The process of hiring is obviously complex and mired in difficulty. Knowing how to lead a search for an external candidate is a particular skillset and requires time, energy, and focus on being expended elsewhere in your company. While you could hire a consulting agency to help you find outside candidates, it then becomes another expense in your process. While it can be tempting to find fresh faces and add new blood to your workforce by looking to fill middle and upper management positions from outside the company, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that promoting internal candidates can be a more efficient and effective means of hiring. While Millenials are less and less invested in the concept of the company man, taking the time to grow and groom individuals in your company to stay for the long haul is often a better way to grow your company than bringing in outside members who know little about you and in reverse about whom you know little.
Plenty of evidence supports claims that hiring internally produces higher productivity levels at the newly filled position than if you hired someone from the outside to fill that spot. In a research study conducted by professors at Cornell and the University of Minnesota, there was strong evidence to suggest that internally hired candidates provided a greater boost to productivity, and it came down to one primary factor. When both internal and external candidates looked like high-performance candidates, really, only one metric would end up separating the two. High productivity candidates, we’re far more likely to leave a new company early, while internally promoted candidates were far more likely to stay with their company for significantly longer durations. Beyond maintaining stability in the present, hiring internally looks to sustain stability for the foreseeable future by hiring people who know, love, and want to develop the company they invest in with their effort, time, and care.
In the conflict over whether to promote internally vs. hiring externally, you should always remember to focus heavily on providing your internal promotions team the appropriate time and resources they deserve. Developing an internal job board is a phenomenal way to consistently have a team responsible for looking at and deciding whether to promote internally or not. Born of 21st-century innovation, an internal job board is basically exactly what it sounds. If you have job openings, providing a place on your website for employees to look at for promotions can be pivotal to retaining talent and growing internally. If employees feel the itch to look for jobs elsewhere, having an internal job board can see if their space already open to growing within the company can do much to keep them around.
There is no magic bullet to hire. It’s often a laborious and tiresome process. Easily the first step to reducing the stress of hiring is to look internally. Of course, you don’t just want to promote internally for the sake of doing so, especially if a candidate isn’t particularly qualified. Regardless of when you have a high productivity candidate who’s internal and wants to remain within your company: your best bet is to strongly consider an internal candidate if what you’re after is the betterment of your business.