Recruiting

Are You Prepared for Internal Hiring?

In yesterday’s Advisor, we discussed the considerable upside of internal hiring. Today, how to avoid common internal hiring pitfalls.

Doesn’t an Internal Hire Mean Just Another Job to Fill?

Well, yes. When a chair breaks on 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 lower in the salary range.
  • Junior and entry-level positions, while important, are often more easily covered by existing staff than senior positions.

Need to get the c-suite on board with your recruiting strategy? Start on Wednesday, September 30, 2015, with a new interactive webinar, Talking Recruiting to Management: How to Get the C-Suite on Board with Your Strategic Recruiting Initiatives. Learn More.


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 believe the procedure was fair.

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.

Whatever your recruiting plan, it’s vital that your executive suite is on board, or you’ll get nowhere fast. It all starts with knowing what you need, creating a convincing case of why your organization needs it, and putting it all in language that resonates with the C-suite. How to get there? Fortunately there’s timely help in the form of BLR’s new webinar—Talking Recruiting to Management: How to Get the C-Suite on Board with Your Strategic Recruiting Initiatives. In just 60 minutes, on Wednesday, September 30, you’ll learn everything you need to know about getting your executives on board with your recruiting strategy!

Register today for this interactive webinar.


It’s easier to build a good team if your c-suite backs up your recruiting strategy. Join us Wednesday, September 30, 2015, for a new interactive webinar, Talking Recruiting to Management: How to Get the C-Suite on Board with Your Strategic Recruiting Initiatives. Earn 1 hour in HRCI Recertification Credit and 1 hour in SHRM Professional Development Credit. Register Now.


By participating in this interactive webinar, you’ll learn how to:

  • Tips for conducting a solid recruiting audit for your organization—what do you have, what do you need and what would you like to see it the future?
  • How to define those needs and wants in a way that shows benefits for the overall company, not just another bell or whistle for the HR department
  • The kinds of metrics you can track and incorporate that will get executives’ attention
  • What typically turns the C-suite off when it comes to recruiting needs – and how to turn those potential landmines into opportunities
  • A review of “executive speak” – how to speak the C-suite’s language in a way that will not only have it offering support, but turn it into a valued recruiting partner
  • And much more!

Register now for this event risk-free.

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. (Eastern)
1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. (Central)
12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. (Mountain)
11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (Pacific)

Approved for Recertification Credit and Professional Development Credit

This program has been approved for 1 credit hour toward recertification through the Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI) and 1 credit hour towards SHRM-CPSM or SHRM-SCPSM.

Join us on Wednesday, September 30, 2015—you’ll get the in-depth Talking Recruiting to Management: How to Get the C-Suite on Board with Your Strategic Recruiting Initiatives webinar AND you’ll get all of your particular questions answered by our experts.

Find out more

Train Your Entire Staff

As with all BLR®/HR Hero® webinars:

  • Train all the staff you can fit around a conference phone.
  • Get your (and their) specific phoned-in or e-mailed questions answered in Q&A sessions that follow the presentation.

Find out more

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