“This is our time of consequence. What we do, the decisions we make, the actions we take, the Airmen we lead, and the way we do it will define that next seminal event.”—General David Allvin, Chief of Staff of the Air Force

We acknowledge that Airmen are the Air Force’s greatest asset, yet we have not fully implemented talent management strategies that prioritize their aspirations to ensure the right Airmen are in the right jobs at the right time—both to fulfill mission requirements and individual goals. In an era where our military’s strategic advantage hinges on human capital, effectively managing talent within the Air Force is critical to maintaining operational readiness and a competitive edge. The Department of Defense (DoD) has emphasized a strategic imperative to cultivate the workforce our nation needs: “To recruit and retain the most talented Americans, we must change our institutional culture and reform how we do business.”¹

Internal talent marketplaces (ITMs) have emerged as a game-changing approach for organizations to align business needs with employee preferences. A 2022 article published by Harvard Business Review identified that for organizations to compete in the new talent market, companies must “play both offense by creating a better employee value proposition to attract new talent and defense making it more attractive to stay.”² The Air Force needs to focus on strategies that challenge the status quo and improve its appeal as an employer of choice.

The DoD’s recruitment challenges were evident in Fiscal Year 2023 when the Air Force missed its recruitment targets for the first time in 24 years.³ In addition to this challenge, there is a trending reduction in the size of the Air Force, a declining propensity to serve among Americans, and an ongoing war for talent. These factors underscore the importance for the Air Force to not only attract talent but also to effectively utilize and develop the existing force, ensuring the Air Force’s operational readiness and ability to adapt to future organizational needs with agility.

The Air Force is not alone in these challenges. Large organizations in all sectors grapple with aligning their talent management strategies to attract, develop, and retain talent in today’s environment. To combat these trends, companies are investing in ITMs that have the potential to drive transformational change. ITMs have emerged as an invaluable business tool to optimize talent utilization, rapidly respond to changing organizational needs, and empower and retain employees. Gartner projects that 30 percent of large enterprises will adopt a talent marketplace by 2025.⁴

In line with this trend, the Air Force has introduced its Talent Marketplace as an innovative solution “designed to provide increased transparency and interaction that should lead to greater awareness and satisfaction with the assignment process.”⁵ Nevertheless, the Talent Marketplace’s present capabilities do not meet industry benchmarks, primarily due to its dependence on antiquated practices and processes that are insufficient in addressing the needs of today’s Airmen and evolving mission requirements.

To optimize and engage its all-volunteer force for great power competition, the Air Force must transition from traditional, industrial-age talent management strategies toward those required by the information age. To accelerate this transition, the Air Force should prioritize and advance Talent Marketplace’s development to leverage its human capital’s unique skills and experiences as a strategic resource. This paper will examine how the Air Force can modernize its Talent Marketplace to operate as a true matching market by strategically applying market design principles and integrating technology. This entails embracing iterative design processes that keep pace with market demands and cater to Airmen’s professional growth and ambitions.

Building upon research and assessments of existing ITMs, this paper will progress through a structured analysis. Chapter two will provide a brief background of the Air Force Officer Assignment System to lay the groundwork for understanding the evolution of the Air Force’s current methodologies. Chapter three examines the current challenges of the Talent Marketplace. Chapter four describes key elements of an optimized ITM. Chapter five presents actionable recommendations for the Air Force to enhance the Talent Marketplace.

In the Air Force’s time of consequence, the strategies leveraged to retain and harness the unique capabilities of our all-volunteer force today will decisively shape our ability to meet the defense challenges of tomorrow.

“A relentless barrage of ‘whys’ is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often.”—Shigeo Shingo

Before we discuss the challenges of the Talent Marketplace, we must first define talent management and understand the historical context that influenced its design. Talent management, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “the process of attracting skilled employees to a company, and developing the skills of existing employees, giving them attractive pay, working conditions, etc.,” has continued to be a critical function in organizations.⁶ As a result of the dynamic nature of the workforce, talent management strategies have evolved significantly over the years in response to shifts in organizational needs and ever-changing talent market conditions. In response to these shifts, the Air Force Officer Assignment System has undergone several changes throughout history that have shaped the way it manages officers today.

