An internal talent marketplace is software that matches a company's own staff to open roles and projects inside the company, before the company hires from outside. In Indian IT services firms, its main job is to move engineers off the bench. An engineer is "on the bench" when the project they worked on has ended and no client is paying for their time yet. The firm still pays their salary.
The marketplace depends on a skill taxonomy. This is one agreed list of skills, with a name and a level for each. It makes sure that "Spring", "Spring Boot" and "Java Spring framework" are recorded as one skill. Every engineer's profile and every open role is described with skills from the same list, so the software can compare them.
Consider a Java developer with five years of experience at an IT services firm in Kolkata. On 15 March, his project for a retail client ends, and he moves to the bench. That afternoon, the marketplace reads his profile: Java at level 4 of 5, Spring Boot at level 4, Oracle at level 3 and some Kafka. It compares his profile with 140 open roles across the firm. One role builds payment services for an insurance client and needs Java, Spring Boot and Kafka. He matches 82% of it. Another role is in Android development and needs Kotlin. He matches only 41% of that one. The marketplace offers him the first role. It also sends his profile to that project's manager, who interviews him by video the next day.
The comparison works by meaning, not only by exact skill names. It uses the same semantic job matching that recruiters use on outside CVs. The open roles come from the firm's project plans. Its project portfolio management (PPM) system lists which projects will start, and when, and how many people each one needs.
The marketplace also looks ahead. Suppose the sales team expects to win a cloud migration deal in June that needs 25 AWS engineers. The software checks which engineers on the bench, or about to come off it, have skills close to AWS. It then asks the learning management system to assign them an AWS course now. Without this, the firm might hire 25 new people while it still pays engineers who are waiting on the bench.
The marketplace is one part of talent intelligence. When a skill cannot be found inside the firm at all, planners turn to labour market analytics to decide where to hire it.