DHL Global Forwarding's Nilika Singh advances her career

Wondering what makes Career Marketplace (CMP) the go-to platform for DHL Global Forwarding's colleagues to find their ideal career or learning and skills development opportunities?

Meet DHL Global Forwarding Customer Implementation Manager, Nilika Singh, who decided to embark on an exciting journey of self-discovery and career advancement by utilizing the DHL's CMP.

Hear how DHL's CMP aided Nilika with opportunities to apply for roles that best align with her skill set.

Identifying jobs best aligned with skills and career goals

Nilika first learned about the platform during a CMP awareness workshop conducted in 2023.

Recognizing the potential of the platform, she realized that it offered her a unique opportunity to apply for jobs that aligned with her skills, experience, and career goals.

Valuable learning recommendations across DHL's diverse landscape

Through her profile, Nilika received valuable learning recommendations tailored to her needs and job recommendations across the diverse landscape of DHL Group that resonated with her skills inputs.

She was pleasantly surprised by the simplicity and effectiveness of this process, which set the CMP apart from traditional job portals and websites.

Seizing the right opportunity

Through the platform, she felt confident that her skills perfectly aligned with the requirements of the position. “Driven by this realization, I was encouraged to apply for my current role," says Nilika.

Her confidence paid off, as she successfully secured the position through the application process.

CMP is an invaluable tool as it enables DHL Global Forwarding colleagues to navigate their career paths based on their unique skills, interests, and experiences.

Identifying skills and connecting with people

Companies of every size can learn from DHL’s efforts to connect talent with open roles and tasks within the organization. When it’s easier for employees to take a new role with a company's competitor than to find their next role within their current organization, the best employees may leave.

DHL's CMP is a platform designed to help employees identify skills and connect people with open opportunities. The goal is to increase the number of open roles filled by internal candidates to closer to 90 per cent.

“The idea was that if we could get people to share their skills, we could match those with jobs,” says DHL Vice President, Group Talent Acquisition, Learning and Growth, Meredith Wellard. “And if we put it on an app, then it would be quite easy for them to get transparency on what jobs are available.”

Implementing policies and programs to support employees

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,” shares DHL Executive Vice President and HR Board Member, Rick Jackson. “The manager of the person also has to go through a huge change in their mindset.”

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,” explains Rick. “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 CMP 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,” adds Meredith. “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.”

Synergy creates momentum

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,” explains Meredith.

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 Meredith 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,” says Meredith. “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.

DHL employees 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 under-report their skills than to claim proficiency they didn’t have.

“Their manager has visibility of it and their peers, so it's very visible,” shares Meredith.

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,” adds Meredith.

Considerations for launching a career marketplace tool

Here are some lessons DHL shares for others looking to launch a CMP tool:

Learn how the technology and AI works - CMP platforms are powered by AI, which 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,” Meredith explains.

For DHL, that was a 12-month process to really understand what AI could and couldn’t do for the organization.

Focus on meeting the needs of the employee - Getting too focused on questions around 'skills' compared to 'competencies' risks 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,” says Meredith.

Set clear goals and measure results - A CMP 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,” explains Meredith.

Whatever the motivations are, ensure that clear goals are set. “Decide what you want to achieve and then worry about what the solution is,” says Meredith.