How to Leverage Pre-Hire Data to Develop Employees and Drive Internal Mobility 

The data you collect during the hiring process, particularly with pre-hire assessments and tests, is extremely valuable for making hiring decisions. But if you’re only focused on using it to hire new employees, you’re actually missing out on a treasure trove of data and insights that can power your talent management and  internal mobility strategies. Here’s what you need to know about using pre-hire data to drive greater employee mobility. 

Why Pre-Hire Data Matters Post-Hire 

Pre-hire testing gives you a wealth of information on your candidates: their hard and soft skills, their aptitudes, their motivations and aspirations, just to name a few. Once you’ve used that data to make a hiring decision, all that information on your new employee is still just as valuable, in a different way. 

The data from these pre-hire assessments can significantly enhance your existing internal mobility efforts in several ways. You can discover employees with skills that another department needs or that are well-suited for a different open role. Instead of conducting an expensive and time-consuming external search, you can fill those needs and roles with highly qualified internal candidates. 

The value of that pre-hire data helps your organization in a few other ways too. 

Create Stronger Teams 

Building strong teams requires carefully looking at the skill sets and capacities of existing team members and determining what gaps need to be filled, and capacities enhanced, with new members and roles. Pre-hire data can help you identify the perfect person to round out existing teams, or suggest several people who could work together to form an innovative new one. 

Develop Talent Outside of Hiring 

These stronger teams can be formed without relying solely on external hiring and recruiting. Those have a key place in your talent strategy, of course, but they’re also expensive and uncertain compared to enhancing your employee mobility to fill open roles. You can access great new talent and even help to reskill and upskill employees intelligently, which helps you retain that institutional knowledge and future-proof your organization. 

Internal hires are a performance powerhouse too: they were 82% more likely to be rated as top performers than external hires in their new role, according to Workday research. 

Increase Employee Retention 

Finally, creating a more powerful internal mobility strategy with pre-hire data can significantly boost your employee retention rates. One of the biggest reasons employees leave an organization they like for another role is because they feel they lack opportunities for growth, whether that’s a lateral move or a promotion. Offering your employees a way to grow and develop within your company encourages them to stay, reducing your turnover. 

In fact, 67% of employers who implement an internal mobility program report it has a positive effect on their organization with retaining top talent. And internal mobility has grown 30% since 2021 for companies on LinkedIn globally, making this a key trend to stay on top of. 

How to Leverage Your Own Pre-Hire Data 

Now that you understand all the benefits of using your pre-hire data for your internal mobility efforts, how can you actually put that knowledge into place in your organization? 

First, you’ll need to be using the right pre-hire assessments in your recruiting strategy, which means ones that give you a truly holistic view of a candidate: both hard and soft skills, for example, along with what motivates them and where they need additional development and training. 

The next step is easy if you’re using talent acquisition and management software like Cangrade: our Internal Talent Marketplace helps you predict the right fit for all your open roles with the assessment data you already have. It also offers you insights into potential development opportunities for each employee so you can easily upskill them. 

Additionally, our brand-new AI Copilot Jules makes internal mobility even easier: just ask a question like “What type of role would be best for Cam?” and get an answer informed by your existing employee data, including pre-hire testing. You can make faster, data-backed decisions that inform your entire talent management and employee mobility strategy, all by just asking a few questions.