Agentic AI Takes the Talent Marketplace to the Next Level

As organizations rethink how they deploy skills and talent, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform the talent marketplace from a reactive matching tool into a proactive workforce intelligence engine. Heather Yurko, vice president of agentic HR innovation at Gloat, a pioneer in talent marketplace technology, discussed with SHRM how AI agents can anticipate talent needs, enable internal mobility and help organizations make faster, more strategic workforce decisions.

SHRM: How is agentic AI transforming talent marketplaces?

Yurko: In 2019, Gloat defined this platform by creating a talent marketplace based on machine learning and deep learning AI. Employees completed profiles and were matched to development opportunities that were offered as recommendations; people looking for talent were offered employees with the skillsets they needed in the same way.

By early 2023, the marketplace could take advantage of newly available technology: including LLMs and creating workforce graphs that allowed employee and opportunity data to sit in contextual relationship to each other, bringing far more nuanced matching and personalized experience. The marketplace could even capture development opportunities that were completed within the platform and update employee profiles with newly acquired skills.

The advent of agentic AI changes the shape of that system and experience entirely. Instead of waiting to be asked, agents build on a persistent workforce context layer. This layer continuously reasons across an organization’s ATS, HRIS, LMS, even Sharepoint sites and Zoom call transcripts, to surface what a person would have spent hours searching for, and days analyzing — a team about to hit a skills gap, an employee whose project history signals readiness for a stretch assignment, a retention risk months before it shows up in an exit interview.

The marketplace stops being a destination employees have to remember to visit and becomes something that meets them where they already work: inside Teams, Slack, or Copilot. No more logging in or updating information. It is all gathered and updated in real time as work happens across the organization.

The talent marketplace becomes a talent data exchange, connecting many systems and data sets, respecting guardrails and policies, and taking continuous action without ongoing prompts.

That is the real shift: reactive matching to a proactive digital worker; logging in to a tool vs. agents that exist in the flow of work. Talent marketplaces move from being a searchable database tied to one SaaS platform to an orchestration engine that reasons and acts on the organization’s behalf, continuously, not just when someone remembers to log in. This shift allows leaders to expand the benefits of a talent marketplace into use cases like HR help desk, onboarding, and benefits recommendations that a traditional SaaS marketplace could not address.  

Specialty Credential: AI+HI

SHRM: What are the benefits of an agentic AI talent marketplace?

Yurko: While there are many benefits, three rise to the top. First, speed and agility. When agents are proactively surfacing ideal internal candidates to managers with open roles rather than waiting for requisitions to be posted or identifying the best teams for M&A employees to move into, organizations can redeploy talent in days instead of the months an external hire or traditional integration would take. Second, retention through visible mobility. Employees who can see a real, personalized path to their next role inside the company — not a generic career ladder, but options generated from their actual skills and experiences — are far less likely to look outside for it. Having an employee receive a ping in Teams that lets them know that a position just opened for the role they’ve been actively upgrading their skills towards is a world-class experience that agents provide best. Third, and probably most underappreciated: workforce intelligence for business and HR leaders. An agentic AI marketplace doesn’t just move people, it produces a living, continuously updated picture of what skills the organization has, where they are concentrated, and where they are about to run short — turning workforce planning from an annual spreadsheet exercise into something leaders can understand in real time.

SHRM: What are a few best practices for managing a talent marketplace?

Yurko: Have a marketplace that is business-led; your organizational leaders should leverage it to run their business and drive adoption, not HR. Be sure to anchor it to business priorities, not just employee experience, growth and retention. A marketplace that only serves individual career development will plateau; the ones that last are tied explicitly to workforce planning, skills strategy, and where the business is headed.

Invest in the quality of workforce context before you invest in features. Matching is only as good as the data and signal underneath it — employee skills, project information, manager input, performance data.

Instill trust through transparency. Employees and managers need to understand why an agent is recommending a person or a development opportunity, not just receive the recommendation.

Meet people where they work. A marketplace that requires a separate portal visit won’t be as effective as one that shows up inside Teams, Slack, or Copilot, in the flow of daily work.

Start narrow, then expand. The organizations that see the fastest ROI begin with one or two high-value use cases — employee profile or job architecture enrichment, for example — to prove the value, and then extend the same context engine into succession planning, workforce planning, and reskilling.