Restructuring talent is no longer a one‑time event that organizations endure, according to HR leader Aly Sparks. It is becoming a recurring operational reality, and HR is being asked to orchestrate it.
LHH has a team across 60-plus countries, working with more than 15,000 organizations each year. Sparks occupies a rare dual vantage point as global head of HR at talent advisory LHH and group SVP at workforce solution Adecco Group. She advises client organizations externally while running the same playbook internally at LHH, where the workforce of roughly 12,000 employees includes a significant portion of contingent and freelance employees, alongside a large base of full‑time colleagues.
That blended model is increasingly the norm, and it’s changing what HR must be capable of. The function is being asked to cover the entire talent lifecycle for contingent and full-time workers simultaneously, often for the same workforce in the same fiscal year. Fragmented HR models, Sparks says, are struggling to keep pace.
One of the clearest signs of constant structuring is how organizations are approaching internal mobility. Where it was once largely a career development perk, a way to give ambitious employees visibility and encourage retention, it has become more urgent. Companies are sitting on skills gaps they can’t afford to fill externally, and they don’t want to lose the institutional knowledge walking out the door.
Professional HR practitioner body CIPD argues that, when done well, internal mobility is one of the most powerful ways to close skills gaps, while strengthening retention and succession pipelines. On a CIPD podcast, Laura Ibbotson, interim head of HR at U.K.-based environmental services firm The Green Spark Group, said that organizations have “an incredible opportunity” with internal team members.
“Focusing on what’s important to them, and it can be different for individuals, and being open to making those adjustments could save a business an incredible amount of money and [avoid] losing key staff, key team members from your organization because they did feel overlooked,” said Ibbotson.
To stay on top of mobility opportunities, Sparks describes a three-part diagnostic she sees organizations working through:
- What roles do we actually need?
- What skills do those roles require?
- And where are the adjacent jobs, the ones where people can move with targeted reskilling rather than starting from scratch?
The challenge lies in making that mobility visible and a normal part of the culture. LHH has integrated internal marketplace practices into “rituals,” highlighting open roles and turning informal networking into an intentional process. The goal is cultural as much as operational.
There is good reason to tend to the cultural side of the coin. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report, 66% of managers and executives say that the most recent hires are not fully prepared for the demands of their roles.
Technology can model adjacency. It can surface patterns in skills data and flag potential matches at scale. But Sparks says the actual movement of talent, particularly at the leadership level, where nuance and trust matter, still depends on human judgment and human conversation. People enjoy those conversations, she notes. The process works better when it feels human.
The early-career gap and where AI fits in
If internal mobility can solve for mid-career transitions, it leaves a pressing question on the table. What happens to early-career talent in an AI-enabled workforce? It’s a question Sparks takes seriously. It’s a query she believes the HR function, and frankly, employers broadly, have a responsibility to answer.
AI is moving into recruiting, leadership development and learning faster than most organizations have built policies or strategies to absorb it. LHH has expanded its own capabilities to include HR advisory services, General Assembly for skills training and EZRA for coaching, an acknowledgment that clients don’t just need outplacement anymore. HR teams need end-to-end workforce solutions that can hold together as the ground keeps shifting.
Deloitte identifies this tension as the gulf between what employers demand and what workers bring. Workers can’t get jobs without experience, but can’t gain that experience without foothold roles or equivalent opportunities.
Studies find that many AI-boosted HR tech tools can improve talent identification, internal mobility matching and skills‑gap detection. At the same time, recent practitioner research warns that these tools intensify pressure on HR to design human‑centered pathways around them, ensuring employees are supported and upskilled to navigate AI‑mediated processes.
Careers, talent and the working world have all changed, and HR has a responsibility in that, Sparks says. “Right now, HR has to lead, pull it all together and be bold.”
Credit: Source link
