September 26, 2025

Internal Mobility & Employee Experience: How to Master Internal Hiring

By David Dungay

Hiring externally has become second nature for many companies. A role opens, recruiters go to market, and weeks later, a stranger walks in. It works sometimes. Other times, the team waits, projects lose steam, and the newcomer struggles to fit.

Meanwhile, people already inside the business get overlooked. They know the systems. They know the customers. Many are waiting for their next step. When those doors stay closed, frustration builds. When they open, careers move forward without anyone handing in a notice. That’s what the internal mobility is really about.

Mobility doesn’t have to mean promotion. It can be a lateral move into a different team, a stretch project that lasts a few months, or a chance to shadow another role.

The problem is that in most workplaces, none of this is visible. Openings get filled quietly. Managers hold on to their best people. Career talks get pushed aside. Over time, employees stop imagining a future there.

When career mobility becomes part of daily work, everything shifts. Growth is no longer separate from onboarding or engagement. It sits inside the employee journey. People know there is something ahead of them, and that belief makes them stay.

Understanding Internal Mobility: The Different Pathways

Say “career mobility,” and most people picture climbing a ladder. Step after step, straight to the top. But careers don’t really work like that anymore. Growth shows up in different ways, and a good mobility program makes room for all of them. Promotion is the obvious path. Someone takes on extra responsibility, moves into leadership, or runs a bigger team.

But lateral moves matter just as much. A marketer might switch into a product role for a year. An engineer could move into operations to understand how the business runs day-to-day. These shifts build range, and often surface skills the person didn’t even know they had.

Short-term projects are another route. At Uber, employees can spend around 15 percent of their time on “gigs” with other teams. It’s a way to test different roles without making a permanent move. Unilever has a similar setup through its Flex Experiences program, where people take on assignments that broaden their skills while still holding their primary job.

Then there’s mentorship and shadowing. These aren’t formal moves, but they give employees a way to explore career options and build networks inside the company. Sometimes, a few weeks of shadowing a peer can spark more growth than a year in the same chair.

Mobility isn’t one ladder; it’s a corridor filled with doors. The job of HR and leadership is to make sure people know where those doors are and that stepping through them is encouraged.

The Business Case for Internal Mobility: ROI, Retention & Engagement

Hiring has become one of the largest budget drains. Recruiting fees, long vacancy times, and onboarding all add up. Then there’s the gamble: will the new hire fit? Many don’t. Meanwhile, people inside the business are waiting for their next step. Moving them costs less, carries less risk, and keeps experience in-house.

In fact, reports on internal mobility keep showing additional benefits. Employees who make an internal move in their company are 75% more likely to stay there for more than 2 years. That matters when 93% of organizations are worrying about retaining talent.

Mobility pays off in several ways:

• Closing skills gaps. The World Economic Forum estimates half the workforce will need reskilling soon. Mobility is a way to build those skills while putting existing talent to better use.
• Protecting knowledge. When someone leaves, their know-how can walk out with them. Internal moves spread that knowledge across teams, making it less likely to vanish.
• Encouraging innovation. Moving people around brings new perspectives together. At 3M, employees spend part of their time on projects outside their core role. That freedom has produced products that now generate nearly a third of the company’s revenue.
• Supporting diversity. Opening pathways inside the company makes leadership roles more accessible to a broader group of employees.
• Improving customer experience. Skilled, motivated employees bring that energy to the people they serve. Happy employees often mean happier customers.

To put into a financial perspective, one 10-year study found that companies in the top tier of performance filled more than 60% of their roles internally. They also achieved four times the sales per employee compared to low-performing peers, who relied more heavily on external hiring.

Benefits of Internal Mobility: Real Case Studies

The business case is strong on paper, sure. But the impact really gets clear when you start looking at real-life stories, from companies that make internal mobility a priority. For example:

• Hilton: Creating Clear Career Paths: The Thrive@Hilton program gave employees access to career maps, mentors, and posted internal jobs. Engagement rose, turnover fell, and more people pictured a long future at the company.
• T-Mobile: Opening Doors for Everyone: T-Mobile launched its Career Success campaign to rethink development. Employees could explore new roles, take part in job shadowing, and attend career events that showcased different paths. Participation surged, and employees began to see career growth as achievable.
• Procter & Gamble: Building Leaders: P&G has long believed in building leaders from within. It fills 80 percent of its executive roles with internal hires. Culture is preserved, continuity is strong, and employees see leaders who once stood where they stand now.

