont
Yeah, I think getting that right is the dream for all chros. Right? Like being able to have that sort of strategic view of talent so that you can balance those multiple different things. And I think it takes time and I think it takes intention. I think that’s one of the big things. You have to step back from doing what you’re doing because we’ve got such good recruiters and TA teams are so excellent and going out and finding talent, bringing into the organization, it’s almost the only option that we pull. In many instances, that’s the lever that we’re really strong in. So we pull that quite regularly. But if you sit back from it a little bit and you sort of think about, okay, well what is the types of talent that we’re going to need today and in the future?
07:35
Lucy Beaumont
And then you start to think about, well, what talent shortages do we have externally? What type of talent are we going to need? And you start to think about, well, do we already have this talent within the organization? Do we start leveraging that from an upskilling, reskilling, you know, an L and D process to try and create the talent that we need if we can’t find it externally? So it’s sort of having that sit back, you know, build by those types of conversations. But I think what it takes is things like breaking down those barriers. So, you know, the fact that I’m on Recruiting Future podcast is a testament to the time that we’re in whereby, you know, 15 years ago, talent acquisition, talent management were on completely different sides of the room, you know, doing different things. Not talking, not sharing data.
08:19
Lucy Beaumont
Those silos are coming down faster than ever before. And so recruiters are really leaning into this internal mobility side and actually leveraging their skills as recruiters and finding talent externally to help find talent internally. So it’s about breaking down barriers, it’s about having consistent data. So, you know, there’s so much data in recruiting when you’re going out to bring people into the organization, really understand the talent, the skills that people have. And actually when you look internally, that’s not always the case.
08:48
Lucy Beaumont
So how do we create a consistent data framework, consistent skills frameworks, often so that we can measure and compare people internally, externally and where I think one of the big things that people are trying to get their heads around now is if we’re going to have talent shortages, if it’s going to be more and more expensive and difficult to find talent, and we know that we’re going to be, you know, we don’t know what jobs people are going to do in six or 12 months time, then we need to be more agile with the people that we already have so that we can sort of leverage them, grow them, develop them, which ultimately is what people want as well. So it’s taking this more sort of holistic, strategic approach, I think, across everything.
09:27
Lucy Beaumont
Talent acquisition, talent management, L and D, all of these things coming together to work, you know, consistent data, consistent processes, consistent operating models and so on?
09:36
Matt Alder
Why is it so difficult for companies to do this? What are the barriers in terms of kind of unlocking that internal talent, in terms of understanding what’s in the organization and moving people around, different jobs, different departments, different work areas in a kind of a more scientific way.
09:51
Lucy Beaumont
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that’s where people are scratching their heads right now, actually, because everyone gets that internal mobility is a good thing, you know, and the reasons to do that. And we know people want it, businesses want it. We did some data actually, that I would say there were three top things that came up when you look at this. So one would be stakeholder buy in. So, you know, often actually leadership are bought into mobility. They see the business case for it, but if they don’t, you’ve got to build that and you’ve got to get leadership buy in. But then it comes down to the Other different types of stakeholders that you’re going to be working with. So both within hr, but also line managers, business leaders, and making them sort of understand this more enterprise approach to talent.
10:35
Lucy Beaumont
So it’s very difficult. When you’re a line manager, your target is, you know, perform, meet your KPIs, get your team to deliver X, Y and Z. You’ve got top performers in that team that are doing that day in, day out. They’re unhappy. Maybe they want to move somewhere else, maybe they want to grow. You don’t want to lose them. Of course you don’t, you know, so actually to get people’s mindset shifted, thinking about how sharing talent, moving talent around the business is a good thing for everybody, you know, takes a bit of intention when it comes to thinking of putting yourself in the shoes of the line manager. You know, how do we incentivize them to see this as a positive?
11:10
Lucy Beaumont
How do we build a culture of learning and talent mobility so that people think it’s a good thing if this high performer in my team moves over to that team or function elsewhere? Because actually the organization as a whole is going to grow and benefit. And recruiters will know this day in, day out. But if we don’t do that, these people will leave anyway. And so then it becomes the recruiter’s problem to find somebody to bring in. So, you know, stakeholder buy in is a really big one. The other one is data deficit. So actually talent acquisition have so much data when it comes to people and they have so, you know, really good data that they’ve driven into, they know what they’re looking for, you know, time to hire all of these sort of information that they’ve got.
11:53
Lucy Beaumont
When you come to look internally at employees, nothing there and really difficult to actually get that same level of data. And that’s not to say that there isn’t data there, but the data quality that we tend to have on employees is serious lacking because we’ve assessed them when they’ve come in. We probably haven’t bought that data into the organization, although we should. And I think as organizations are driving towards efficiencies, TA are starting to say we’ve collected good data. Do you want to use it for onboarding, do you want to use it for development and mobility? But that often doesn’t happen. And so then you’ve got people that might have been with the business 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, and actually you lose track of what skills they have. Where could we best place them? And so there’s just A lack of data.
