share on
Urvi Jobalia, Global Head of Talent Deployment & Strategic TA-Tech and Ops at Standard Chartered Bank says that internal deployment of talent is driven by employee opportunities, a leadership mindset, as well as culture and structural changes.
What if you, as HR practitioners, had the superpower to take away 30% of your talent costs — without letting people go or increasing the workload?
The above was the question that opened HRO's Talent Mobility 2025 on Wednesday morning (26 February).
Posing this question to the audience, our star keynote speaker Urvi Jobalia, Global Head of Talent Deployment & Strategic TA-Tech and Ops, Standard Chartered Bank shared what this superpower could be: internal talent deployment.
Particularly, she views it as a win-win strategy for both organisations and employees. On the organisation's end, would be the ability to obtain higher productivity all while reducing costs significantly. As for employees, not only does it drive employability and long-term value within the organisation, but it also drives high employee engagement.
While acknowledging this as a way to manage talent costs, Urvi believes that the potential of internal talent deployment is far greater, and that the strategy is still underutilised. She went on to share insights on what HR practitioners can do to leverage this superpower.
Read on for some of our excerpts from the session.
As Urvi highlighted, the big trends that the market is currently struggling with are:
- Finding talent externally is challenging and expensive.
- FOBO – Fear of being obsolete; employees want to upskill and remain relevant.
- Aligning talent supply and demand remains a major challenge for organisations.
- The pace of upskilling is slower than the pace of the evolving world.
- There is a growing need for faster outcomes and quarterly profits, creating barriers for people leaders who want to make room for ‘learning on the job’; instead affirming a ‘plug and play’ hiring mindset.
One other key aspect Urvi pointed out is that traditionally, organisations have focused on developing people before deploying them into roles. However, she suggested reversing this approach—deploying individuals first, then developing their skills on the job. This allows employees to grow as part of their career journey while remaining employable and productive.
Before outlining key strategies to address these challenges, Urvi acknowledged that industries have been implementing various interventions. That said, she emphasised the need for sustained commitment and support from business leaders to embed these strategies effectively.
3 ways to drive strategies for internal deployment
Among the key takeaways of her presentation, Urvi shared the following pointers for leaders and mobility teams to consider, that could drive strategies for internal deployment:
1. Employee opportunities
- Start with smaller groups, categorising the people into jobs that best fit their roles to achieve maximum impact.
- Provide access to exclusive projects, rotations, talent exchange enabled by CEOs with clear returns on investment (ROI), as well as an end-to-end, outcome-driven approach.
- Provide employees with a 'high-performance organisation' (HPO) exposure, involving role/work shadowing, in which workflow will be shadowed for either part of a day, or the entire day.
2. Leadership mindset and culture
- Create a culture that promotes talent export and import, one that is enabled by clear career paths.
- Review the critical roles in the organisation and allow equal opportunity for others.
3. Structural changes
- Apply a 'deploy to develop' philosophy where colleagues are redeployed based on existing skills.
- Invest in tools and technology that democratise the visibility of opportunities to people.
- As Urvi noted, with so many talent marketplace tools available, choosing one is easy — but ensuring people actively use it is key. These platforms enable individuals to showcase their skill sets, while AI matches them with relevant opportunities.
- What's important to note here is that it’s not just about full-time jobs; gigs and projects play a crucial role in helping individuals progress towards their next big career move.
Closing the speech, Urvi shared a five-letter mantra of deployment from her last two decades of experience in the industry:
O- Obsession with a personalised journey: connect, support and match people with the right role.
P – Programme approach: provide structured career path through structured conversations.
Q – Quality: drive and measure quality measure the quality of internal mobility over quantity.
R – Robust gigs and projects: allow people leaders to access the candidate and the fitment of how much more investment to make in the person through gigs and projects.
S – Skills mindset: assess skills pools, identify gaps, explore skills adjacencies and talent fungibility.
Want more learnings from Urvi's session? Head over to read our LinkedIn post!
Lead image/ Human Resources Online
share on
