MYOB is Everybody’s Business!!
MYOB is a leading business management platform supporting Australian and New Zealand Sole Traders, SMEs and Mid-Market organizations, providing technology solutions across accounting, payroll, and enterprise resource planning. Our purpose is to help businesses start, survive and succeed in a rapidly evolving digital economy.
The Talent Team
MYOBs Talent function operates as a centralized but business-partnered model, with a mature Talent Advisory team embedded within a broader People Experience function, working closely alongside our Senior Leadership teams and General Managers of People to enable workforce capability at scale.
The Challenge:
2 years ago, we identified a critical challenge: despite strong internal capability, we continued to rely heavily on external hiring for critical roles, with limited visibility of internal talent and inconsistent career conversations happening across the business. This initiative aligned strongly to broader business goals, including building future capability in a competitive tech market, improving retention of critical talent, increasing organizational agility, and reducing dependency on external hiring by unlocking internal talent pathways.
Goals & Success Metrics
Primary Quantitative Goals
- Increase internal mobility into technology and adjacent roles
- Reduce time-to-fill for priority roles
- Decrease reliance on external hires for critical positions
- Improve retention of high-potential and critical talent
- Establish and embed Quality of Hire as the hero metric for Talent Acquisition, measuring the long-term impact of hiring decisions on performance, retention, and business outcomes
Primary Qualitative Goals
- Improve the quality and consistency of career conversations and provide an objective view of marketability and the external market for our people
- Increase employee confidence and engagement in internal career opportunities
- Strengthen leader capability in talent development
- Improve hiring manager satisfaction with talent pipelines
- Shift perception of Talent Acquisition from a delivery function to a value driver through measurable hiring quality outcomes
Aspirational Goals
– Normalize non-linear career movement
– Solidify Talent Acquisition’s position at MYOB as true strategic advisors
Stakeholder Engagement & Buy in
This initiative required broad and sustained engagement across the organization.
Internal Stakeholders
- Executive and Senior Leaders
- People Leaders
- People & Culture Teams
- Employees
External Stakeholders
- Market insights and benchmarking sources
Approach / Actions Taken
Design & Planning
We designed an integrated talent system, owned by Talent. By Talent owning and driving the new process, partnering with key collaborators across People Experience, we were able to create a holistic and total view of Talent at MYOB.
Starting with Career Conversations as the Foundation
Our transformation began in 2023 with the introduction of career conversations as a foundational intervention.
We intentionally designed these as unbiased, future-focused discussions, where employees could opt into conversations with senior leaders within the Talent team in addition to their regular direct manager 1-1’s. This created a safe and objective space for individuals to explore their career aspirations, capabilities, and potential pathways.
These conversations focused on:
- Identifying how to bridge capability gaps to reach the next stage of their career
- Reframing lateral moves as meaningful career progression, not just upward movement
- Encouraging employees to expand beyond their current role, team, or even function
- In some cases, supporting honest discussions about growth pathways both within and beyond MYOB, reinforcing trust and transparency, and providing real market intel
This approach significantly increased visibility of internal ambition and capability, while also building a more mature understanding of non-linear, skills-based career development.
Expanding to a Connected Talent System
Given that Talent Acquisition already owned internal mobility and played an active role in workforce planning and future organisational design, this created a natural progression.
We expanded the scope of the Talent function to take a more integrated role across:
- Talent reviews
- Talent management practices
- Succession planning
This shift positioned Talent as a central connector across the talent lifecycle, working in close collaboration with People Experience teams and senior business leaders.
By bringing these elements together, we moved from fragmented talent activities to a cohesive, insight-led system.
Roles & Responsibilities
- Talent Acquisition: talent brokers and advisors, creation of Talent Review frameworks and Succession design
- Business Leaders: talent outcomes accountability
- People Experience: Sponsorship, Development, Collaborators
Processes / Methods
- Reimagined career conversations to be future focused
- Enabled internal mobility and lateral movement
- Embedded dynamic succession planning to also incorporate our critical capability, going more broadly than leadership to identify the talent needed in such a rapidly changing world.
Embedding Quality of Hire as a Core Metric
To support the broader shift from Talent to Talent Management, we introduced Quality of Hire as the Talent Acquisition team’s hero metric.
This was designed to move away from volume and speed-based success measures (e.g. time-to-fill) toward longer-term indicators of hiring impact, including:
- Performance and effectiveness in role
- Retention and tenure
- Alignment to capability needs and future potential
- Hiring manager satisfaction
Importantly, Quality of Hire was not treated as a standalone metric, it was tightly linked to our broader talent system, reinforcing:
- The importance of internal mobility as a source of our quality hires
- The value of career conversations in identifying better-fit candidates
- The role of succession planning in building ready and near-ready talent for an evolving workforce
This added weight to Talent Acquisition being a function focused not just on filling roles, but on optimising long-term talent outcomes.
Technology / Tools used
- Leveraged existing HR systems and simple frameworks
Outcomes & Results
Quantitative Results
- Increased internal mobility across the organization & Decreased reliance on external hiring for key positions (Internal hires at 40%)
- Reduced time-to-fill for critical roles (under 8 days for an internal hire)
- Decreased reliance on external hiring for key positions
- Established a baseline and ongoing measurement approach for Quality of Hire, enabling more informed hiring decisions and stronger alignment to business outcomes
Qualitative Results
- Noticeable improvement in the quality and consistency of career conversations
- Increased employee awareness and confidence in internal pathways
- Greater leader engagement in talent development and succession discussions
- Stronger visibility of organisational capability and talent pipelines
- Improved hiring manager confidence in hiring decisions, with greater focus on long-term fit and impact rather than immediate capability alone
Unexpected Benefit
- Stronger internal career mindset
- Increased engagement results around internal career opportunities
- Increased collaboration across People experience and cross functionally
- Confidence in knowing who our Talent is, where are our gaps, with the ability to build not only robust internal succession plans, but also engaged external pipelines where we have minimal bench strength
Challenges & Do-Overs
Unexpected Roadblocks
- Defining and aligning on a consistent, meaningful definition of Quality of Hire across stakeholders
- Defining critical capability and roles in a rapidly changing workforce
Key Learnings
- What gets measured shifts behaviour: Introducing Quality of Hire helped move the conversation from speed and volume to long-term impact
- Conversations are foundational
- Mobility must be designed
- Culture shift is critical around the strategic value that a Talent Leader can have when they are in the right conversations about internal and external talent and capability
Conclusion
This initiative grew from initial career conversations, to so much more, enabling MYOB to unlock talent and build a more future ready workforce.