A quarter century ago, the Air Force introduced a “new way of officer assignments” as an improved assign-and-select model to manage personnel.⁷ Previously, the Air Force experimented with various volunteer systems to improve retention during the post-Cold War drawdown of military forces. During this time, technology and personnel policy changes allowed officers a high degree of autonomy in determining their assignments and career paths utilizing internet-based job boards. The design and implementation of this model unintentionally reduced the Air Force’s ability to fill required positions and removed the commander’s role in mentoring officers in their career development.⁸ For example, officers could apply for a job online and subsequently be issued orders without any coordination or approval by their commander.

As a result of the flawed model, General Michael Ryan, the Chief of Staff at the time, appointed an Officer Assignment System (OAS) Review Group in 1998 and tasked them to perform a comprehensive review of the assignment process and provide recommendations for an updated assign-and-select model. The study’s findings resulted in four recommendations:

1. Increase the involvement of commanders in the process of future assignments for the officers serving under them;
2. Create a new Personnel Requirements Display to replace the Job Advertisement System “electronic bulletin board” maintained by the Air Force Personnel Center;
3. Develop a Preference Worksheet to be filled out by officers, routed through their commanders, and stored electronically at the center as part of the input for determining their future assignments; and
4. Require Officer Assignment Teams at the center to work more closely with losing and gaining commanders, major commands, and career field functional leaders in matching officers to assignments.⁹

The recommendations were approved by the Air Force and went into effect in 1999. These changes were described as “gone forward the past” as the Air Force re-deployed a revised assign-and-select model for officer assignments.¹⁰ The OAS changes remained largely intact, as reflected in the Air Force’s Total Force Assignments, Air Force Instruction 36-2110. The directive encompasses the “authority, guidance, and procedures to select personnel and direct their temporary or permanent assignment or reassignment to satisfy national security requirements.”¹¹ The ultimate goal of the OAS is to “assign the right officer to the right position at the right time to meet [Air Force] mission requirements.”¹²

While the directive was in place, the Air Force recognized the need for continuous improvement of talent management through modernized systems and processes to adequately identify and align its Airmen’s unique talents with agility. The Human Capital Annex to the U.S. Air Force Strategic Master Plan set out a specific objective to “adapt human capital management and talent management practices within the Air Force to ensure an institutional human resource system capable of rapidly recognizing and adapting to the changing environment.”¹³

The identified objectives led to three significant changes to the officer assignment process. First, the Air Force reduced the officer assignment cycles from three to two in 2018, providing officers and stakeholders with more time to communicate and select assignments. Second, the Air Force implemented an advanced assignment notification for commanders. Third, since workforce management is not a static endeavor, the Air Force implemented a new system called Talent Marketplace in 2019 to facilitate the OAS process.

Like the previous assign-and-select model, the Talent Marketplace aims to improve various aspects of the assignment process, including increasing transparency in available opportunities, enhancing communication between officers and commanders, and gaining billet owners. Additionally, it gives officers a heightened degree of agency in their future assignments and career trajectories.¹⁴ As designed, this intricate process involves a nuanced balance that considers the needs of the Air Force, individual officers’ professional development, personal preferences, and commander recommendations. Achieving this balance is often called the art and science of assignment matching. This process works well when the officers’ respective Assignment Teams and commander are actively engaged in discussing their career aspirations and long-term goals. This comprehensive understanding enables personalized mentorship and customized assignment suggestions. Conversely, the process falls short when there is a lack of communication and transparency regarding the reasons and methods for assigning members to specific roles, especially if it is a role that was not on the officer’s preference list.

Talent Marketplace distinguishes itself from previous methods by utilizing a market-design approach inspired by the National Residency Matching Program that incorporates the two-sided matching preferences of officers and billet owners. The Air Force first tested the concept with the science community, followed by the fighter pilot assignments in 2017, then scaled it as the primary mechanism for all officer assignments below the rank of Colonel except for the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAG, career field.¹⁵ The Air Force’s increasing demand to expand the Talent Marketplace beyond officer assignments and to include enlisted assignments reflects a significant shift toward modernizing the assignment-matching processes.

