Why Hire Internally and How to do Internal Job Interviews

Your vision is to choose the best candidate for the job. For some positions, when the need for a new hire occurs, you would like to hire from within and backfill. This isn’t always the best move, as diversity and new ideas can lead to success, but in a lot of cases, having the product knowledge and trust in the employee can be equally as beneficial. So how do you go about selecting an internal candidate? This article is going to walk through the pros and cons to hiring internally, the questions to ask, and the evaluation method to ensure fairness and transparency.

The benefit of posting jobs internally

You will end up with a list of pros and cons when thinking about this method. According to Forbes, the positives outweigh the negatives as externally hired employees are 61% more likely to be fired than internal candidates. They also state that external candidates almost always have more education and experience, but an understanding of the company is often more valuable. One final note from that article is they found it takes external candidates about 2 years to catch up to the external in terms of performance and by then it can be too late and employees are already let go or found a new job anyway.

Pros to posting internally

1. You aren’t forcing a job on anyone with a promotion, they have to take the initiative and put forth the effort to get it.
2. You will get insight into what those interested don’t like about their current position and some undiscovered interest in other types of positions.
3. The entire business is given a fair shot at application.
4. You get a refresher on employee skills. Often, you hire someone, and then once they are in a job, you may forget about other skills or knowledge they have until you go through the interview process again.
5. You get someone who you trust, and who knows your service or product.
6. The person chosen will already know the teams and how they work together, making for a smoother transition.
7. For those who apply and are not selected, this can open up training opportunities and plans for them to grow into.
8. This is likely quicker and easier, however, there is likely a backfill needed.

Cons to posting internally

1. There is likely just one job opening and it may go to someone with less seniority. This may cause tension.
2. There may be bias towards some candidates, but this may be eliminated by having several people part of the interview process with a scoring method.
3. You will likely be harder on an internal candidate because they know the product or service and where the gaps are. This is actually a pro depending on the side you’re on because you can see ahead of time what their plans would be.

Considerations in communicating the job internally

• You may want to send it out to a large group via email or team chat.
• Sometimes targeting specific departments will be best so letting them know directly makes sense.
• Ask the manager who is hiring to communicate with relevant groups and ensure buy-in from the managers of other departments to avoid fear in applying.
• Find a common area data is shared to post it so that everyone can see. Some businesses have intranet or company websites, or actual boards in the lunch area.
• Announce it during a company-wide or department-wide meeting.

The questions to ask in the interview

Outside of the typical questions you would ask, there are a few additional ones to consider since the candidates are familiar with the company and processes. The basic goal with these is to ensure the candidate understands the role, and that they can demonstrate their contributions.

1. How would you spend your first 30 days in this new role?
2. What makes you stand out from the other candidates?
3. Why do you want to change jobs?
4. What don’t you like about your current job?
5. What are you going to do if you don’t get this job?
6. Describe projects you have worked on that demonstrate success in this area.
7. What is your proudest achievement at the company?
8. Explain the role of the new position to me and what it looks like day-to-day.
9. How would your current team members describe you?
10. How have you contributed to reaching company goals?

Evaluation and scoring method of the interview answers

If you’ve read any other articles I have written, you will notice a common theme and that is that I am spreadsheet and numbers-driven. This is no different. My recommendation is to come up with the 5 to 15 aspects or attributes required to perform this job and to score each candidate accordingly on a 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 scale. This will assist greatly in explanation to the candidates who don’t receive the job as well as assist in removing bias as long as you’re fair in scoring. If you want to take this one step further, you should use weighted averages for these as problem-solving may be much more important than communication. The reason for this is you may end up with two people with the same score, but they score higher in the areas that are of higher value.

Types of attributes to consider in interviewing

This chart can include anything you deem valuable. You may want to evaluate salary level, interpersonal skills, or skills that directly lighten your workload. Keep in mind if someone asks you why they didn’t get the job, you may need to refer to this so use common sense and assume this may be public at some point and that you aren’t scoring based on gender, kids, or anything else illegal.

An example is listed below for hiring a manager who will be overseeing the buying team. There were three people on the interviewer team and they scored 1 to 5, 5 being the highest. Each attribute was assigned a weight out of 1, based on how important the attribute is to the business. You can see that although they have the same total score of 132, candidate 1 scores higher in the attributes that are weighted as more important, and therefore, that is the person you should strongly consider.

Sample template here.

In summary, posting jobs internally is a great way to motivate employees, and capitalize on experience someone has with your product or service. There are specific questions to ask in the interviews, and you need a scoring method of some sort to be transparent and as unbiased as possible in making the decision.

Written by Nicole Hullihen, March 26th, 2022