What are the advantages of internal recruitment?
How about the disadvantages of internal recruitment?
It’s not necessarily easy to find the right staff for the job.
Not only can it take time and plenty of hard work to find the right staff, but it can cost many thousands of dollars in terms of recruitment costs.
Internal recruitment could seem like the perfect answer.
The employees are already onboard.
You’re familiar with their abilities and their work ethic.
You know about their strengths and their weaknesses.
The whole process is not only quicker, but it’s much easier.
Plus, there’s, potentially so, a huge reduction on the costs involved with external recruitment. Though this does depend on the circumstances.
Wait!
It’s very tempting to always go the internal- recruitment route.
But there are considerations to be made. Is it really the appropriate route for you and your business?
Are you going to land the best candidate for the job each time, or is it better to look elsewhere rather than internally?
No doubt that for some roles, internal recruitment is the ideal approach.
However, for other roles, it’s best practice to look elsewhere – to search for an external candidate.
Prior to making any decision about what’s right for you, read through some of the advantages and disadvantages of internal recruitment given below.
Advantages of Internal Recruitment
1 The cost of recruitment is lower
There’s no doubt that the initial costs involved with hiring internally are lower – perhaps even far lower – than recruiting externally.
There’s no advertising to do when you recruit internally. There’s no recruitment agencies involved, either.
There are numerous factors involved in hiring, but when hiring externally compared to internally, there are additional costs involved.
That includes the cost of lower output during the time of employee replacement. It also includes the cost of the recruitment process. And it includes the costs involved to get the new employee at a level of full potential productivity.
When hiring staff internally, you already have someone that is familiar with the business in general, and they may even be familiar with the particular role they are to fill.
In this way, the internally recruited candidate can become fully productive in a greatly reduced amount of time in comparison to the externally recruited candidate.
2 Hiring internally means you know the caliber of the employee already
While someone might be great at interviewing, they may be rotten at the actual job.
Further, people do have a tendency to embellish their resumes – embellish their accomplishments.
When you recruit internally, you know mostly what you need to know about the candidate.
3 Hiring internally can make you appear to be a more attractive employer
For mid- to large-sized companies, it’s not merely about hiring employees. It’s also about establishing a brand that says you’re an attractive employer to work for.
This way, you are setting yourself up to retain the best people.
And a large part of this process is giving your current staff every opportunity for them to progress.
Career progression is among the top things that employees look for when joining a company.
Disadvantages of Internal Recruitment
1 The person that’s been promoted must be replaced
While internal recruitment can appear to be far easier, far quicker, and far less costly than externally recruiting, when you do internally recruit, you almost always have to find another candidate to replace the employee that’s been promoted.
So, in reality, you’ll need to train two people as opposed to one.
Should it be a senior position that you’re aiming to fill, and the employee’s current experience has proven them to be of true benefit to the company, then it’s likely worth the risk.
However, if the job is at a lower level, it could prove to be more prudent to recruit externally.
This way, you only have one person to train as opposed to two.
2 Conflict among colleagues
Employing internally can negatively impact the morale of some of your current staff.
After all, it’s more than likely that when you offer a job internally, you’ll have a few employees that apply for the job.
Only one of them is going to be successful. So how are the employees that were not successful going to feel?
While this may seem of little consequence, the truth is that if your staff begin to feel dissatisfied, team morale can go down, which in turn, can make your business suffer.
3 Limiting choice
Internal recruitment is, as we’ve established, faster, it’s quicker, and it can be cheaper.
Nevertheless, when you recruit internally, the talent pool that’s available externally is bypassed completely.
You can cast the recruitment net far wider. And by doing so, you may come across a candidate that adds great value to your business.
What’s more is that it can be good to introduce “fresh blood” into a business.
Introduce someone that has fresh ideas, a brand-new focus.
If morale in your business is already far from its best and productivity is affected because of it, internally promoting is very possibly not going to have the desired impact.
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