In spite of the Talent Marketplace platform’s introduction, the fundamental process and traditional manual assignment-matching methodologies have remained unchanged. Therefore, the process heavily relies on human judgment rather than the science of matchmaking that market design can provide. The alignment of human judgment and data-informed decisions is essential not only for optimizing current operations but also for promoting retention and strategically cultivating a future-ready force. The next chapter will further explore the key problems and challenges in the Talent Marketplace.

“In the case of markets, bad designs can often persist not just because it takes time to discover better ones, but also because there may be lots of market participants with a stake in the status quo and many interests are involved in coordinating any market-wide change.”—Alvin E. Roth

Despite its promise, Talent Marketplace has yet to evolve to realize its full potential. Recent studies have described the Air Force Talent Marketplace’s functionality as “somewhat more market-oriented”¹⁶ and “closer to a digital talent marketplace” but noted that it “does not yet function as a true market.”¹⁷ While the platform enhances transparency and stakeholder involvement, this chapter addresses the core challenges related to operational execution and technology that must be resolved for Talent Marketplace to function optimally.

The design of Talent Marketplace was intended to balance the art and science of assignment matching. The Air Force Personnel Center Commander, General Brian Kelly, in 2018 defined art as “officer development where a variety of warfighter requirements, special considerations such as join-spouse or Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) requests, and individual desires are balanced to help maximize both officer and billet owner satisfaction with solutions sometimes outside of conventional parameters.”¹⁸ The science aspect is described as “providing predictability and consistency using defined timelines and rule sets that allow Airmen and families to understand and plug into the process accordingly.”¹⁹

While the design successfully digitized the existing process onto a new platform to enhance transparency, it failed to address the core intent of the Human Capital Annex vision. The strategy aimed to modernize workforce management in line with present-day research, which indicates that traditional methods of managing people for industrial jobs are inadequate to anticipate and meet an organization’s needs in an information age. It is widely acknowledged that “as technology, speed of operations, and mission flexibility increase, human capital management approaches need to evolve accordingly.”²⁰

Although the initial design of the Talent Marketplace wasn’t transformative, General Kelly recognized the importance of an iterative design process, stating, “We are also 100 percent sure we didn’t get it 100 percent right, so we continue to incorporate feedback and make modifications as we go.”²¹ The dynamic and fluid nature of markets necessitates gradual adjustments to meet the evolving needs of the organization and key stakeholders.

However, due to competing digital transformation efforts, the Air Force has not prioritized the evaluation and development of the Talent Marketplace—This is an oversight. The lack of prioritization of Talent Marketplace has led to limited progress over the past three years, with the platform’s advancement taking a backseat to other enterprise initiatives on MyVector, an enterprise solution that aims to support career development and mentoring in the Air Force.

The diversion of resources has resulted in an accumulating backlog of over 300 items, unresolved since the fiscal year 2022.²² The backlog items include bug fixes, changes to existing features, and new requirements that have yet to be built. For example, there is a coordination option in Talent Marketplace that needs to be fixed. Currently, it only allows for approval or disapproval of assignment actions, which results in unnecessary rework because it does not allow the user to return or redirect the action. Other items in the backlog involve added capabilities for Officer Assignment Teams (OATs) to pull reports and metrics that gather data from assignment cycle matches. Additionally, there are requests for data automation that adds Personnel Processing Codes and other key information to assignment transactions to reduce errors and delayed reporting.

