The Best Candidates For The Job Already Work for You… So Stop Ignoring Them

“Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you've got ‘til it’s gone?”

An oft-repeated phrase within many corporations these days is “It’s easier to find a job outside of the company than it is inside.” This is all the more alarming when you consider a) how much time and resources we spend on “employee retention programs”, and b) the fact that a company should have far more information about the talent already walking its halls and therefore should have a much higher probability of picking a “winner” from this talent pool than from a bunch of relative unknowns.

Why is it that we undervalue our existing employees when it comes to filling open roles? I believe there are four main reasons: 

1. Agents of external change

A significant driver of the “easier outside… than inside” dynamic is that there are many agents that have an economic stake in external hiring. External recruiters and agencies make a commission from successful matches. Job boards get paid by companies who want to advertise their jobs and try to differentiate themselves by making candidates’ search process as simple, fast, and efficacious as possible. LinkedIn does this and goes a step beyond, creating a massive talent database and monetizing it through pricey recruiter licenses.

The field of “hiring tech” has pulled in hundreds of millions in VC funding over the past few years, using it to create technology and service solutions (and an ecosystem, as mapped by Talent Tech Labs below) designed to make “outside” easier.

It’s not an ecosystem map if you’re able to read it without a magnifying glass

Meanwhile, solutions enabling job searches “inside” are largely confined to the Applicant Tracking Systems (e.g., Oracle Taleo, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday) that have been around for years, provide a notoriously bad candidate experience, and whose deficiencies much of the externally-oriented hiring tech is designed to overcome. While there are some startups trying to crack the nut of internal matching, none have hit any significant scale yet.

From a technology and services perspective, “outside” is beating “inside,” and that’s manifesting itself in the employee experience. 

2. The “shiny new toy” fallacy

Companies always think they can get better. “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

This is no different when it comes to talent. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve, whether that means being on the search for skills that we don’t have or chasing people whose resumes are littered with the brand names of aspirational companies or institutions of higher learning. Why shuffle the deck chairs when you can buy an entirely new, luxe and plush set. Or so the thinking goes.

Once you adopt this mindset, you start to discount the talent that you have on the team already and hold them to a higher standard when assessing them for opportunities. You take their knowledge and capabilities for granted and start to dwell on their flaws. And then, much like the overly enthusiastic and overinvolved owner of many a professional sports team, you cast your veteran aside as you chase the hot free agent.

Never mind the fact that you have much more information about the associate who’s been part of your organization for several years – in the form of recorded accomplishments, manager assessments, thought leadership, and countless other structured and unstructured data points – than you do about the person who’s interviewed with you for a combined 180 minutes and seems smart on Twitter. Or that much like M&A transactions, hires fail an obscenely large percentage of the time. Or that a senior mis-hire can have an outsized, negative impact on an entire organization.

Of course, only being insular in your search for talent is also a bad idea. You do need to bring into your company fresh ideas, thinking, and capabilities. The caution here is to avoid thinking that you ALWAYS need to be looking outside. 

3. The culture of “remain”

It didn’t work for the UK – or the rest of the post-Brexit world for that matter – but a culture of “remain” does seem to permeate most companies.

Managers instinctively want to keep high-performing teams together, and they grow especially attached to their strongest talent. They’re also typically incentivized to deliver results, and in the near-term, disrupting your team is negatively correlated with that.

For their part, associates can worry about being shut down by their managers before their search has gone anywhere, and it can make a good situation bad… or a bad situation worse. For some, there can also be risk aversion and a fear of squandering the goodwill and expertise they’ve worked so hard to build in their newest role.

Even in the case of a great relationship between a manager and an associate, the natural desire to “not make it awkward” can be a barrier. A manager might not want an associate to think she’s trying to boot her from the team. An associate might worry that their manager could perceive her “looking around” – even within their company – as a sign of discontent or disloyalty.

This reminds me of Dorothy Boyd’s send-off to Jerry Maguire in the eponymous movie, “If one of us doesn’t say something now, we might lose ten years being polite about it.” Only in our case, the associate might find it easier to simply leave the company instead of pursuing internal opportunities for growth.

Don't lose employees from being too "polite" to talk about internal movement

4. Everybody’s responsibility… and nobody’s responsibility

As a card-carrying member of HR, I’d maintain that it’s ultimately our responsibility to push the company to overcome the aforementioned challenges and promote putting new opportunities in front of employees. And from my experience, at an overall HR organization level, we own up to this. I’d imagine “internal talent movement” is high on the priority list of HR for most established companies.

