Why Internal Mobility Pipelines Are Failing — and How Employers Can Build Stronger Ones

Key Takeaways

• Only 7% of non-executive positions were filled internally in SHRM’s 2025 benchmark, showing how heavily organisations continue to rely on external hiring.
• Half of respondents in TalentLMS’ 2026 research said their organisations hire externally for skills that existing employees already possess, while 49% said their skills are underused.
• Skills visibility is a major challenge: many employers do not have a sufficiently clear picture of the capabilities already inside their workforce or how those capabilities could be deployed elsewhere.
• Internal mobility can also break down when employees cannot see opportunities, managers restrict movement or development programmes are disconnected from actual career pathways.
• Organisations such as Bank of America, Unilever and Schneider Electric illustrate different approaches to connecting skills, development, opportunities and internal movement.
• A stronger pipeline starts with skills visibility and future workforce planning, then connects employees to development and opportunities while measuring whether people actually move.

Internal mobility has become an increasingly important workforce issue as employers deal with changing skill requirements, recruitment challenges and pressure to retain experienced employees.

Yet many organisations still rely heavily on external hiring, even when relevant capabilities may already exist inside the business.

SHRM’s 2025 recruiting benchmark found that only 7% of non-executive positions were filled internally, compared with 93% externally. Among extra-large organisations, 28% of non-executive positions were filled internally, but the overall median remained low. SHRM also reported that the 2025 median rates of internal and external hiring were generally consistent with its 2022 data.

The issue, therefore, is not simply whether organisations promote enough employees. It is whether they can identify the skills already available within their workforce, connect employees to opportunities and create credible pathways from one role to another.

Recent research helps explain where those pipelines are breaking down.

The Internal Mobility Problem: What the Numbers Show

The gap between the talent organisations employ and the talent they actually deploy is becoming increasingly visible.

TalentLMS’ 2026 Skills Visibility Report found that 50% of respondents said their organisation hires externally for skills that current employees already have, while 49% of employees said their skills are underutilised. The research also found that 40% of respondents said it is easier to find a new job than a new role within their own company.

That creates an important workforce-planning problem.

You can have a skills shortage and an underused-skills problem at the same time.

The issue becomes clearer when you look at how managers and employees perceive workforce capabilities. TalentLMS found that 90% of managers said they understand their direct reports’ skills, but only 69% of employees agreed. Similarly, 75% of managers said their teams’ skills were fully utilised, compared with 49% of employees who said their skills were underused.

These differences matter because an organisation cannot reliably move talent that it cannot accurately see.

HR leaders also report gaps in workforce visibility

The problem is not limited to employee perceptions.

LHH’s 2026 research found that only 33% of CHROs said they had a clear picture of the skills their workforce currently possesses and will need in the future. Only 37% said they use skills data to make workforce decisions, while just 29% considered their organisations very effective at tracking internal mobility and career progression.

For employers, this creates a difficult choice.

If you cannot clearly see your current skills base or predict the capabilities you will need, it becomes harder to determine whether a workforce gap should be addressed through hiring, reskilling, redeployment or internal movement.

External recruitment can then become the easiest option simply because the external market is easier to search than the internal one.

Mobility programmes can exist without employees experiencing them

There can also be a significant gap between what an organisation believes it provides and what employees can actually access.

LHH’s 2026 Mobility Breakdown found that 77% of HR leaders said their organisations offer targeted redeployment and mobility programmes, while only 19% of employees said they experience or recognise them.

The same research found that only 30% of organisations track the number of redeployments and 32% measure cost savings from targeted redeployment and mobility.

The finding relates specifically to targeted redeployment and mobility programmes, but it highlights a broader issue: having a mobility process on paper does not necessarily make it visible or useful to employees.

For an internal pipeline to work, employees need to know what opportunities exist, how they can qualify and whether moving internally is genuinely supported.

Where Internal Mobility Pipelines Break Down

The research points to several connected obstacles. None can be solved simply by adding an internal job board.

