Most recruiters are quite familiar with external recruitment processes, or even boomerang employees. But one recruiting tactic that TA professionals might not lean on so often is internal hiring. Internal recruitment allows you to fill billets with your existing employees, while external hiring means sourcing candidates from outside the company.
Recruiters or hiring managers sometimes wear horse blinders – they receive requirements and immediately look to their normal candidate sources. But they may not realize that they are potentially overlooking a bulk of employees who are qualified for an opening that just came across their desk. And those employees might be ready to seek new challenges or are looking for a change of scenery.
Hiring or promoting from within is the easiest way to save time and money under your recruitment budget. It’s also an easy retention tool, even if you find that your internal employees may not be the best fit as they move through the process. Internal hiring shows them that you value their service and are actively seeking new ways to help them advance their careers. The alternative if you don’t engage in internal hiring? Qualified employees may eventually quit to gain that upward mobility they seek. That leaves you with at least two more openings to fill.
BENEFITS OF Internal HIRING
The first benefit of hiring from within is that you save time by using internal talent to fill hard to staff roles. You’ll of course have to backfill their role, but that could easily be done with a referral or your pipeline. Secondly, you already know the candidate and their work quality. Lastly, you retain an employee by offering them a new challenge.
As you navigate the internal hiring process, be sure that your recruitment teams:
- Decide who will make hiring and job posting decisions, both internally with the company and to external platforms.
- Outline a policy for how to post your openings and create an internal hiring policy.
- Continue to lean on your ATS to track internal and external candidates.
- Let current employees know about openings weekly / monthly (including what you are pipelining for).
- Ensure your internal and external hiring processes are the same and measure internal candidates the same you would to requirements as external ones.
- Maintain transparency and provide detailed feedback to internal applicants and not the same generic email that you would to someone who applied on your website.
So, hiring for a technical writer who has familiarity with Army intel? See if one of your current contract employees would want to take it on part time. Need someone to help build CI programs for a current customer onsite? See if that veteran recruiter who did CI work once upon a time is willing to move back to a direct billet.
All recruiters should be adding internal recruitment as a box to check on their TA process – ask your hiring manager if there is someone you should promote, put a call out to your current employees, and engage with employees to encourage them to stay with your company, while still moving up the ladder in the contracting world.
THEÂ CLEARED RECRUITING CHRONICLES: YOUR WEEKLY DoD RECRUITING TIPS TO OUT COMPETE THE NEXT NATIONAL SECURITY STAFFER.