The backlog continues to grow as Talent Marketplace has become a Total Force platform, resulting in more users and additional requirements to build the desired system capabilities. The absence of prioritization has impacted the overall implementation, wherein iterative design methodologies and feedback loops are not given priority, particularly because of the substantial existing backlog and limited resources. The former Chief of Talent Marketplace attributes the platform becoming a victim of its success due to senior leaders prematurely declaring it as a solution for officer assignments and scaling it too quickly. “We were directed to expand the platform for Total Force assignments when Talent Marketplace was still only a partial solution. Talent Marketplace growth was a priority. However, we did not have the staffing or resources to focus on improving the OAS and scal[ing it] at the same time.”²³

This misalignment between business growth and strategic resource allocation has left the platform at a basic level of functionality, falling short of fully meeting user needs or evolving. For example, the matching algorithm used in the Talent Marketplace is not working as intended. In one example, when comparing the final assignment matches to the computed ones, the algorithm only achieved approximately a 22 percent match rate, aligning only 22 out of 104 matches.²⁴ The algorithm does not account for the unique qualifications of officers or important variables such as positions that must be filled, priority matches for short-tour returnees, or considerations for join-spouse officers.

This has led the OATs to distrust the results, prompting them to manually verify matches using the old process.²⁵ The decision to employ the deferred acceptance algorithm has been criticized for the absence of evidence-based justification and was noted as a “too-hasty parallel” of the National Resident Matching Program application.²⁶ The faulty algorithm application was acknowledged early on and is listed as one of the many open backlog items.

Another factor leading to the underperformance of the algorithm is a lack of an informed and informative market. Billet owners are not incentivized or compelled to provide detailed job descriptions that clarify the responsibilities, qualifications, and competencies required for each role. Comparatively, there are ineffective mechanisms for officers to convey specific skills, knowledge, and organizational fit for available opportunities other than a member’s comments provided to the OATs. These limitations may result in missed opportunities for billet owners to identify suitable candidates and for officers to align their aspirations with opportunities.

The strong correlation between assignments and retention further exacerbates this misalignment. The 2021 Air Force Exit Survey revealed compelling evidence supporting this link, identifying several Talent Marketplace assignment-related factors influencing members’ decisions to leave the Air Force. Among the top factors influencing exit decisions are job stress, overall job satisfaction, opportunities outside the military, choice of job assignment, and location.²⁷

In assessing the shortcomings of the Talent Marketplace, it’s important to consider current national workplace trends. According to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report, 47 percent of employees are actively looking for new jobs with the intention of leaving their current employer, while an additional 52 percent of employees fall under the category of “quiet quitting.”²⁸ This group represents a disengaged workforce that remains with their employer but only does the bare minimum, resulting in low productivity and negative impacts on the organization’s bottom line. They are seen as an organization’s “greatest opportunity for growth and change” if proactive measures are taken to address the challenges related to engagement, incentives, and employee well-being.²⁹

However, the lack of transparency and engagement within the assignment-matching process complicates addressing these challenges. The fundamental principles of the Air Force Officer Assignment System (AFOAS) inherently devalue expressed preferences, as they explicitly prioritize mission needs and an officer’s professional development over the desires of officers and commanders, which can result in an officer receiving an assignment that was not on their ranked assignment preference list.³⁰ The findings of the 2020 Talent Marketplace Survey draw attention to this disconnect, where survey participants expressed a need for increased transparency regarding how billet owners’ and officers’ preferences are weighted in the matching process.

Respondents also called for a comprehensive explanation regarding the rationale behind the final assignment decisions made by the OATs.³¹ The rules and processes that govern the market, including how final matches are made, must be transparent in an internal talent marketplace (ITM). The AFOAS Personnel Delivery Guide offers some guidance, but the ultimate assignment decisions rest with the OATs. If stakeholders do not further understand procedures beyond the current definition of art and science, this decentralized system may lead to different interpretations and execution of the AFOAS.

The challenges of the Talent Marketplace are complex but possible to fix with a clear vision and follow-through. The following chapter will discuss elements of an ideal ITM and identify how organizations are evolving their human capital management strategies.

“There’s a way to do it better. Find it.”—Thomas Edison

This chapter explores the critical elements necessary for optimizing an internal talent marketplace (ITM), highlighting the importance of being (1) mission-responsive; (2) innovative yet disciplined; (3) accurately informed and informative; (4) understood and trusted; and (5) collaborative and agile.³² By examining these key attributes, as well as the role of advanced technology and iterative design, we will identify how organizations leverage ITMs to create a responsive and engaged workforce.

