What’s the difference between internal candidates and external applicants? All too much, it would appear, for some employer brands

English sport has very recently replaced two of its senior figures. The gentlemen who began this year as the head coaches for both English cricket and rugby are currently buffing up their CVs as they seek employment pastures new. Their replacements – Aussies the two of them, both interestingly and ever so slightly depressingly – Trevor Bayliss and Eddie Jones come with impressive, and impressively international, experience. They replace two men, in Peter Moores and Stuart Lancaster who shared a humility, a passion, a decency, as well, sadly, as a propensity for coming up short when things mattered.

Both Moores and Lancaster were inside men. They had developed their careers within the structure and fabric of their domestic games. They were internal hires, lateral moves if you like. Their recruited replacements then signify tangible activity. Their respective organisations have made sizeable statements by bringing new talent and external hires into highly developed coaching infrastructures.

Fascinatingly, this tends to chime with impressions TMP have taken from recent employee focus groups across a number of sectors – that the very process of successful recruitment functions as an internal boost and lift to existing people. Employees feel that the workloads and pressures they are under, as a result of rising business and activity levels (as well as voluntary colleague departures), are being addressed by additional headcount coming on board.

And anywhere you turn in the HR press underlines the importance of recruitment. According to the most recent REC JobsOutlook from last week, 92% of employers felt they had no spare capacity should business demand pick up. The same report added that no less than 84% of UK employers plan on increasing their permanent headcount in the next quarter. The latest ONS labour market readings point to another decline in the unemployment numbers, with the percentage out of work now touching 5.3%. 

On a more anecdotal level, Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk, resorted to Twitter in order to reach out to ‘hardcore software engineers’ to work on his Autopilot software. The real eye opener? Musk, in possession of a tidy personal net worth of $13bn, is due to interview candidates personally. Recruitment is that important for him. 

Similarly, this week saw news from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) suggesting that the £40bn proposed investment by the Chinese in UK infrastructure might be largely irrelevant – and that the current skills and talent crunch is now a more fundamental challenge than that of funding.

But in the rush to hire in bright shiny baubles from the outside, to what extent are organisations ignoring internal talent?

Plenty, it would appear.

According to research firm, CEB, 70% of employees are dissatisfied with their future career opportunities. Fascinatingly, and touching on our blog from two months ago –  http://www.employerbrandingadvantage.co.uk/2015/09/as-we-begin-to-edge-into-autumn-its.html– people are spending an average three years more at the same job level than used to be the case in 2010.

This is consistent with some of the key themes emerging from LinkedIn’s 2016 Global Recruiting Trends. Although 59% of its global survey intend increasing their investment next year in overall employer branding (up 4% on the current year), internal hiring appears at best sporadic and random. 31% of its survey had an ad hoc internal hiring process and 12% bettered this by having a complete absence of methodology around internal hiring. Just 24% of the survey claimed to have a well defined programme for advancement opportunities. This was emphasised in an associated question – just 29% of organisations in the survey saw the recruitment of internal candidates as being an enterprise priority.

So, employers have little process and structure devoted to moving people successfully around and up through their organisations. This was a theme picked up by CEB, ‘Employees don’t jump for joy at the idea of a lateral move because organisations don’t promote such movement as being beneficial to career development’.

In reality, the situation can be even worse. Again TMP’s access to internal employee groups suggests that many potential internal moves are either directly or indirectly blocked by line managers who fear if they lose an individual, their replacement will be, at best, a long time arriving, so exacerbating the resourcing pressures they are under.

Perhaps then we shouldn’t be entirely surprised if talent pools associate internal career (im)mobility in terms of blocked moves, promotion stasis, thwarted ambition or employers who appear to lack enthusiasm for progressing their people. Organisations which recognise such a picture should perhaps not be surprised if recruitment is their only source of new talent given the volume of current talent who are very likely to be eyeing up the exits.

This is quietly ironic, given the pattern we see developing around graduate recruitment. The proportion of graduate hires that major employers make from the cohort of interns and year-in-industry students who spend either a summer or whole year with them is rising markedly. The AGR suggest that law firms, for example, make 56.4% of their hires from people who are already with the organisation in the form of such work experience.

There can be few organisations with an interest in employer branding which do not possess in-house recruitment teams – and with the drive to focus on direct hiring, teams which are measured on their capacity to bring talent into the organisation. Why do those same employers then not invest in similar internal infrastructure to ensure that talent is moved around an organisation, developing their experience as well as their experiences?

In the continued paucity of employers that see internal career advancement as an organisational priority, the next career progression for individuals hired into their organisation might well be in the opposite direction. And there is a clear synergy at play here – would-be hires will look closely at employee turnover and listen equally closely to employee advocacy when considering a job move. Too much of the former and not enough of the latter is unlikely to prompt them to change employers.

Personally, I hope that Messrs Jones and Bayliss prove to be both inspired and inspirational choices. And successful external recruitment has perhaps not been as important as it is now than for the best part of a decade – interestingly for both engagement as well as skills acquisition.

But that shouldn’t mean that organisations then do not invest as much in internal career mobility as they are increasingly having to in its external equivalent.

Now, which Aussie can we recruit in to manage our football team?