Strategies for effective internal recruitment. How to develop talent within your organization?

Companies with many employees are keen to use internal recruitment to find candidates for senior positions. A candidate who is familiar with the company’s procedures and organizational culture is likely to settle into a new role much faster than someone from outside the company. Internal promotions bring numerous benefits to companies—as long as they are carried out correctly. What strategies are worth using to develop talent within an organization?

When searching for candidates for senior positions, employers should first check whether they already have someone with the right skills in their ranks. According to The Future of Recruiting 2023 report, as many as 75% of recruitment professionals say that internal recruitment will be an important factor shaping the future of this process over the next 5 years. Why?

Here are the most important benefits of internal recruitment.

• Lower recruitment and onboarding costs. Over the past two years, the costs associated with hiring an employee have increased by an average of 36% and currently amount to approximately PLN 5,000. Internal recruitment eliminates the need to publish job ads, invest in recruitment campaigns, analyze CVs, or conduct numerous interviews with candidates. This type of recruitment is therefore cheaper and faster.
• Lower risk of promoted employees leaving. Giving an employee the opportunity for internal promotion has a huge impact on increasing their commitment and building loyalty. This reduces the risk that the employee will leave the company in the short term.
• Building the image of a company that offers opportunities for development. A proven opportunity for development is an important element of employer branding. Other employees feel more motivated to achieve better results and develop their skills.

Although internal promotions bring many benefits to the organization, it is also worth remembering certain risks. What are they?

• The departure of other candidates competing for promotion. Most often, there are significantly more people willing to take on higher positions than there are vacancies. The candidate with the most promising potential is selected for internal promotion. However, the others may experience a significant drop in motivation and even decide to leave the company, which is the case for up to 24% of employees whose candidacy has been rejected.
• Problems faced by employees after taking up a higher position. The effects of internal recruitment depend on whether it is carried out correctly, i.e., taking into account competence and attitude rather than sentiment. Recruitment based on opinion rather than objective evaluation criteria may result in the position being filled by an incompetent employee.

Internal promotions should be based on clear criteria, not personal preferences. If an organization plans to conduct internal recruitment, it is worth taking steps to facilitate the process and make it fair and transparent.

One of the easiest ways to recruit internal candidates for higher positions is to prepare them for the role through internal training. In large companies, employees often express their desire to develop and take on new challenges at an early stage. Planning an employee’s development path and providing training and tasks to test their abilities will allow you to check whether the selected person should indeed be given a chance for promotion. The entire process must be conducted fairly. To this end, competency matrices are an essential tool, providing access to information about skill levels for both the supervisor and the employee.

However, let us assume that we have 10 candidates with the same experience and level of competence for one position. What can we do to select the best candidate from among them? The noSilo application we have developed, in addition to conducting the aforementioned training courses and creating competency matrices, also allows you to create your own training programs – entire blocks containing various types of surveys, checklists, and tests. A good solution may therefore be to create a dedicated program to test the theoretical and practical competencies of candidates for internal promotion to a specific position. Theoretical tests will allow you to check the employee’s current knowledge. The most important stage, however, will be practical tasks based on checklists – this way, we can see how the candidate will cope with the challenge under time pressure or pressure from other people. Multi-level tests conducted during such a training program will allow us to select the candidate with the best hard and soft skills.

Internal recruitment is an important element of building an organizational culture and translates into the optimization of employment costs. It is worth planning activities in advance that will allow you to effectively develop talent and select the best candidates for higher positions.

Bibliography:

https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/talent-solutions/resources/pdfs/future-of-recruiting-2023.pdf;
https://ccnews.pl/2023/09/28/drastycznie-rosna-koszty-rekrutacji-pracownikow/;
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/being-overlooked-promotion-reason-24-employees-say-theyre-pitner/.