Mission responsiveness describes an organization’s ability to effectively respond to emerging missions and address strategic capability gaps. A 2021 study published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine further elaborates that the “Air Force requires [a human capital management] system that is mission-connected and strategic (e.g., assessing and developing Airman competencies to meet changes to the mission; providing incentives to retain individuals that have mission-critical competencies such as pilots or cyber).”³³ As mentioned previously, the Air Force is not alone in the challenges associated with competing in the new talent market or the need for a mission-responsive ITM.

While organizations may adopt various approaches in implementing an ITM to address these challenges, Deloitte has identified three common strategies focused on “talent deployment,” “talent mobility and management,” and the “future-of-work model.”³⁴ Understanding an organization’s pain points through the identification of user personas, goals, objectives, and incentives is key to defining the strategy for an ITM and ensuring successful implementation. Despite organizations beginning with one distinct strategy, the organizations interviewed remain agile in their approach and evolve their strategy as the market matures.³⁵

An innovative yet disciplined ITM maintains a forward-looking approach by encouraging innovative solutions and continuous improvement. As strategies transform, researchers recommend utilizing an iterative design process to assess and align the ITM across the following four P’s:

• Purpose: Define your strategy based on different possible use cases and measurable outcomes;
• Plan: Determine the iterative steps required to activate the internal talent marketplace;
• Program: Define the policies and processes that enable talent and career mobility; and
• Platform: Work toward an integrated technology ecosystem.³⁶

Schneider Electric’s ITM journey illustrates such an approach. Their decision to implement an ITM was motivated by an internal exit survey, which revealed that 50 percent of departing employees noted the lack of internal growth opportunities as the primary factor for their resignation.³⁷ With a clearly defined purpose, Schneider Electric developed a three-part strategy to improve retention, empower employees in their career-path choices, and increase learning and development opportunities.³⁸ Leveraging artificial intelligence, their Open Talent Market solution matches employees to opportunities based on their skills, experience, and interests. This approach has given employees more autonomy in their careers and has resulted in Schneider Electric saving $15 million in enhanced productivity as well as reduced recruiting expenses by unlocking hidden capacity and skills within the company.³⁹ While its ITM solution began with retention in mind, it has since transformed its ability to embrace a future-of-work model through flexible assignments and encouraging a culture of continuous employee development.

The usefulness of an ITM depends on the system providing enough information on available opportunities. Additionally, it should contain detailed information about individuals applying for these opportunities to ensure the alignment of matches based on skills, interests, and career aspirations.

As seen in Schnieder Electric’s Open Talent Market solution, matching employees with opportunities requires the system to be both accurately informed and informative through market design. Market design “brings science to matchmaking” by integrating game theory and market behavior insights to create systems that facilitate efficient and equitable transactions.⁴⁰ Alvin Roth, a leading expert in the field of market design and the inspiration behind the Air Force’s Talent Marketplace, emphasizes that markets must be thick, uncongested, and safe to function properly.⁴¹ Thickness implies having an equally large pool of job opportunities and candidates. While thickness is desirable, it can lead to congestion, or “the economic equivalent of a traffic jam, a curse of success,” if participants don’t have adequate time or information to make informed decisions.⁴²

The collaboration and agility of an organization are gauged by its adaptability to evolving business needs and workforce dynamics through an interconnected ecosystem approach. The emergence of new technology and automation continues to shape organizational structures and increase the need for employee skill-tracking and upskilling as existing jobs are transformed and new jobs are created.

As an example, Booz Allen implemented a skill-based job architecture and recommendation algorithms to mitigate congestion. Despite the structured approach, initial adoption by employees and managers was slow, highlighting the need for better engagement to gather employee profile data for tailored recommendations.⁴³ To drive desired behaviors, they integrated their existing skill badging program with their ITM to serve as a holistic talent management solution called Career Hub. This integration created a structured and systematic way for employees to engage with the system, requiring regular updates of skills and preferences. Booz Allen’s talent system investments resulted in improved talent marketplace adoption, a heightened focus on employees acquiring essential skills essential for the company’s strategic growth, and a notable 4 percent improvement in their retention rate.⁴⁴

The overall effectiveness of an ITM and its matching mechanisms depend on the clarity, transparency, and understanding of the marketplace rules by all key stakeholders and system users.