Building a Thriving Internal Mobility Program

Most companies talk about developing people from within. Fewer have a system that actually makes it happen. One LinkedIn study found that only 15% of employees were ever encouraged to move to a new role in their organization. A mobility program gives shape to what’s often just good intention.

Step 1: Assess Your Current Landscape

You can’t improve what you haven’t measured. Begin by looking at how people already move in the company. Which teams promote from within? Which do not? Are there jobs that always filled from the outside?

The numbers tell one story, like internal hire rates, average tenure in roles, and how many employees have advanced across departments. But listening matters just as much. Ask employees if they even know where to find opportunities. In most organizations, a surprising share will say no.

Step 2: Define Objectives and Metrics

Mobility looks different in every business. For some, the goal is to reduce recruiting costs. For others, it is keeping the leadership pipeline healthy. Decide what matters most, then choose the markers that show progress.

That might be the percentage of jobs filled internally, the length of time employees stay after a move, or the speed of filling roles compared with external hires. Choose a handful that matter to leaders, the ones that prove mobility is more than an HR initiative.

Step 3: Gain Leadership Buy-In & Establish an Advisory Board

Internal mobility shifts how power sits in an organization. That is why executive support is essential. Senior leaders need to see the upside, like lower costs, stronger retention, or more resilience, and they also need to help manage the politics. Managers often fear losing their strongest performers. Without someone higher up making the case, resistance wins.

One way to build that support is with an advisory board. A cross-section of HR, talent, and business leaders who can look ahead at workforce needs, weigh in on succession planning, and keep mobility tied to strategy. At companies like Unilever and Hilton, senior sponsorship has been the difference between programs that thrive and ones that fade after launch.

Step 4: Align Mobility with Strategy & Map Skills

Mobility only sticks if it connects to where the business is headed. If your company is pushing into new markets or doubling down on digital, then your program has to surface the people who can drive that. Otherwise, it becomes a side project that fades when budgets tighten.

Start by mapping skills in a way managers can actually use. Keep track of who has which skills, what projects they have worked on, and what they want to learn next. When a new project appears, you will already know who fits.

IBM offers a good example. Its Blue Matching platform connects employees to short-term projects based on skills and interests. The algorithm makes the match, which reduces bias when decisions depend only on managers. For employees, it opens up opportunities they might never have seen. For IBM, it keeps people engaged while building new capabilities across the company.

Step 5: Remove Barriers to Mobility

Employees will often tell you the problem isn’t opportunity, it’s access. Roles are hidden. Processes are unclear. Or worse, they worry their manager will punish them for applying.

You can’t fix all of that overnight, but you can start by asking. Survey employees about what blocks them. Some barriers are cultural, others are procedural. Tackle them in plain sight. The act of removing roadblocks shows employees you’re serious.

Then, build a process. People won’t gamble on a move if they don’t trust the rules. Set them clearly. Who can apply? What’s the minimum tenure before moving? How are managers expected to handle requests? How will transitions between roles be managed?

At L’Oréal, the POP platform (Positions Open Portal), built with Avature, was designed to make opportunities easier to see. More than 80 percent of roles are now posted internally before they reach the outside market. The change bumped up internal hires and gave employees faith that chances for growth wouldn’t just pass them by.

Step 6: Implement Supporting Infrastructure

Good intentions only go so far. If employees still have to chase job postings across three systems or rely on word of mouth, mobility will stall. That’s where technology comes in.

A talent marketplace platform brings jobs, gigs, and development opportunities into one place. Companies like Vanderlande use these tools to match people to projects based on skills and aspirations. Employees can see options, managers can see talent, and HR can see where the gaps are.

But don’t forget the basics: update your HR policies to back it up. If the system says someone is eligible for a move but the policy blocks them, trust evaporates.

Step 7: Train Managers as Career Enablers

Managers sit at the choke point of mobility. If they hoard talent, the whole system clogs. And often, they’re not being malicious; they’re just under pressure to deliver and don’t want to lose good people.

Training helps, but so does recognition. Teach managers how to have honest career conversations, and show them why exporting talent is a sign of strong leadership. Then back it up with rewards. Some organizations now spotlight managers who’ve successfully moved people into new roles. That kind of recognition changes the culture faster than another workshop.

