Yesterday’s Advisor outlined the advantages to internal hiring (including saving on training costs). Today we’ll discuss ways to avoid inevitable downsides of internal hiring.
Doesn’t an Internal Hire Mean Just Another Job to Fill?
Well, yes. When a chair breaks in your lawn set, it doesn’t matter how much you rearrange the remaining furniture, you will still be down a chair. Luckily, jobs are more dynamic than lawn furniture. In this regard, the largest advantage comes from the fact that hiring from within should always leave a junior opening and fill a senior one. Consider the greater ease at hiring for a junior position versus a senior one:
- The candidate pool for junior-level positions is often larger.
- Candidates often don’t need as much training to fill a junior level position.
- If the candidate you replaced had risen up in the salary range by the time you moved him or her to a better position, you can save money by hiring the replacement candidate lower in the salary range.
- Junior and entry-level positions, while important, are often more easily covered by existing staff than senior positions.
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Won’t Hiring Within Make Others Jealous?
It is true that hiring within can make other employees jealous, specifically, those employees who also wanted the job. But there are ways to mitigate this problem. For example, don’t hand-pick an employee to fill the open position, even if you have one candidate in mind.
Instead, it’s best to open up the job to anyone who wants to apply, then interview each applicant as you would with outside candidates. Those who didn’t make the cut may be disappointed, but most will roll with it as long as they know the procedure was fair.
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Some of the Same; More of the Good
Let’s take a quick look at the risks of hiring within and see how they stack up against the risks of hiring externally:
- It’s true that hiring within fills one position but creates another. You may be able to fill that opening with another internal candidate. Either way, it is generally preferable to have outside candidates applying for the easier-to-fill, cheaper, more junior position.
- If you hire externally, your employees might feel overlooked and unimportant. If you hire from within the company, those who don’t make the cut can feel overlooked as well. However, if you have to risk upsetting your employees either way, it makes a lot more sense to at least make them feel like they were considered for the job.
Is internal hiring for you? It saves recruiting time and costs, training time and costs, gets you on track faster, and helps employee engagement and retention. Hiring from an external candidate pool does none of these things. Next time you have an open position, look at your current employees—you might be surprised at what you find.