Employers cannot see the skills they already have

Traditional workforce systems are often organised around job titles, departments and reporting structures.

Those categories are useful, but they do not always capture the full range of capabilities an employee has developed through previous roles, projects, training, certifications or experience outside their current position.

Someone hired as a financial analyst may also have experience in data visualisation, automation or project management. An engineer may have developed commercial or leadership capabilities. A marketing specialist may have skills that could transfer into customer experience, product or growth roles.

If those capabilities are not visible in your workforce data, they are difficult to match to opportunities.

TalentLMS found that only 12% of respondents said their organisation does not have skills-visibility issues, while 56% of employees said their career progression is held back at least sometimes because their skills go unnoticed.

Internal mobility therefore begins with a basic workforce-planning question:

What capabilities do we already have?

Employees cannot always see where they can move

Skills visibility is only half the problem.

Employees also need visibility into the opportunities available to them.

You may have hundreds of roles, projects, mentoring opportunities and development pathways across your organisation. But if employees discover them only through informal networks or happen to hear about them from their managers, access to internal mobility can become uneven.

This is one reason internal talent marketplaces have attracted attention.

Mercer’s Global Skills Technology and Adoption Survey found that 68% of organisations had established ways to track and manage skills, but only 43% used a talent marketplace to connect talent to work.

Having skills data, therefore, is not the same as putting that data to work.

Managers can become gatekeepers

Internal mobility can also be restricted at team level.

Managers may be reluctant to lose high-performing employees, particularly when replacing them is difficult. This can create talent-hoarding behaviour in which employees have opportunities elsewhere in the organisation but encounter resistance when they try to move.

The problem can also appear in how managers define an internal candidate.

Gartner’s 2025 research found that organisations can lose performance opportunities when they require employees to demonstrate proficiency in every skill before moving into critical roles. Its research found that employees hired based on “promise” were 1.9 times more likely to perform effectively than those hired based on proficiency.

For internal candidates, this distinction matters.

If you require an employee to already possess every capability for the destination role, you can end up screening out the very people your development and mobility programmes were supposed to help.

Learning and mobility are often disconnected

Training alone does not create internal mobility.

An employee can complete an AI course, earn a professional certification or participate in a leadership programme without ever being considered for a role where those capabilities can be applied.

This creates a gap between learning and deployment.

LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that 48% of respondents, and 55% of organisations it identified as career-development champions, considered internal mobility a higher priority for the year ahead.

The important question for employers is not only:

How many people did we train?

It is also:

Where did those skills go afterwards?

Development becomes more valuable when employees can see how new capabilities connect to actual work and future roles.

Mobility is not always measured as a workforce outcome

Internal mobility is often discussed as an employee-experience issue, but it also has a workforce-planning dimension.

You can measure:

• the percentage of vacancies filled internally;
• promotions and lateral moves;
• movement between functions or business units;
• time taken to fill roles internally;
• retention after an internal move;
• skills gained through development programmes;
• redeployment during organisational change;
• movement into critical-skill roles;
• recruitment costs avoided through internal hiring.

Without these measures, you may know how many people completed training or how many jobs were advertised internally without knowing whether your overall mobility pipeline is working.

What Are Some Organisations Doing Differently?

The approaches used by large organisations vary, but several examples illustrate a common shift: internal mobility is being treated as a system for matching people and capabilities to business opportunities rather than simply as an internal vacancy process.

Bank of America: connecting mobility with development

Bank of America provides an example of how internal mobility can be connected to broader talent development.

In 2025, more than 14,000 employees found new roles within the corporation, while the bank delivered more than 7.6 million hours of training and development through Bank of America Academy.

The significance is not simply the number of internal moves.

The bank has connected several parts of the employee journey:

development → career support → internal opportunities → movement.

That is closer to a pipeline than simply publishing vacancies on an intranet.