The problem is that commitment at an overall HR level can break down when you get to individual groups executing on a daily basis. There’s no one sub-group within HR responsible for internal movement; instead, it often falls into an ambiguous stew of HR Business Partners and Centers of Excellence (COEs), including talent acquisition, learning and development, and people analytics.

And even these groups have motivations that can pull them away from supporting – let alone leading – an internal movement initiative.

• HRBPs often operate at the service of business leaders, who (as mentioned earlier) usually want to maintain team stability… not blow it up
• Talent acquisition are asked to focus on that shiny, new talent referred to above
• Learning and development launch programs but don’t scale to supporting individual groups, let alone specific jobs or associates
• People analytics typically study and analyze but don’t effect change directly

In the absence of a clear HR owner, unfortunately, the job of putting internal opportunities in front of associates (and vice-versa) gets punted to managers – who have disincentives from movement – and the associates themselves.

How to get internal talent moving

Making internal movement a part of how we operate is not easy. But it’s also not impossible, and several companies that put talent at the forefront are known for the “jungle-gym” like movement they can create.

A successful effort will require tackling the challenges mentioned above head-on. Here are a few ideas about how you can do that:  

Promote a culture of internal talent movement, by establishing expectations and aligning incentives accordingly.

If you don’t blow up the notion that change is bad and holding on to people is good, you’ll never be able to sustain internal movement. You need to set the norms within your company so that associates expect movement within the organization will be a typical and vital part of their development. And managers should understand that they are responsible for helping people on their team find new opportunities outside of it; this must be part of what they’re assessed on if you want it to stick.

Another way to promote a culture of movement is to celebrate it. Highlight instances in which associates have made moves and met with success. One thing we have done is to start an internal podcast in which we interview leaders within the company about their career journeys. We have done two dozen over the past year, and not surprisingly, all of them have been entrepreneurial when it comes to their careers. Role modeling like this is a great way to spark inspiration in the rest of your organization and set expectations about movement.

Clarify different HR teams’ specific responsibilities for internal talent

Looking at internal talent movement as one big mass to be owned is a mistake. Instead, we need to break it into its component pieces and establish ownership of each by the team best positioned to drive it. Specifically,

• Make talent acquisition responsible for internal candidate sourcing. They are the only ones in the organization focused on filling specific job opportunities with the right talent. By explicitly defining that talent as external AND internal (vs. implicitly external only), we can fit internal candidate sourcing right into the workflow of the recruiter. And having an understanding of the internal talent market and specific shining stars will help recruiters better live up to the ideal of the talent expert who knows the hiring manager’s business and team and can counsel them holistically throughout their search.
• Make HRBPs responsible for ensuring regular movement and change for the teams they support. They have the best understanding of these teams and the individuals on them. They should be guiding managers and associates on how they need to develop and proactively surfacing opportunities that could fit. While TA is sourcing for open roles, HRBPs would be in some cases creating those roles in the first place, in the name of helping their teams continue to evolve.
• Have learning & development and people analytics be responsible for arming TA and HRBPs with the tools, data, and insights necessary to do their jobs – sourcing internal candidates and ensuring the regular movement, respectively. This can involve experimenting with some of the nascent hiring tech available for internal movement (for example, we have done some work with Twine Labs, to provide our recruiters with the shortcut to their internal short list) as well as applying what was designed for external efforts inwardly.

Make it as easy as possible for associates to find and apply to open positions.

Ensure that all job openings are posted in a place where people internally can access it; don't bury it five levels down on the search-unfriendly intranet. Consider posting some jobs internally before they are posted externally, to show associates how seriously you take their candidacy. And PLEASE streamline the application so that associates don't have to fill out a bunch of information you should already know about them - that's just insulting.

Create a talent strategy to clearly identify what specific skills / capabilities you need for the future, and execute against it. 

In a previous post, I went into some depth on what a talent strategy is and why I think it’s critical for an effective HR effort. Specifically applied to internal movement, of the talent we need, we must assess what exists already inside vs. what can be developed vs. what kind of talent we need to acquire from the outside. With as clear a view of this as possible, we can be much smarter and more discriminating about when we need to focus on looking externally for talent and when an internal focus would make more sense. And we can flow that into how we approach individual openings that arise, executing our candidate sourcing with increased confidence. 

How much of a priority is internal talent movement at your company? Is it easier to find a job inside of your company... or outside of it? And if the latter, what are you going to do about it?

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my current or past employers. If you would like to read more of my writing, you can follow me on Twitter at @chrislouie.

You can also read a few of my other LinkedIn posts:

• Why You Need a Talent Strategy
• Focus on Talent, Not Org Structure
• Autonomous Hiring: Will Software Replace Recruiters?