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Internal Hiring Best Practices

Each companies hiring strategy is based on a set of rules that defines the ideal candidate. Many companies utilize internal and external hiring to ensure they have skilled, experienced workers. If you work in recruiting, maximizing your internal hiring strategies could be the key to retaining employees and simplifying your hiring process.

Why Would I Choose Internal Hiring?

When successful, the benefits of internal recruitment extend far beyond simply filling a vacancy. Companies that look to their existing employees fill new positions more quickly and at a lower cost. Better yet, internal hiring has the power to foster an energetic, resilient work culture. Let’s explain more.

Rapid and cost-effective hiring

The greatest apparent benefit of recruiting from the inside is accelerating the lengthy and costly employment process. When a new position becomes available, external recruitment starts from scratch – sourcing, recruiting, filtering, interviewing, etc.

On the other hand, internal recruitment skips the sourcing and recruiting part and gets right to evaluations. Hiring managers move straight to analyzing internal candidates’ strengths, weaknesses, and areas of growth. Even if an internal applicant would require more training, it is still less expensive than onboarding a totally new employee.

Developing a stimulating corporate culture

In addition to being less expensive and time-consuming, internal recruitment assists businesses in stimulating workplace culture. By giving current employees opportunities to advance and move around on the career ladder, you show that you are willing to invest in their professional growth. This not only increases morale and healthy competition, but it also positively impacts retention and employer branding.

Decreased training expenses

Internal candidates require less broad training, so their training costs less than external candidates. Internal candidates are already familiar with the company’s history, organizational structure, types of software in use, and the company’s initiatives. Therefore, they don’t have to take extra time to learn about these things. Instead, once they are acquainted with their new role, they can become productive sooner.

5 Best Practices to Build an Internal Hiring Process

Develop a System for Announcing Vacancies

The hiring team should establish an internal job posting system to announce available opportunities. Depending on the company’s resources and the size of the organization, job posting methods vary from business to business. Some use message boards devoted to promoting internal roles. Meanwhile, others use asynchronous video software to distribute vacancy alerts. Other methods include

  • corporate newsletters and blogs
  • bulletin boards
  • old-fashioned email alerts
  • internal social media groups

Get Employee Referrals

No one knows your employees like other employees who work with them. Employee referrals can work one of two ways. In one instance, you could urge managers or supervisors to refer someone they work with. On the other hand, you could use employees’ opinions to evaluate applicants. Check in with your candidates’ colleagues to see who is really ready for the position.

By involving your staff in hiring, you create an environment of inclusivity. You make people feel as if their opinions matter, and give them a chance to advocate for each other. You may even decide to throw in a referral bonus on top of that.

Conduct Performance Reviews

One predictor of success is past growth and achievements. If your company consistently conducts performance reviews, then it would be helpful to go through and review those for employees who have applied.

Note that an open position is not always a promotion for the employee. Sometimes, a candidate may decide to apply because they feel that their skills would be more useful in a different position. So, when analyzing performance reviews, be sure to draw reasonable conclusions about why the employee wants the job. Then, ask questions to get a better picture of whether they are ready for the role.

Consider Transferable Skills

In general, transferable skills are the skills that employees carry over from one experience to the next. This is most important if you have an employee looking to change departments or fill a role that is different than their current one. Though roles differ, if a candidate has a strong set of transferable skills, it is an indicator that they can still be successful in the role. However, if the candidate’s skill set is not diverse, then it may be difficult to trust that they will transition into the role smoothly.

Keep Your Decisions Objective

One of the biggest downfalls of internal hiring is that bias is stronger than ever. You know these candidates. So it is very easy to choose the employee that you’ve worked with the most or you like the most. But it is so important you remain as objective as possible.

If your workforce feels that the process is one-sided and subjective, it will negatively impact employee morale and loyalty. Not to mention, it could also cause some division within your workforce. To avoid this, be sure your process follows a set of procedures based on data and objective comparisons.

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