Member-only story

Instead Of Over-Analyzing External Hiring, Why Not Promote From Within More?

Seems logical, right?

Ted Bauer
5 min readMar 8, 2023

Internal recruitment — essentially, promoting, advancing, and hiring from within — seems like a pretty fraught concept at a lot of companies.

I think the big thing here is FOMO, or fear of missing out. It’s kind of the same logic behind why companies hire consultants. The idea is that “fresh blood” is good. These people will have new ideas. They might even be poached from a competitor, so that gives you a leg up on the enemy. I also think a lot of executives know (but don’t admit) that people start to get burned out and recycle the same 3–5 ideas once they’ve worked somewhere a few years, so an infusion of new human capital could be a good thing. All this has some validity, although it’s also a bit wrong. More on the FOMO part later.

On surveys, employees often talk about wanting “opportunities for growth.” That usually means “a higher salary,” if we’re being 100 percent honest. One of the most demoralizing things ever is working for a place with poor internal recruitment. In that type of setting, you hit target after target for a boss man — and then when you’re up for a promotion, it goes to someone they found on LinkedIn. After that happens 2–3 times, why would you care about your job anymore? Clearly there’s no chance for…

--

--

Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

No responses yet