How DHL’s Career Marketplace Creates More Opportunities for Its People

Companies of every size can learn from DHL’s efforts to connect talent with open roles and tasks within the organization.

What happens when it’s easier for employees to take a new role with your competitor than to find their next role within your organization?

Your best people are going to leave.

That was the challenge DHL Express set out to overcome with its Career Marketplace, a platform designed to help employees identify skills and connect people with open opportunities. The goal? Increase the number of open roles filled by internal candidates to closer to 90%.

“The idea was that if we could get people to share their skills, we could match those with jobs,” says Meredith Wellard, vice president, group talent acquisition, learning and growth at DHL.

“And if we put it on an app, then it would be quite easy for them to get transparency on what jobs are available.”

Wellard and Rick Jackson, executive vice president, and HR Board member at DHL, shared what they had learned from rolling out this marketplace to the group’s 600,000 global employees at the 2024 For All Summit?.

Challenges and risks

To launch a career development tool successfully, leaders can’t just rely on new technology to transform cultural practices.

“It’s not just the person who is interacting on a very regular basis with the system that needs to understand that the way they think about themselves changes,” says Jackson. “The manager of the person also has to go through a huge change in their mindset.”

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To overcome talent hoarding, the HR team changed rules about how long an employee had to stay in their role before applying for a different one, or whether they had to consult their manager before applying to an open role.

“What we are trying to do is educate our managers about how to keep their minds open,” Jackson says. “If they are leading in a way that is right for the business, they’re developing their people themselves, they’re allowing that to occur in the organization.”

It helps that DHL’s Career Marketplace is layered on top of its many policies and programs to support employees — an essential foundation for success in a company with DHL’s global footprint.

“It doesn't remove any of the need to do diligent recruiting processes or diligent reference-checking,” Wellard warns. “The assumption is that there are some very good practices across our organization on all of those activities … the tool is not about placing people, it's about making things transparent.”

Starting small

To test the program, DHL started with a cohort of early adopters called “Our Success Leads.” The group came from across all of DHL’s division and offered feedback on the tool, eventually becoming champions and ambassadors for the effort.

“By early next year, all 600,000 employees will be on the platform … driven from the grassroots largely,” Wellard says.

To understand how internal mobility would affect other policies and experiences inside the company, the tool didn’t immediately start placing people in new roles. Instead, it connected interested employees with what Wellard calls “micro-moments.”

The idea is to spend a few hours a day working in another part of the business. “If my sourcing team was recruiting a blockchain specialist, but they don’t know anything about blockchain and they want someone to be part of that interview, they could reach out with a micro-gig,” Wellard shares as an example.

“Maybe there’s someone out there who works with blockchain today who says, ‘I'm thinking about moving over to become a talent acquisition specialist. I need some experience working in the recruiting space.’”

That synergy creates momentum, and only after starting to build success will leaders be able to answer the bigger questions of what department pays for the new role, or how culture needs to change overall.

Getting employees to share their skills

Great workplaces empower employees to share their skills, encouraging employees to self-identify. In practice, DHL found that employees were much more likely to underreport their skills than to claim proficiency they didn’t have.

“Their manager has visibility of it and their peers, so it's very visible,” Wellard says. DHL also has an algorithm to assess proficiency on the back end.

There are 65,000 skills that employees can report in the tool that are then matched to a subset of skills DHL has identified as crucial for the business. Employees can share their hobbies, if they choose — but that’s not necessarily going to connect them to an open role at DHL.

Employees are asked to share skills during onboarding and receive frequent prompts to update their skills. “It’s an ongoing prompting process,” Wellard says.

Lessons for others

Here are some lessons DHL shared for others looking to launch a career marketplace tool:

1. Learn how the technology works

Career marketplace platforms are powered by artificial intelligence. That requires leaders to understand how the AI makes connections and recommends different candidates.

“If we know where potential bias kicks in and if we’re not using it for decision making, just recommendations, then we make this a much more rigorous activity,” Wellard says. For DHL, that was a 12-month process to really understand what AI could and couldn’t do for the organization.

2. Focus on meeting the needs of the employee

If you get too focused on questions around “skills” vs. “competencies,” you risk creating a tool that bores employees rather than engaging them.

“Understand what the employee wants, what the user wants, what they’re actually looking for, think about their consumer experiences and then build it with that in mind,” Wellard says.

3. Set clear goals — and measure results

A career marketplace could have many different applications in the organization. At DHL, the tool is already opening new horizons for employees.

“Our anecdotal experiences are that this has really enabled women to have exposure to roles that they previously would not have considered,” Wellard gives as an example.

Whatever your motivations, make sure to set clear goals.

“Decide what you want to achieve and then worry about what the solution is,” Wellard recommends.