For instance, Google chose to adopt a deferred acceptance algorithm in the development of its Chameleon platform to ensure market matches adhere to defined rules while maintaining scalability and prioritizing choice and fairness.⁴⁵ To establish confidence among individual contributors and managers, Google focused on providing them with an understanding of the system’s operations and dispelling any opacity surrounding the black box algorithm that generated matching outputs.⁴⁶ By addressing these concerns, they successfully aligned the preferences of managers and workers with business goals while ensuring the process was seen as fair by its users.

As an ITM becomes more informed and informative, it provides valuable workforce-related data that can be used to inform strategic human capital management (HCM) decisions. Researchers note combining human resource metrics with talent analytics “forms a powerful approach to optimizing the utilization and experience of the chief resource of most organizations—the people.”⁴⁷

Through talent analytics, Google identified low-performing employees whose skills were mismatched to opportunities and poorly managed. This awareness enabled Google to address these issues through personalized incentives, thereby retaining employees and supporting their success.⁴⁸ These insights can also enhance organizational responsiveness by fostering collaborative efforts within the HCM system. A collaborative system integrates traditionally siloed functions such as talent acquisition, talent management, learning and development, and performance management into an interconnected solution, creating value across the organization.⁴⁹

Creating an optimized ITM requires a balanced, agile approach that ensures the system is mission-responsive, innovative, informed, trusted, and collaborative. The following chapter will provide recommended actions for the Air Force to develop a well-designed Talent Marketplace that facilitates efficient talent matching while supporting continuous improvement and organizational resilience in a dynamic labor market.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”—Albert Einstein

As we evaluate the Air Force’s challenges in the Air Force Officer Assignment System (AFOAS) Talent Marketplace, a “gone forward to the past” approach is no longer effective in managing talent in today’s informational age. The Air Force must modernize and follow through on development efforts that align with industry best practices to create an agile and adaptive human capital management (HCM) system that leverages our personnel as a strategic asset.

The Air Force must create a better Airmen value proposition to retain talent and has taken a first step by following industry trends and implementing an internal talent marketplace (ITM). However, as illustrated previously, there are several key problems and challenges in realizing the full potential of the Talent Marketplace.

The Talent Marketplace has been scaled as a Total Force solution but is not aligned with a clear strategy or adequate resources. The lack of a clear strategy has also resulted in a misalignment in policy and functionality of matching mechanisms within the system. This direct misalignment is further exasperated by the lack of information to properly align talent with opportunities.

While ITMs aim to increase transparency and collaboration, the Talent Marketplace lacks feedback loops and monitoring to ensure the efficiency of the system’s performance. The culmination of these challenges has resulted in a growing backlog and a missed opportunity to leverage the benefits other organizations have achieved through the deployment of an optimized ITM solution. To improve the Air Force’s Talent Marketplace, the following three recommendations are proposed:

1. Define the Talent Marketplace strategy;
2. Increase transparency and communication; and
3. Enhance data connectivity and optimize matching algorithms.

The Air Force should initiate a talent deployment strategy to align Airmen’s skills, attributes, and interests with available assignment opportunities. This strategy aligns with the broader AFOAS goal of assigning the right officer to the right job at the right time. It is important to note that this strategy will serve as a starting point to set the foundation for future iterations of the Talent Marketplace. The following key activities should be conducted to inform the strategy implementation.

• Appoint a senior leader within the A1 to champion the development and follow-through of Talent Marketplace updates.
• Establish change management programs to communicate Talent Marketplace changes.
• Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure Talent Marketplace success.
• Review 4Ps (Purpose, Plan, Program, and Platform) to assess the actions required to activate the talent deployment strategy. Review and update policies and processes that govern the Talent Marketplace to enable talent movements and incentivize desired behaviors within the market.
• Establish a strategy review cadence to continuously assess the Talent Marketplace based on the established KPIs and measurable outcomes across the 4Ps.
• Use human-centered design methods to map the user journey and identify user personas to align capabilities within the system.

