Contributed by Matt Charney, Head of Community, Talent Acquisition at HR.com
What happens in hiring does not always make a whole lot of sense, and internal mobility reveals one of the biggest disconnects between hiring success and recruiting reality. While dedicated talent acquisition headcounts and budgets have yet to recover to their pre-pandemic levels, recruiters today are increasingly asked to do more with less — in a market where there are infinite jobseekers but fewer openings it has become a challenge to manage shortlisting and interviews. As a result, many employers are turning to solutions and technologies designed to expedite the hiring process as much as possible.
When it comes to connecting people to jobs at scale, however, the solution is more high touch than high tech. Responding to the unique challenges of today’s world of work requires refocusing your recruitment efforts not on sourcing and developing external candidates but, instead, on taking a step back and starting your hiring process with the highest performing of all talent communities — your own org chart.
If you are among the majority of employers without an internal recruiting strategy or wondering how to improve and optimise your existing internal mobility strategy, there has never been a better time than right now. So where to start? What are some critical things employers should consider when building a business case for prioritising internal recruiting — and how do you create a culture of talent mobility and career development at your organisation?
Finding unicorns in your org chart
According to a recent study from Indeed, there are pretty compelling reasons for refocusing and reprioritising internal hiring. Reduced time in hiring and onboarding, significant declines in hiring costs, long-term cost savings (particularly around direct compensation and internal agility) and increased engagement — given these (and more) inherent advantages, the best talent available to your organisation is overwhelmingly already employed there. That’s where, in this business of hiring, you will find your shortlist of unicorns.
After all, almost all employers like to consider their companies an “employer of choice” (even if their offer-acceptance rates seem to proffer evidence to the contrary). Even the highest-volume, highest-turnover organisations have existing employer branding and messaging conveying that any job posting represents more than just a job — it is a starting point for building a successful career.
A lot of that messaging, though, is perceived as generic and almost as suspicious as “our people are our greatest assets”. If you want to create a competitive hiring advantage, it is time to transform what’s become cliche into a meaningful, foundational element of your company’s culture and employee value proposition.
Employees who have worked in multiple departments or business units — even if those movements have been lateral as opposed to strictly linear — report much higher levels of company loyalty and job satisfaction than employees within the same department who lack the same depth of internal experience. As observed, then, the quickest way to upskill any workforce seems pretty simple: provide as many paths to internal mobility as possible.
Made it this far: A long retention span
Whether part of a rotational program or a dedicated internal recruiting and employee-development initiative, moving people around within an organisation makes workers feel more invested in not only their job performance but also the bigger business picture and their impact on organisational success. And the more invested employees are, the greater the relative ROI will be for both recruiting and retention.
Additionally, internal mobility’s significant impact on retention results makes hiring exponentially less frustrating. Instead of constantly building and nurturing a pipeline of potential candidates, your organisation can instead focus on proactively developing, retaining and engaging top performers and high-potential workers.
This does not mean a stop to external sourcing; internal mobility, obviously, creates the need to backfill existing roles with new hires. The difference is that most of these internal movements are ultimately promotions and backfilling these roles requires less experience or position-related requirements than backfilling the higher level jobs successfully filled through internal hiring. In short, backfilling is easier to source.
And, naturally, organisations that consistently develop and promote internal workers as an integral part of their talent culture are more likely to generate exponentially more referrals than those without a talent mobility strategy in place. According to research in India Recruiting Trends 2016, conducted by LinkedIn Talent Solutions, “Nearly 55% of talent leaders see employee referral programmes as the top source of quality hire," says Irfan Abdulla, Director, Talent Solutions, LinkedIn India.” So ask yourself: what portion of your talent budget is devoted to employee mobility? What could be a big miss is, fortunately, easily correctable.
Company culture and internal recruiting
HR departments, managers and employees — we all share the responsibility for investing in internal recruiting. It starts with an organisation’s commitment to a talent-sharing mindset, a focus that creates continuous development opportunities for employees across roles, projects or gigs within their current jobs.
Internal recruiting builds on a foundation of support: managers need to have deeper conversations with their teams about expectations for future assignments, including how that work may impact career paths over time. They should also be intentional about modelling transparency, regularly updating senior leadership on hiring successes and challenges so expectations are aligned around the company’s needs versus individuals’ ambitions.
Finally, employees must recognise that mobility will be a natural part of working at your organisation, and taking advantage of that opportunity includes keeping skill sets up to date, discovering cross-training opportunities and encouraging cross-functional collaboration as much as possible.
