The 6 Risks of Internal Recruitment & Why You Should Consider An Employment Services Agency

A position is vacant with an army of bright workers rising in your company ranks, keen to fill it. What on earth could go wrong?

Plenty. While an existing worker is a known quantity with an established history, familiarity alone is no guarantee of success.

Remember the butterfly effect? Rather than a butterfly flapping its wings in China and causing a hurricane in the Caribbean, imagine a worker leaving a role in one department and causing meltdowns in another.

Companies are organic, with fluid and evolving work environments. Keeping the right internal balance is a constant challenge.

If choosing between internal and external recruitment, don’t get caught out.

Consider the risks of not hiring an employment services agency in terms of productivity, stability and cost when recruiting from within the ranks.

• Lost in translation

Just because someone does great work in one role and department, their effectiveness may not automatically transfer to another.

Assessing past performance is not enough. It’s vital to measure their ‘fit’ for the job, department and challenges in question.

Without a detailed assessment of behavioural traits and transferable skills, switching positions can be a shot in the dark.

• Domino effect

Pull one brick, and watch the rest tumble.

When you switch or promote an employee internally, you need to fill the position they’ve just vacated. If you then pull an employee from elsewhere in the firm, that creates another vacancy – and so on.

Stuck in the loop of internal recruitment, the cycle seems endless. Until someone gets sick of the hamster wheel and looks outside the firm for candidates!

• Dissatisfaction

One of the disadvantages of internal recruitment is that you can upset just about everyone.

Employees overlooked for the role may feel slighted, while managers can get their noses out of joint if valuable employees are taken away and moved on to different departments.

• Instability

Some employees take a while to really get a grip on their role, while challenging positions may require a long settling-in period.

Why unseat a worker just hitting their stride, and switch them to a new position?

Considering the training, mentoring, trial and error, encouragement, time and money invested in getting them to their current productivity level, it can be a risky manoeuvre.

• Job Hopping

Every company has them – those staffers who shift seamlessly from job to job within the organisation.

Outwardly successful, they avoid performance appraisals which might alert bosses to problems in their work and approach.

Some organisations ask workers to spend at least 18 months or two years in a role before being considered for another. This can increase stability and stop ‘job hoppers’ in their tracks.

• Limited talent pool

If you’re looking for top performers, you’re not guaranteed to find them within your existing ranks.

Truly agile companies know they need constant refreshment and rejuvenation from new talent, however accomplished their team happens to be.

The ‘best of what you have’ might not measure up when competing in a volatile and ever-more complex marketplace.

The best option for recruiting externally – an employment services agency

If you decide to look outside the company for new talent, should you use an in-house selection panel or hire an external recruiter?

There are compelling reasons to choose a specialist agency experienced in the sourcing and selection of high performers.

• Skill. Expert recruiters assess your organisation’s needs and find candidates with the right cultural fit.
• Objectivity. They look beyond personal loyalties and relationships in pursuit of the best all-round candidates and future leaders.
• Quality. You can trust a specialist agency to match the skills, behavioural traits and attributes of candidates to the roles in hand.
• An agency can supply one person, lots of people at short notice, workers with specific project skills or seasonal labour.
• Savings. Because they match precisely, expert recruiters can reduce staff turnover by selecting candidates based on measurable ‘job fit’.

While the advantages of internal recruitment include familiarity and cultural fit, it often pays to cast a wider net and look externally for premium talent to grow your business. Talk to us about how our smart and flexible search strategies can help.