Step 9: Launch a Pilot Program

Launching across the entire company on the first day is rarely successful. Start smaller. Choose a business unit or region with supportive leaders and test the process there.

During the pilot, track what works and what doesn’t. Did employees actually use the platform? Did managers support moves or resist them? Were policies clear enough to follow? Collect stories too. A few employees making visible moves can do more to build confidence than a whole slide deck.

Step 10: Scale, Iterate & Use Data

A pilot proves the concept, but the real work starts when you roll mobility out to the broader business. Go gradually. Expand into new departments, then regions, and keep listening as you grow. What worked for engineers might not land the same way for sales.

Keep mobility visible. Share dashboards with leaders, highlight employee stories, and keep managers in the loop on results. If people stop hearing about mobility, they’ll assume the program’s lost steam.

Data should be your compass. Track internal fill rates, retention after a move, and time-to-fill compared to external hires. Layer in predictive analytics to spot where demand is rising and where skills are running thin.

Don’t treat the first version as final. The companies that succeed with internal mobility, like IBM, AT&T, and Unilever, all got there by refining, listening, and adapting. They didn’t get everything right the first time. Neither will you. But each adjustment builds trust, and trust is what keeps employees willing to take the leap.

Internal Mobility: Overcoming Common Barriers

Every company says it wants people to grow inside the business. In reality, a handful of familiar obstacles get in the way. They aren’t new, but they show up again and again.

The risk of ignoring them is big. Research shows that only 20% of employees believe they have solid growth opportunities in their current workplace. That leaves 80% ready to look elsewhere if they don’t see a future opening up.

Here are the barriers to watch out for:

Managers Hanging On

It’s common to see managers hold on tightly to their best people. The fear is simple: if someone moves, the team is left short. The problem is that the employee often leaves anyway, just for another company. The healthier approach is to back managers up with quick replacements and to give credit when they support a move. Some firms now celebrate “talent exporters” the same way they celebrate sales wins.

Skills That Don’t Line Up

An employee spots a role they’d love to take, but their CV doesn’t quite match. That gap often kills the application before it starts. A better way is to treat it as a bridge. Short projects, shadowing, or a few months on a cross-team assignment can close the gap. It keeps ambition alive instead of shutting it down.

Systems That Don’t Talk

In many workplaces, opportunities are scattered. A job board here, a learning platform there, and the rest handled through quiet manager conversations. Employees end up piecing things together on their own. Bringing those streams into one place makes it easier for people to see what’s open, and easier for leaders to spot where skills are moving.

Culture That Sends Mixed Signals

The biggest barrier is culture. If leaders say they support mobility but never show it in practice, people don’t believe it. When executives share their own career moves or highlight internal success stories, it normalizes the idea. Without those signals, mobility feels like something for other people, not for everyone.

Measuring Internal Mobility Success

It’s one thing to say mobility matters. It’s another to prove it’s working. Without measurement, mobility can turn into a feel-good story that leaders reference in meetings, but employees don’t actually experience.

What to measure depends on what matters to the business. A few signals always stand out:

• Internal Fill Rates: Start simple. Track how many roles are being filled by current employees. If the number barely moves, the system isn’t working. High-performing companies often aim for more than half of the roles to go to insiders.
• Retention After a Move: It’s not just about getting someone into a new role. The real question is: do they stay? Looking at retention one or two years after an internal transfer shows whether those moves create stability or delay turnover.
• Time to Fill: Mobility should make hiring faster. If it still takes months to place someone, there’s a process issue. Internal hiring should cut that timeline sharply, freeing up recruiting capacity.
• Employee Sentiment: Hard numbers tell part of the story, but listening matters too. Short surveys, feedback after applications, and even exit interviews can highlight whether employees feel they had a fair shot at mobility. Tools that track employee experience signals.

Building a Mobility-Focused Culture

Changing how a company thinks about mobility doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a software switch or a new policy document. It’s a shift in how opportunities are shared and how managers behave. Breaking it into phases helps keep the work real.

Start with an internal audit, set your goals, train your managers, and implement systems (internal talent marketplaces) to help. Gather feedback and scale with data.

Do it right, and you’ll be able to hold on to their best people and keep skills in play. You’ll also build a reputation as a place where careers can grow. That reputation makes recruiting easier, too.

In the end, mobility is less about filling vacancies and more about giving people room to move. Once they see that room, they usually choose to stay.