What is internal recruitment?
Internal recruitment refers to a recruitment strategy that prioritises hiring an organisation’s existing employees for vacancies. There are multiple types of internal recruitment, which include:
- Promotions: Promotions are a very common internal recruitment method. If an employee has been with the organisation for a certain period of time and performed highly, they may be considered for promotion to a more senior role.
- Referrals: Referrals have become a key aspect of many organisation’s recruitment strategies. This is where an existing employee refers someone in their network, such as a past colleague, for a vacancy in their organisation.
- Confirmations: This is where an employee who is on probation, on an internship, in a temporary position or an independent contractor is made a permanent employee.
- Transfers: This is where an employee is transferred from one role or department to another. This can often help retain talent who may have shifted their career goals or lifestyle.
The pros of internal recruitment
Internal recruitment offers a number of advantages which make it a great fit for some organisations, such as:
- Reduced onboarding efforts: When you recruit internally, the training period can be shorter than when you hire an external candidate, as a candidate who is an existing employee, contractor, or is familiar with your company through referral may already have an understanding of your culture and industry.
- Reduced hiring time and cost: Organisations funnel an incredible amount of resource into the hiring process. Recruiting internally reduces expenditure by a significant margin as it takes job adverts, external agencies, and wading through mass amounts of CVs out of the picture.
- Boosts employee morale: Internal recruitment can help with employee confidence in internal career paths and progression. They can see that good performance is rewarded with promotions, or that as their priorities change, their organisation can be flexible, such as in cases of transfers.
The cons of internal recruitment
There are also some disadvantages to internal hiring, as the strategy isn’t suited to every company. These disadvantages include:
- Reduced application pool: When you recruit internally, you limit your talent pool to people you already employ, and perhaps talent your employees may be connected to if you utilise referrals. This means that your chances of hiring culture adds for your vacancies is low.
Check out our article: Interview Questions For a Culture Fit and a Culture Add
- Move one, hire another: When you promote or transfer an employee from their department, you may have to hire a replacement, which can mitigate the cost benefits of internal recruitment.
- Competitive culture: If many people want the same role, this can create competition or conflict between colleagues. Favouritism is rife in some organisations, with 56% of managers admitting to already having a ‘favourite’ in mind for a promotion before the formal review process begins. This can also lead to dissatisfaction if someone perceived to be undeserving gets the role.
Tips for how to implement a successful internal recruitment strategy
Create a culture which values growth
To ensure people feel comfortable applying to internal vacancies, line managers need to be trained to encourage their team member’s career progression and goals. This means building up employee’s confidence, nurturing their abilities, giving them the opportunities to upskill, and supporting them if they want to transition to a different team or role.
The vacancies you advertise internally should also be genuinely attractive. While internal recruitment can significantly cut costs and result in time-savings, that doesn’t mean corners should be cut when it comes to offering competitive compensation or benefits.
Share the vacancy effectively
When you post internal communications to inform internal colleagues of the available vacancy, it’s important to make sure this is still written with the clarity that an external job posting would. This means a full job description, seniority, who they’d be reporting to, the interview process, as well as being transparent about salary.
Utilise recruitment software
A robust recruitment solution can be an invaluable tool for your internal recruitment strategy. It not only boosts your time and cost-savings through automating administrative processes but will also help your recruitment team to report on the success of your strategy and collect the data which enables identification of areas for improvement. It can also streamline the candidate process, which shouldn’t be compromised just because many of your applicants many already be employees.
Learn more about the Hireserve recruitment software’s features.
How do you measure the success of your internal recruitment hiring process?
- Employee retention: Review your retention rates of employees who were promoted, transferred, confirmed or referred within your organisation. The higher your retention rate, the more likely they are satisfied.
- Employee feedback and satisfaction: Ask employees who have been through your internal recruitment process to fill out a feedback form. If there are anonymity concerns, you may choose to wait to release the survey until you have a higher number of people who have been through it, so they can all fill it out anonymously at the same time, allowing them to provide more honest feedback.
