What is the advantage of promoting from within when filing an opening within the organization?

What is the advantage of promoting from within when filing an opening within the organization?

When it comes to business growth, having the ability to create new assignments and expand on current roles within your company is vital to its overall success. When this happens, a business is forced to start recruiting new talent or promoting within. This can be a tough choice, particularly when you have highly skilled and dedicated employees competing for rank in your organization. And yet, there’s still undiscovered talent that is out there in need of a chance on the job market.

Succession planning is the practice of educating, mentoring, and promoting current employees so that they can increase productivity and growth for a business. In many cases, this method can be far more efficient than hiring new staff.

We’re here to help you decide if you should focus your team building efforts from the inside out, or if you should start a proactive recruitment campaign. Keep reading to find out the main benefits of promoting instead of hiring.

It’s less expensive to promote employees

In general, it is far less costly to promote employees from within vs. hiring outside candidates. Some experts estimate that it costs as much as a half-year’s salary to recruit just one employee. Before you hire anyone, you have to account for the cost of advertising, training, interview, and new hire orientation. Plus, it can be months before any productivity is enjoyed from an outside recruit. With an internal promotion there is little if any additional cost to the company.

Proven loyalty to the organization

Your current employees have already demonstrated that they are loyal to your company’s cause and mission. Therefore, it only makes sense that you choose promoting within, instead of taking a chance on a new hire who may decide not to stick around. Loyalty is a valuable commodity today, with so many professionals jumping ship for other opportunities on a frequent basis. Show how loyal you are to your hard working staff by offering internal promotions and employee development.

, rather than take a chance on a new hire who may decide not to stick around. Loyalty is a valuable commodity today, with so many professionals jumping ship for other opportunities on a frequent basis. Show how loyal you are to your hard working staff by offering internal promotions and employee development.

Seamless transition to new duties when promoting within

It’s often difficult and time consuming to bring a new hire into the flock. You’ll have to set aside time for training, mentoring, etc. This is a huge loss of productivity and time spent on trying to transition someone into new tasks. However, promoting within means s/he is already familiar with your company’s goals and tasks associated with success.

Synergistic fit for team culture

A group of employees may take months, even years, to get comfortable working with each other in a team setting. To more effectively staff for higher positions in the company, you must honor the company culture and how well each employee fits into the greater scheme of things. Only through planned team building and proper job matching, will your company be able to grow and flourish. Choosing hires from the outside can upset the corporate culture, leading to breakdowns in team cohesion and efficiency. Therefore, internal promotions are a better way to develop your teams within the corporate culture.

As you build your company and add new roles to handle additional tasks and projects, keep in mind all the advantages of succession planning by promoting from within. Take a careful inventory of the employees you have now, their skill sets and gifts, so that you can design a plan that helps honor the people who work hard for your success every day.

About the Author: Steven Burrell has been writing about technology and business solutions for nearly a decade. Visit this page for more information about cognitive ability testing for employees and students. 

What is the advantage of promoting from within when filing an opening within the organization?

Hiring from inside your business makes sense because new hires are already part of your team and know your culture and policies well. But despite the benefits of internal recruitment, relying too much on promotions and lateral job moves might have negative side-effects.

Here are eight advantages and disadvantages of internal recruitment and how to ensure that when you are hiring internally, your process works:

  • Advantages of internal recruitment
    • Reduce time to hire
    • Shorten onboarding times
    • Cost less
    • Strengthen employee engagement
  • Disadvantages of internal recruitment
    • Create resentment among employees and managers
    • Leave a gap in your existing workforce
    • Limit your pool of applicants
    • Result in inflexible culture
  • What could you do to mitigate the disadvantages of internal recruiting?

Advantages of internal recruitment

Hiring internal candidates can be more efficient than recruiting externally, because it can:

Reduce time to hire

When recruiting externally, hiring teams find candidates (either through sourcing or job posting), evaluate them and, if all goes well, persuade them to join their company. All of which takes time. Conversely, internal candidates are already part of your workplace, so the time you need to find and engage those candidates is much less. It’s also easier to assess internal candidates because:

  • They’re prescreened for culture fit.
  • Their track record is easily accessible.
  • They may not always need full interviews with managers (for example, if they are moving within their department, the department head already knows the candidate.)

All these reduce the time spent on each hiring stage and your overall time to hire.

Shorten onboarding times

Everyone needs some time to adjust to a new role, but internal hires are quicker to onboard than external hires. This is because they:

  • Know how your company operates and most of your policies and practices.
  • May be familiar with people in their new team, especially in smaller businesses.
  • May already know the content and context of their new roles if they move within the same team or to a similar one (for example, a sales associate becoming a category manager).

Cost less

Research has shown that external hiring may cost 1.7 times more than internal hiring. This is because when hiring from within, you usually don’t need to:

  • Post ads on job boards. It’s easy to inform internal candidates about job openings through email or your company’s internal newsletter. You could also place printed job ads on a bulletin board, if all your employees work in one place.
  • Subscribe to resume databases. Instead of sourcing passive candidates on resume databases, ask managers about their team members or look into your HRIS to find coworkers who might fit in your open roles.
  • Pay for backgrounds checks. You may already have conducted background checks on internal candidates when you first hired them. And, you know if they’re in good standing based on their manager’s input or employee records.