12:36
Lucy Beaumont
And I hear HR sort of saying, well, you know, we could ask people, we ask managers, or maybe we infer it and, you know, we try and look at the jobs they’ve done to sort of see what skills they might have. And what they’re sort of saying is it’s better than nothing. You know, this is data that we have, so we’re going to use it. But the really startling thing that came out of that research is nobody trusted the data that they had. So they had data, they were probably making decisions on that data, but they didn’t trust it. They didn’t think that it was accurate. You know, does this person really have those skills?
13:09
Lucy Beaumont
They, they often thought that it was biased, you know, because we’ve asked managers to rate people skills and not out of bad intent, but of course, managers just are going to bring their own biases. They’re not going to have the full picture that, you know, these things creep in. We know that they do. And so consistently we find that organizations don’t have that level of objective data internally. And I think that shift is coming. I think were talking previously and I said, I remember trying to get retailers to assess people coming in to work in stores, and nobody wanted to do that 15 years ago. Why would we do that? We can get loads of people want to come and work here now. Everyone’s doing that because they see the importance of getting the right people in making fair decisions.
13:51
Lucy Beaumont
And we’re seeing that increasingly on the talent management side when it comes to employees at every level, if we’re going to move them, make decisions on them, you know, redeploy talent, we need hard, objective data that we can stand by. And so that shift is happening, but I think that’s one of the big barriers. The final one, apologies, it’s a long answer, but the final one that came out of the research was a thirst for technology. And so what we find is that within talent acquisition, there’s a lot of tools specialized to help you bring in the right people, from sourcing to assessment to bringing them in. When we look at talent management, we’ve got a lot of those tools at the senior leadership level and high potential identification and so on.
14:35
Lucy Beaumont
But when you look more broadly, we haven’t got tools that are specialized in measuring people and understanding their fit to different roles at scale. And I think that we’ve been trying to tackle that for a number of years and now we’re at the time where AI technology can help us do that. And actually there are specialized talent mobility solutions that can actually help us understand what skills does somebody have? And not just skills they’ve done before, but what potential do they have? What skills do we need people to have in different job families, in different jobs across the whole business? And then how do we really align people to those? Create development plans so they can get there and have that sort of aggregate at scale information or on employees within the workforce.
15:26
Matt Alder
I’ve had lots of conversations with some very big organizations about how they are building kind of matrices of skills within their organization and all those kind of things. And everyone has really struggled with that. And you know, sometimes they’re looking at things that are self reported, sometimes they can’t keep up with everything because they’re just capturing those kind of hard skills that are going out of date very quickly. And it’s kind of been a sort of real conundrum that sort of stops this kind of mobility happening in the way that it should be. And quite rightly you’re kind of identifying technology and systems in terms of doing that. But a lot of this does come down to those actually mapping those durable skills, doesn’t it, in the first place?
16:06
Matt Alder
Because that’s what predicates, perhaps what people would be predicates, where people move and what they’ll be good at.
16:12
Lucy Beaumont
It absolutely does, yeah. And I think that’s. That has been. You’ve hit the nail on the head. That’s the challenge that people are having right now and they’re chasing these skills. They can’t keep up, they’ve got no good way of measuring them. And perhaps they’re not focusing on the right skills for that durable sort of talent, long term talent planning, workforce planning. And so a big sort of area that we’ve been focusing on is on those human skills. All of the research that we’re leaning into and seeing around the world is that those durable skills are the ones that are going to be important. Change, adaptability, resilience, all of those things. Actually. Can we upskill people? Can we reskill people?
16:46
Lucy Beaumont
And so one of the things that we see consistently is even within a framework that has the human centric skills, it has a heavy load of overlap whereby different departments, maybe we’ve got mergers and acquisitions that have come in with different terminology. I looked at a framework that had 30 different definitions around communication and they were all trying to say the same thing. And so it’s just that consistency of well, you have that type of communication, this person has this different communication. Are they actually the same thing? And makes it really difficult. If you think about an employee trying to move within the organization, they look at the skills that they’ve been told they have. They look at the skills of a job maybe they want to move to and the two things look like apple and pears.
17:31
Lucy Beaumont
So they’re sort of looking at them and going, well, I could never become, you know, a marketing analyst because I’ve got none of those skills. When actually if you were to have that consistent framework there, you’d be able to say, oh, okay, it’s about, you know, relationship building, communication. Well, I have got those skills so actually I could be a good fit. So we’ve almost created those accidental barriers. And one of the things, as a psychologist we sort of have for many years understood competencies and behaviors and we know that there’s only a finite amount of these things that matter when it comes to people at work and the ways they’re going to show up from a human perspective. And when we get down to the human skills, that doesn’t go away. And so sh.