The Talent Marketplace must be transparent and enable communication to properly execute a talent deployment strategy that aligns Airmen’s skills, attributes, and interests with available assignment opportunities. The following key activities should be conducted to increase transparency and communication.

• Establish rules of engagement for the Talent Marketplace and outline the process for making assignment decisions to promote transparency and fairness.
• Co-locate all published Talent Marketplace policies, procedures, and process documentation on the Talent Marketplace landing page. Provide specific details such as how many preferences members should list. Create an explainer video that clarifies how the matching algorithm works.
• Publish Air Force Personnel Center (AFPC) public post-assignment cycle reports that offer macro data on Talent Marketplace matching outcomes.
• Publish an internal AFPC post-assignment cycle report that identifies constraints in matching officers to desired assignments and annotates final matching outcomes that deviate from expressed preferences.
• Implement feedback mechanisms to solicit input from the users about their experiences within the Talent Marketplace during and after assignment matches. This feedback will serve as a feedback loop to inform future developments and adjustments.
• Develop a communications tracking feature on Talent Marketplace to monitor and analyze engagement between billet owners and officers throughout the assignment cycle. This functionality enables the collection of data about communication dynamics and engagement levels.
• Incentivize and enforce billet owners to provide detailed position descriptions before being allowed to post their jobs in the market.

Enhanced data connectivity and optimized matching algorithms will enable the Talent Marketplace to drive organizational outcomes and Airmen satisfaction. The following key activities should be conducted to improve data integration and refine the matching process.

• Connect MyVector profile, resume, and endorsement data with Talent Marketplace. This integration allows officers to share additional interests, skills, and competencies not captured in standard personnel data with billet owners.
• Implement machine learning recommendations to enhance and personalize the officer and billet owner’s search within Talent Marketplace. The users should still be able to view all available officers and positions during the assignment cycle.
• Use insights from AFPC reports and user feedback to refine and improve the recommendation engines to increase the accuracy and effectiveness of matches.
• Use data captured from AFPC reports to identify deferred acceptance algorithm deficiencies to improve the usefulness of its application.
• Standardize competencies and skills captured in job descriptions and officer profile data to maximize matching algorithms.

Implementing these recommendations will transform the Talent Marketplace into an ITM that is mission-responsive, innovative yet disciplined, accurately informed and informative, understood and trusted, collaborative, and agile. Creating a connected and data-driven platform will open additional opportunities for Talent Marketplace to integrate with other HCM systems, such as learning and development courses and mentoring connections. Such integration represents a comprehensive systems approach, enhancing the overall functionality of Talent Marketplace and improving talent management within the Air Force.

“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”—Carl Jung

To effectively optimize and engage its all-volunteer force for great power competition, the Air Force must shift from traditional, industrial-age talent management strategies toward those required by the information age. As stated in the Air Force Strategic Plan, this transition involves more than just technology: “Game-changers do not result solely from technology, but rather from the specific ways in which a technology is applied in an operational capability—and how such capabilities are employed.”⁵⁰

In evaluating the Talent Marketplace, it becomes evident that despite the potential of its application as an internal talent marketplace, it has yet to reach industry benchmarks of an optimized solution. The Talent Marketplace can be a game-changer if the Air Force prioritizes and advances its development with a clearly defined strategy to enhance transparency, communication, and data connectivity to optimize matching algorithms for a personalized experience. Once the Talent Marketplace is optimized, it will provide valuable workforce-related data that can inform strategic talent management decisions, positioning the Air Force to develop new ways to identify and align Airmen’s unique talents with agility.

In an era where our military’s strategic advantage hinges on human capital, effectively managing and retaining talent within the Air Force is critical to maintaining operational readiness and a competitive edge. The time is now to follow through and fix the Talent Marketplace to ensure the right Airmen are in the right jobs at the right time, leveraging its human capital as a strategic resource.