Internal Mobility

Internal mobility software enables organizations to identify, match and move employees into new roles, projects or development opportunities without first turning to the external market. It replaces informal, manager-dependent processes with structured workflows, AI-driven matching and employee-facing career portals.

For large enterprises, the business case centers on two converging pressures: rising external hiring costs and growing employee expectations for visible career development. A L’Oréal workforce survey found that 56 percent of former employees cited a lack of visibility into internal career opportunities as a primary reason for leaving. At enterprise scale, informal networks cannot surface or move talent fast enough to meet business demand.

Avature Internal Mobility provides a fully branded talent marketplace with skills-gap analysis, personalized career paths, AI-powered opportunity matching and program analytics. The platform connects natively with Avature’s succession planning, performance management and onboarding modules, giving enterprises an integrated view of internal talent supply and demand.

Organizations with large, distributed workforces, high external hiring costs and measurable attrition among high performers gain the most from structured internal mobility programs. Companies with 5,000 or more employees across multiple geographies are best positioned to realize value quickly.

The strongest candidates are enterprises experiencing retention pressure in critical functions, visible skills gaps or employee feedback indicating insufficient career development options. Industries including telecommunications, aviation, consumer goods and professional services, where institutional knowledge and long tenure carry strategic value, typically see the highest return on mobility programs.

Avature is used by global enterprises, including 9 of the world’s 15 largest banks and 5 of the 10 largest tech companies. L’Oréal reached 75 percent of vacancies filled by internal candidates after launching its Avature-built mobility portal. Jack Henry saw a 100% increase in internal mobility rate in three years since launching its program with Avature. The fintech provider now fills 40% of roles internally (excluding entry-level jobs).

Results vary by program design, leadership support and employee adoption, but measurable outcomes typically emerge within the first year of launch. Organizations most commonly track percentage of positions filled internally, voluntary turnover among high performers, cost per hire and time to fill. Internal mobility programs deliver the highest ROI when AI matching and automated workflows work together from day one.

L’Oréal reached 75 percent of vacancies filled by internal candidates after launching its Avature-built mobilityPOP portal. Jack Henry saw a 100% increase in internal mobility rate in three years since launching its program with Avature. The fintech provider now fills 40% of roles internally (excluding entry-level jobs). Delta Air Lines deployed Avature’s platform during the 2020 pandemic for employee redeployment, achieving 100 percent utilization among interested employees and avoiding involuntary furloughs for U.S.-based staff.

Strong outcomes consistently correlate with programs that combine transparent opportunity posting, AI-driven matching and automated communication to current managers and HR business partners.

An internal mobility program moves employees through a structured cycle of discovery, interest, matching and transition. Most enterprise programs follow five core phases:

1. Employee profile building: Employees publish their skills, experience, interests and willingness to relocate. HR supplements profiles with data gathered from performance reviews, onboarding records and other touchpoints across the employee lifecycle, building a skills-based view of the workforce.
2. Opportunity creation and posting: HR and hiring managers publish open roles, short-term gigs, project assignments, mentorship programs or other mobility opportunities on a branded internal talent marketplace, with configurable eligibility criteria and approval processes.
3. AI-driven matching and search: Avature Internal Mobility surfaces personalized opportunity recommendations for each employee based on profile data. HR can also run proactive searches and segment the employee population by skills, location or any custom data field to identify candidates proactively.
4. Application and workflow management: Employees express interest or apply. Automated workflows route approvals through HR business partners, current managers and hiring managers according to company policy, department, country or seniority level.
5. Analytics and program improvement: HR tracks fill rates, retention metrics and skills evolution through configurable dashboards, with reports breakable by division, location or opportunity type.

Avature Internal Mobility supports all five phases in a single platform. Workflow configurations are adjustable by country, business unit and seniority level, and the platform integrates with HRIS systems via Avature’s integration framework, which supports 300+ out-of-the-box integrations and more than 100,000 integration runs per month.

Avature’s internal mobility AI analyzes employee profile data, including skills, experience, career goals and behavioral signals, to generate personalized opportunity recommendations. The system factors in adjacent skills and stated preferences to surface roles, projects or gigs employees may not have searched for independently.

At enterprise scale, the architecture of the AI matters as much as its accuracy. Organizations need to understand what data drives recommendations, how to adjust the matching logic to meet local policy requirements, and how to provide employees with sufficient visibility into the reasoning so they engage with suggestions rather than dismiss them. One-size-fits-all recommendation engines create friction in diverse, global workforces where matching criteria differ by business unit or seniority.

Avature takes a transparent approach, meaning the logic behind each recommendation is visible and auditable. Organizations can customize matching criteria, and employees can see why a specific opportunity was suggested.

Yes. Internal mobility platforms process sensitive employee data, including skills profiles, career aspirations, performance history and compensation context, making security and data privacy compliance a procurement requirement rather than an optional checkbox. Organizations in regulated industries or operating across multiple jurisdictions should verify certifications, data-handling practices and regional hosting options before selecting a platform. Platforms without independently audited certifications pose significant security risks during security reviews.

Key requirements to evaluate include SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification, GDPR compliance with Binding Corporate Rules, regional data residency options and, for public sector organizations in the U.S., FedRAMP Authorization.

Avature holds SOC 2 Type II certification (annually audited since 2016), ISO 27001 (since 2017), ISO 27017 (since 2021) and FedRAMP Authorization (April 2025). GDPR compliance is backed by EU-approved Binding Corporate Rules covering both Processors and Controllers. Avature also meets CCPA, HIPAA, PIPEDA, PIPL and Australian Privacy Act requirements. Employee data is protected by field-level encryption, role-based access controls and SAML SSO with MFA.

Yes, but global deployment is one of the most underestimated challenges in the design of internal mobility programs. Policies governing manager notification, eligibility windows and approval hierarchies vary significantly by country, making a uniform configuration impractical for multinational organizations. Without local policy support built into the platform, global programs require significant manual workarounds from regional HR teams or fail to gain traction in specific markets.

L’Oréal’s Avature implementation illustrates this in practice. When designing their internal mobility portal across 70 countries, they gathered input from 38 HR leaders worldwide. In some regions, direct managers were not notified of an employee’s application until an HR conversation had taken place; in others, immediate notification matched local norms. Eligibility windows for role changes also varied by geography and seniority.

Avature supports multi-country deployments with workflow configurations by country, department, business unit and seniority level, along with data privacy compliance covering GDPR, CCPA, PIPL, PIPEDA and the Australian Privacy Act. L’Oréal’s Avature-built mobility portal, launched across 70 countries in August 2018, helped the company fill 75 percent of vacancies with internal candidates.

Workday Talent Marketplace and Gloat both help organizations match employees with internal opportunities using skills and AI. Workday is often a natural choice for organizations that have standardized on the Workday ecosystem, while Gloat is focused on AI-powered talent marketplace capabilities that can integrate with existing HR systems.

The key consideration for enterprise organizations is whether a talent marketplace operates as a standalone application or as part of a broader talent management platform. When internal mobility shares data with performance, learning, succession planning and employee engagement, organizations can make talent decisions based on a more complete view of employee skills, aspirations and development, while reducing the need for data synchronization across systems.

Avature Internal Mobility is built on the same configurable platform as Avature Performance Management, Learning, Succession Planning and Employee Engagement. Rather than connecting separate applications, organizations can manage skills, career development, internal opportunities and talent planning through a shared data model, configurable workflows and AI-powered recommendations. This approach is particularly valuable for enterprises that want to build internal mobility into their broader talent strategy rather than deploy it as a standalone marketplace.