18:14
Lucy Beaumont
I’ve spent quite a long time researching a model of what are all of the human skills that are relevant at work from a How do we have them as discrete skills so they’re not overlapping? How do we have them as actually being relevant and then covering the whole spectrum. And my remit was it’d be nice if we could have a nice number of skills here. Like 100 would be nice or like something round number. We have 96. And so there’s these 96 human skills that essentially cover every aspect of people at work from that durable human centric perspective. And so, you know, we don’t need to have frameworks that have got hundreds and hundreds of skills in because you’ve got duplication there.
18:55
Lucy Beaumont
And it just creates this lack of consistency, these barriers, but actually aligning and often what we’re doing, we’re using an AI tool to sort of pass these mad frameworks. We’ve got so many skills in through our model to sort of identify this actually. How do they align to these 96 things that we know matter? Research based, evidence based approach sort of get you there. So yeah, I think we’re on that journey as well. And do you know, sometimes we’re making it too difficult. Sometimes simplicity is the key.
19:24
Matt Alder
Absolutely. I think that science bit is so important because again, when I’ve had conversations with organizations about building out skills profiles and things like that, when people are kind of self reporting their skills, the thing that came up the most was people skills which could mean anything. So, you know, the importance of breaking that down is obviously key. And you made a really good point earlier in the conversation about the fact that when someone comes into an organization, even if we have a terrible recruitment process, we will still sit down and talk to them about their skills, their aspirations, their experience, all of that kind of stuff. And it’s kind of insane that is kind of lost in the mix and not sort of traveled. You know, it doesn’t travel with them through the organization.
20:08
Matt Alder
And having that consistency and measurement throughout the entire employee journey is critical, isn’t it?
20:13
Lucy Beaumont
Yeah, it is. I mean, I think we’re moving into a world of talent, intelligence, and that means harnessing that data. It’s almost a disservice to those individuals that have given their time and information to share their, you know, to complete assessments, to do interviews, to share information that we don’t reuse it and we don’t create a consistent model and actually update that over time. So actually, you had these skills and you went and did some learning and development. How have they changed over time? HR want to know that, Employees want to know that.
20:41
Lucy Beaumont
And I think the really interesting thing is when you think about the goals that an organization has from a HR perspective, and if it’s a skills, you know, on the skills journey or not, it’s about understanding my talent, understanding my gaps, understanding my strengths, and then, you know, making decisions about, well, how do I upskill, reskill, buy all of those things. When you look at an employee, it’s about, what skills do I have, what gaps do I have, what strengths do I have, how can I upskill? So, you know, the really nice thing that I don’t think we’ve unlocked yet is that HR and employees are both trying to do exactly the same thing.
21:16
Lucy Beaumont
So how do we come alongside each other, collect the right data, use that over time so we can develop people, move them, and, you know, upskill them across our business, and they get exactly the same. People don’t want to leave today. You know, that’s. That’s the world we’re in. In 2025. We’re not seeing that sort of appetite for people wanting to jump ship so often, but they want opportunities to grow and develop, and we want opportunities to grow and develop them as well. So, you know, the door is. Is open. We just need to sort of go through it and connect the dots, I think.
21:45
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And as a final question for you, obviously technology AI is making things possible that just that weren’t possible. At all a few years ago. What’s the future look like, do you think? Where is this taking us in terms of impact on the overall organization? You know, what are things going to look like in a few years time?
22:04
Lucy Beaumont
That’s a really big question. And it’s that killer question, isn’t it? We’re all trying to understand what the future looks like, I think. And from an organization’s perspective, the one thing that we know is that jobs won’t look the same, the organization, probably the industry won’t look the same because we’re seeing such mega shifts created by technology. And so we’re all expecting that. And I guess the constant is sort of thinking about how do I scenario plan, how do I build agility, how do I build strength within the organization such that if a seismic technology shift comes and hits us or even an industry shift comes and hits us, how do I know that I’ve got the strength within to be able to understand where we go next to continue thriving and surviving in what is just going to keep being a disrupted world?
22:55
Lucy Beaumont
And I think that having these views of the talent that isn’t isolated to recruitment and talent management and L and D gives that sort of big workforce planning picture. So you can start saying, okay, I know that technology is going to be important. How do we build data literacy? How do we build people that can grow with it and wrap themselves around AI? How can we do that effectively? And then you look at where are my gaps? Do I have people in the organization today that I could take there? Or is the gap just too big and I’m going to have to go and find talent to do that? So I think to be effective in a future that. I’m probably not answering your question because I don’t know what the future looks like. I’d definitely be lying if I said I did.
23:36
Lucy Beaumont
But I think the thing that organizations need to navigate it is good data, good intelligence, talent intelligence really. I think knowing that if this type of shift came along, we might have three options and our talent is going to be really effective in option one. So actually I’m going to influence the board and the decision makers within the organization say we just can’t do that because we don’t have the right people. So our best bet would be to go here. That type of intelligence is priceless. And I think that’s where we should be concentrating now. How do we build ourselves up to be resilient when it comes to change?
24:16
Matt Alder
Lucy, thank you very much for talking to me.
24:19
Lucy Beaumont
It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
24:22
Matt Alder
My thanks to Lucy. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