Unilever: looking beyond job titles

Unilever’s FLEX Experiences platform was designed to help employees identify opportunities across the business where they could develop new skills and gain experience.

The model moves beyond viewing employees only through their current job titles. Internal opportunities can include experiences that build capabilities for future roles rather than requiring an employee to be immediately qualified for the next permanent position.

That broadens internal mobility beyond promotions.

An employee can build experience through a project or other opportunity before making a larger career move.

Schneider Electric: connecting employees to different opportunities

Schneider Electric has also used an internal talent marketplace approach to connect employees with opportunities across the organisation.

Its Open Talent Market was designed around opportunities such as positions, projects and mentorship, allowing employees to explore possibilities beyond their immediate areas of work.

The principle is important because a permanent vacancy does not have to be the only entry point into another part of the organisation.

An employee can gain exposure to another function through a project, development opportunity or mentorship before making a larger career move.

What HR Professionals Recommend for Stronger Internal Mobility

Current research points towards several practical areas employers can address.

Build a clearer picture of workforce skills

You need more than an employee directory.

A useful skills system should help identify current capabilities, transferable skills, emerging skills and areas where development could create future capacity.

Mercer’s research shows that many organisations have already started this process, with 68% reporting that they track and manage skills. The remaining challenge is connecting that information to actual work and internal opportunities.

Make internal opportunities visible

Employees cannot pursue opportunities they do not know exist.

Depending on your organisation’s size and structure, this can include:

• internal roles;
• projects;
• rotations;
• temporary assignments;
• mentorship;
• learning opportunities;
• career pathways.

The goal is not necessarily to give every employee access to every opportunity. It is to make relevant opportunities easier to discover and navigate.

Assess potential, not only current proficiency

Rigid skill requirements can shrink your internal candidate pool.

Gartner’s research suggests that organisations should place greater emphasis on potential rather than requiring employees to demonstrate every skill before they can move.

For internal candidates, this means identifying the capabilities that genuinely need to be present on day one and designing development around the rest.

Give managers a reason to support mobility

Internal mobility cannot succeed if managers see every employee departure as a loss to their own team.

You may need to change how managers are measured and rewarded so that developing and releasing talent is recognised as part of effective leadership.

That can include making internal development, succession readiness and successful talent movement part of management expectations.

Connect development to real workforce demand

Learning should not sit separately from workforce planning.

If you know that your organisation will need more digital, commercial, technical or leadership capabilities over the next two to three years, you can identify employees with adjacent skills and build development pathways around those requirements.

Measure whether mobility is actually happening

A mobility strategy needs clear outcomes.

Track whether internal candidates are being considered, whether employees are moving across functions, whether development is leading to new roles and whether ongoing training has effectively reduced team turnover or avoidable external hiring.

Measurement also makes it easier to identify where your pipeline is breaking down.

How Can Employers Build Stronger Internal Mobility Pipelines?

A stronger pipeline does not have to begin with a sophisticated technology platform.

It begins with a clearer operating model.

1. Map the skills already inside your organisation

Start by establishing what your employees can do today.

Look beyond job titles and include:

• technical skills;
• transferable capabilities;
• certifications;
• previous experience;
• project experience;
• leadership capabilities;
• emerging skills;
• employee career interests.

The goal is to create a more useful picture of internal capability.

2. Map future workforce requirements

Internal mobility should be connected to where your organisation is going.

Your workforce planning should identify:

• roles likely to grow;
• roles likely to change;
• critical skills;
• succession risks;
• capabilities affected by AI and automation;
• new markets or business models;
• areas where external hiring will still be necessary.

This allows you to identify potential internal pathways before a vacancy becomes urgent.

It also complements broader efforts to understand why employers are struggling to attract talent, particularly when recruitment challenges may reflect deeper workforce-planning or skills issues.

3. Identify adjacent pathways between roles

Not every internal move needs to be a direct promotion.