Strengthen employee engagement

Promoting from within sends a message that you value your employees and want to invest in them. Giving employees more opportunities to advance their careers, or even letting them move to other same-level positions that may interest them, is good for morale: employees who change roles develop professionally and others know they may have similar opportunities in the future. This helps to build a culture of trust that enhances employee engagement and retention.

Disadvantages of internal recruitment

Despite all the merits of internal recruitment, there are some things to keep in mind. Hiring from within can:

Create resentment among employees and managers

Employees who were considered for a role could feel resentful if a colleague or external candidate is eventually hired. Also, managers are often uncomfortable losing good team members and may even go so far as to hinder the transfer or promotion process.

Leave a gap in your existing workforce

When you promote someone to fill an open position, their old position becomes vacant. This means that a series of moves and promotions may ensue that could disrupt your business’ operations. Ultimately you may need to turn to external recruitment in addition to your internal hire.

Limit your pool of applicants

While your company may have a lot of qualified candidates for specific positions, this isn’t necessarily true for every open role. For example, if a role is fairly new to your business, your employees will have other specialties and may not be able to fill this skills gap. Relying solely on internal hiring means you could miss the chance to hire people with new skills and ideas.

Result in inflexible culture

Doing most of your hiring from inside your business may result in a stagnant culture. This is because employees can get too comfortable with the ‘way things are done’ and struggle to spot inefficiencies and experiment with new ways of working. An inflexible culture will be more problematic in leadership positions where employees may need to advocate for change and improvements instead of relying on established, inefficient practices. External hires are essential in shaking up culture and offering a fresh perspective on existing problems.

What could you do to mitigate the disadvantages of internal recruiting?

To avoid resentment, cultivate trust and ensure you hire effectively, you could:

  • Ensure promotions or job moves aren’t the only ways to recognize employees or help them advance their careers. Consider offering opportunities for training, job shadowing and job rotation. Also, lay the foundation of rewarding employees frequently (for example, encourage supervisors to praise their employees or give out performance-related bonuses.)
  • Have a transparent process. Ensure internal candidates understand your hiring process and why they weren’t selected. It’d be good to give them interview feedback or pointers on what skills they might need to develop to be successful in the future.
  • Train managers to prepare their team members’ career paths. Help managers think of possible career moves for their team members and ask them to take part in formulating your business’ succession plan. That way, if a position opens, you could immediately consult your plan to see which employee may be a good fit.
  • Avoid communicating an opening if you already have a candidate in mind. Communicating an open role means that you give employees hope that they might be hired for this role. But if hiring teams already prefer a particular candidate, it’s best to reach out to them directly first, instead of encouraging others to apply.
  • Use a balanced mix of internal and external recruiting. Each time you want to fill a position, decide whether to recruit internally, externally or both. Base this decision on the job requirements and the skills your current employees have as well as your company’s needs for a culture add.

At the end of the day though, whether you’re focused on internal vs external recruitment, it’s important to structure your hiring process to ensure fair and effective recruiting. Use screening tests and structured interviews, which help you assess candidates more objectively, and communicate well with all candidates. These practices will help you make good hiring decisions and will also build trust in your hiring process.

Frequently asked questions

What are the types of internal recruitment?

There are many different ways to recruit internally. Some types of internal recruitment work better depending on the size of your company or your industry. These types can include: promotions, transfers, employee referrals, along with simply advertising the job opening within the workplace.

Is it better to recruit internally?

While this can largely depend, most companies see internal recruitment as a symbol of success. It means that your business is nurturing your employees to be the best they can be. Internal recruitment is also less expensive, and research shows that internal hires are more successful than external hires.

How can I look to recruit internally?

Assess the size of your company and what industry you work for, along with the current job market. Based on that information, you can choose a few types of internal recruitment to focus on to hire from within the company.

What is an advantage of promoting from within when filling an opening within the organization?

Promoting from within can force an organization to develop core competencies for a specific role or group of jobs. Jumpstart:HR suggests the internal promotions boost morale because employees see that hard work pays off, and companies save time and money filling open positions with current employees.

What is the advantages of promotion from within?

“When you promote from within, people see opportunity and become less likely to move around in their careers,” Chansler explains, elaborating: It's great for morale when employees can see an opportunity to grow within their organization. That ripple effect can be overwhelmingly positive.

What is an advantage to the practice of promoting from within quizlet?

Promoting from within will increase the amount of diversity within the organization. Promoting internal employees will reduce the organization's human resource needs. Internal employees are more qualified because they are familiar with the organization.

What are the advantages of promoting employees?

Employee Promotion plays a big role in Employee Satisfaction. It aids in employee engagement, boosts morale, reduces absenteeism, and ultimately in productivity. Employee Promotion is also a helpful tool for reducing attrition retention.