I've watched three FTSE 100 clients waste nearly £300K on external recruiters this past quarter, when the perfect candidates were already sitting in their Canary Wharf offices. But with different job titles. In different departments. Complete madness.
In PR, we obsess over identifying the perfect media contacts while overlooking valuable relationships right under our noses. The same pattern plays out in talent acquisition, hunting externally while ignoring internal gold mines.
The pandemic's final echoes have faded, but its workplace revelations haven't. As we navigate 2026's increasingly barren talent pools (in London's PR sector especially), more organisations are finally waking up to internal talent marketplaces. About bloody time.
What's Changed Since 2025?
The skills shortage hasn't eased. It's morphed.
In my client meetings across London this year, the constant refrain isn't just "we can't find people", it's "we can't find people, but we're drowning in projects that need specific skills for 3-6 months."
Traditional recruitment doesn't solve this. Neither does contingent staffing with its eye-watering markups.
What's working? Internal talent marketplaces that match existing employee skills to short-term project needs across departmental boundaries.
The Rise of Skills-First Thinking
Job titles are becoming meaningless. Seriously. I reviewed a "PR Manager" role last week that was 80% data analysis and campaign measurement. Five years ago, that would've been a "Marketing Analytics Specialist" with a completely different candidate pool.
The line between communications roles, marketing technology, and data specialists has basically disappeared. So why are we still hiring by outdated job categories?
Smart employers are shifting to skills-based workforce planning. They're asking: "What specific capabilities do we need for this project?" rather than "Which job title should we recruit for?"
This matters because if you're still thinking in rigid job descriptions, you're missing the point. And likely missing talent right in front of you.
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Internal Marketplaces in Practice
At a recent CIPD leadership summit in Birmingham, I cornered a talent director who'd implemented a matchmaking platform for their 5,000 UK employees. The results? Time-to-staff for project roles dropped from 51 days to 9 days. External recruitment costs down 37%.
But what really caught my attention was something unexpected, employee retention improved substantially where these systems were deployed well.
Turns out, people tend to stay when they can move laterally across the organisation to work on things that genuinely interest them.
One senior account director I placed at a top London agency in January told me she'd turned down a £15K salary bump from a competitor specifically because her current employer let her spend 20% of her time working on sustainability campaigns through their internal project marketplace. That's powerful.
Technology Without Culture Change Fails
The mistake most companies make? Treating this as a technology problem.
Lots of platforms exist now, from the skills modules in enterprise HRIS systems to dedicated talent marketplaces. But the tech is actually the easy part.
The hard part? Getting departmental leaders to share their "resources" (people). The territorial mindset runs deep in UK organisations, particularly in professional services where utilisation rates drive performance metrics.
Why would a department head loan out their best analyst or copywriter to another team? What's the incentive?
That's the question I challenge my clients with, and frankly, most don't have a good answer. Many have invested in slick internal platforms that sit largely unused because the underlying culture still treats people like departmental property.
Making It Work
The organisations succeeding with internal marketplaces have addressed three critical elements:
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Executive Sponsorship: Without the C-suite actively promoting cross-departmental collaboration, middle managers won't risk sharing their best people. Full stop.
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Incentive Realignment: Department heads need recognition and compensation tied to talent development and organisational contribution, not just team output. Some firms have created shared bonus pools specifically for projects staffed through internal marketplaces.
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Skills Visibility: Most employees have capabilities that never appear on their job descriptions. One client discovered a receptionist with advanced video editing skills who now splits time between front desk duties and producing client testimonials.
Is it complicated? Yes. Is it worth it? The numbers suggest absolutely.
The OHub's talent analytics feature gives fascinating insights into how PR professionals are navigating this shift, with increasing numbers listing cross-functional project experience in their profiles.
Where Most Get It Wrong
The biggest failure mode I'm seeing? Making participation optional.
"Hey everyone, we've launched this cool new platform where you can find internal projects!" doesn't work. Optional participation means busy high-performers (the exact people you want sharing skills) won't bother. And the platform quickly becomes a dumping ground for low-priority work nobody wants.
The smartest implementation I've seen actually mandated that 15% of all employees' time be allocated through their skills marketplace. That threshold created enough activity to make the platform valuable, which then drove organic adoption.
But honestly, I'm stunned more UK employers aren't going all-in on this approach. The CIPD's workforce insights suggest that reskilling existing employees remains more cost-effective than external hiring in nearly every sector.
Stop looking outward before you've properly looked inward.
What Next?
For hiring managers: Challenge yourselves to identify the actual skills needed for your next project before defaulting to a job requisition. Could these capabilities already exist within your organisation?
For recruiters and TA professionals: Your value increasingly lies in skills assessment and internal talent mapping, not just external candidate sourcing. The best recruitment partners I work with now consult on workforce planning, not just filling vacancies.
And perhaps that's the real shift here, moving from reactive hiring to proactive skills management.
The PR professionals finding the most promising opportunities in 2026 aren't specialists in a single communication channel or technique; they're those who can rapidly adapt their foundational skills to different contexts and projects.
If your organisation hasn't built some version of an internal talent marketplace yet, you're already behind. But more concerningly, you're probably paying recruiters like me far more than you need to.
And as someone whose income depends on external recruitment, that's not something I say lightly.