An employee may move laterally, enter a new function through a project or transition into a role after targeted development.

You can map pathways such as:

existing skills → adjacent capabilities → targeted development → new role

This is particularly useful where the destination role is difficult to fill externally.

4. Create visible routes into those opportunities

Once pathways exist, employees need a practical way to access them.

Depending on your organisation, this could include:

• an internal careers platform;
• a talent marketplace;
• transparent internal vacancies;
• project-based opportunities;
• mentoring;
• rotations;
• career conversations;
• internal talent pools.

Technology can support this, but it should follow the operating model rather than substitute for it.

5. Make managers part of the pipeline

Managers need to understand that internal mobility is not simply an HR programme.

They have a role in identifying potential, providing effective employee coaching and releasing employees when another part of the organisation needs their capabilities.

Where talent hoarding is a problem, examine the incentives and performance expectations that allow it to continue.

6. Measure movement and improve the system

Finally, monitor whether the pipeline is producing movement.

Useful measures include:

• internal fill rate;
• internal applications;
• lateral moves;
• promotions;
• cross-functional movement;
• redeployment;
• time to internal placement;
• retention following internal movement;
• movement into critical-skill roles;
• development-to-mobility conversion;
• external recruitment avoided.

The objective is not to maximise internal hiring at all costs.

It is to understand when your organisation already has the capability it needs, where that capability sits and what is required to move it.

What Does a Strong Internal Mobility Pipeline Look Like?

A functioning internal mobility pipeline should allow you to answer five questions with reasonable confidence:

1. What skills do we have?
2. What skills will we need?
3. Which employees could potentially move into those roles?
4. What development would they need to make the move?
5. Are employees actually moving through those pathways?

That produces a simple model:

Skills visibility → opportunity visibility → development → internal movement → measurement

When those elements are connected, internal mobility becomes more than an employee-development initiative. It becomes part of workforce planning.

For organisations reassessing workforce structures, skills requirements and talent deployment, working with a HR consulting firm like MGCG can help connect internal mobility with broader workforce planning and organisational priorities.

Conclusion

Internal mobility pipelines do not fail simply because employees lack ambition or because businesses lack training programmes.

They can fail because the organisation cannot clearly see its workforce, employees cannot see where they can move, managers have reasons to hold on to talent, development is disconnected from actual roles, and mobility is not measured as part of workforce planning.

The response is not to eliminate external recruitment.

It is to become more deliberate about when you should build, move, redeploy or hire talent.

A stronger internal mobility pipeline ultimately starts with a simple question: Do you know what you already have inside your organization?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How can you tell whether your internal mobility strategy is working?

Track outcomes such as internal fill rates, lateral moves, promotions, cross-functional movement, retention after internal moves and movement into critical-skill roles. These measures show whether your programme is producing actual workforce movement rather than simply generating activity.

What should employers do when employees are not applying for internal roles?

Look at whether employees know the opportunities exist, understand the career pathways, believe managers will support a move and can meet the requirements. Improving opportunity visibility, career conversations and assessment of transferable skills can help address these barriers.

How can organisations stop managers from hoarding talent?

Make talent development and successful internal movement part of management expectations. Managers should be recognised not only for retaining strong employees but also for developing people who can contribute elsewhere in the organisation.

Should internal candidates be considered before external candidates?

Internal candidates should be assessed alongside external talent, but internal mobility should not eliminate external recruitment. The important question is whether you have assessed your existing skills and potential before deciding that an external hire is necessary.

Does an organisation need a talent marketplace to improve internal mobility?

No. A talent marketplace can help large or complex organisations connect employees with roles, projects and development opportunities, but technology cannot compensate for poor skills data, unclear career pathways or weak management support.

How should internal mobility fit into workforce planning?

Start with your future skills and role requirements, then identify employees who could potentially fill those needs through development, redeployment or career movement. This connects workforce planning with learning, succession and internal hiring rather than treating mobility as a separate HR initiative.