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Internal talent marketplaces (ITMs), which organizations use to match workers and roles, can increase job satisfaction and engagement, reduce turnover, and allow executives to access diverse perspectives about key assignments. Users have an incentive and an opportunity to share information about their skills, interests, and ambitions, including valuable personal information that is usually omitted from résumés. ITMs take a variety of forms. Some function like social networks, where workers and managers interact to find matches. Others allow employees to rank their preferred assignments and use an algorithm to find optimal placements. But matching talent to opportunities requires balancing business objectives, agility, workers' desires for certain jobs, and the need to avoid disrupting existing work. Those challenges confound organizations from every sector. The authors have designed, implemented, and evaluated ITMs for more than a decade in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors, with partners across the globe. In this article they review the pros and cons of using an ITM, explain how to build and optimize one, and recommend ways to align employee preferences and the company's needs.

This case describes how Google designed and launched an internal matching market to assign individual workers with projects and managers. The case evaluates how marketplace design considerations -- and several alternative staffing models -- could affect the company's goals and workers' well-being. It discusses the details of implementation as well as the intended (and unintended) consequences of the internal match system. The case concludes with a debate about how the Chameleon marketplace could expand to include more Googlers and illustrates what to consider when thinking about launching new matching markets in organizations.