Employee Value Propositions vary from company to company based on a number of factors including employee demographics and engagement, culture and business objectives, target seeker demographics and preferences, employer reputation and awareness. All EVP’s are aimed at strengthening a company’s Employer Brand strategy, which includes engaging and aligning your existing talent.
One of the most common reasons talent across the globe seek to join an organization is Opportunity and Career Growth. Most organizations focus employer brand energies on attracting external talent to the organization. Countless articles are written about the value of the external candidate experience. The internal hiring and career progression experience however, has a more significant ripple effect on engagement, retention, culture and employer brand. Blu Ivy Group has conducted interviews with over 8000 employees and job seekers in the last year. One of the top 3 reasons talent cite as a threat to the employer brand, and a reason people will leave an organization, is better job opportunity. The LinkedIn 2014 Talent Trends Report uncovered that 80% of the global workforce have identified themselves as passive job seekers (open to either internal or external career opportunities). Retention, engagement and succession planning are some of the biggest challenges facing HR leadership today. Ensuring a highly effective internal hiring process strengthens your organization as a whole, and engages your talent more. It also reinforces that your current team remain highly-talented, and highly-valued people in your industry.
Here are 4 common internal hiring process mistakes and how to avoid them:
- Ownership of Talent and Identification of High Potential Talent
The war for talent is internal as well as external. When a manager has a great employee working on his team, he wants to keep that person on his team, because he values her contribution to the team’s success. But her talents may be able to benefit the company as a whole by moving her into that new role in another department.
While team performance is important, it only benefits the business as a whole if there are ideal behaviours and KPIs for managers so they do not delay an employee’s career advancement if she qualifies for an available position. Encouraging an overall business strategy that helps people build their own skills and talents outside of their current expertise strengthens the business and creates a productive corporate culture.
Talent within an organization should be considered enterprise resources rather than labelled divisional or managerial resources. Consider training your leaders and new people managers to understand that talent within the company is one of the single largest investments. These resources are to be developed, engaged and retained as a priority and that means open and transparent career progression across the organization without management roadblocks. A consistent support structure and career development experience for talent is an employer brand building block, not an option.
Many organizations measure retention and internal fills metrics, however it tends to be HR divisions alone that have these KPIs. Manager and leadership KPIs tend to be focused on departmental results and engagement scores. A better way to align managers to an enterprise talent development strategy is to measure and reward on how they have impacted talent progression, development and retention. In today’s business environment these KPIs are more important than ever as the largest groups of people managers often have their own project and client deliverables in addition to their leadership responsibilities. Managers that are not willing to alter the factors that impact turnover, engagement and succession planning are ultimately not the individuals that should be leading your talent.
- Weak Internal Platforms and Communications.
Take a look at how you are communicating your internal opportunities to your audience. Many organizations post jobs on an intranet for two weeks. If they have not found an ideal internal candidate in that time frame, they begin external searches to fill the requisition. The flaw with this process of communication is that the bulk of your high performing and high potential employees are far too busy in their daily jobs to have time to regularly check the intranet for new postings. In fact, just 39% of organization leaders feel that their intranet is driving internal engagement. Appirio Sept 2013
To ensure better career opportunity communications, look to using a social intranet solution that seeks communication from all levels rather than a top down administrative communication process. This social communication solution will ensure that all employees see career related communications regularly.
Is your intranet mobile optimized? A Glassdoor study in 2014 found that 89% of employees and job seekers use mobile devices when looking for career opportunities. If developing and retaining top talent is indeed a part of your employer brand strategy, ensuring that you are communicating career opportunities in the most effective manner is critical to delivering on your employer promise.
Can employees sign up for career alerts internally? Do they know what areas they may be a fit for outside of their division? Coaching an employee to look at career opportunity and personal development as both horizontal and lateral will provide greater exposure to career growth and better develop future leaders.
An easy and often overlooked career communication strategy is building an internal communications calendar that features career opportunities internally. Though many companies have strong external editorial calendars, internal employee messaging can tend to be very policy and administrative in focus. Engage your talent by communicating about careers and employer brand stories.
Consider as you enhance all of your external talent acquisition and employer brand solutions, should they also apply to your internal talent pool? Elevating and enhancing communications and awareness of career opportunities will not only improve the internal hiring process, it will positively impact cost per hire, succession planning, retention, trust and your employer brand authenticity.
- Poor Internal Candidate Interview and Follow-up Experience.
Too often, if an employee applies and interviews for a new position or upgrade, and doesn’t fill that new role, he gets very little or no feedback as to why. Did that last performance review affect the decision? Was there a poor reference given by a former manager or colleague? The lack of feedback can have a negative effect on the employee’s work demeanor, while also discouraging that employee to continue to explore internal opportunities.
This lack of feedback is a missed engagement and development opportunity by an organization. We suggest that leaders provide mentoring, training or management coaching, to help that employee understand where they have gaps in their skills and competencies and where they need to develop to best position themselves for future roles within the company.
Always tell candidates if they weren’t the first choice, and always tell them why that was. Identify other jobs that may be better fit opportunities for them in future, and check back with them in a few months to see how they are developing and how engaged they are.
Also, allow the employee a chance to assess the whole hiring process. It will help to improve your company’s hiring processes and further demonstrate your commitment to delivering on your employer brand.
Finally, encourage your employee to share that experience with others in the company. Getting the word out that your internal hiring processes are transparent, supportive and fair, helps to strengthen the employee experience enhances your employer brand.
- Policies are in place that inhibit employees from moving to another role in the company
The first step in creating a successful internal hiring process is developing and delivering a consistent policy that respects and enhances the EVP. Many internal hiring and career progression policies are antiquated and misaligned with corporate and employer brand goals.
Before you update that policy, consider who needs to be involved in the actual process. While it is the job of the HR department to provide guidance in this, consider what other departments, leaders and hiring managers should be included when building the policy and ensure that they are bought in to the values and goals of the policy so that they will act as ambassadors of the process over time.
Most internal hiring policies include clauses that prevent employees from applying for new roles until they have been in their current role for a certain time frame (often 24 months). Although the intent of the policy is to garner an ROI from the employee in the role, we encourage the company to look at the longer term ROI garnered by retaining high performing, high potential resources who have an appetite to be fast tracked. Overly restrictive policies may hold back your most eager talent from spreading their wings, lower engagement and elevate turnover. This phenomenon is often observed with higher levels of turnover within millennials, customer support roles, and high potential demographics.
While there may be training or safety considerations for holding employees at a certain level, your internal hiring policy must be tailored to allow top talent to explore their potential. If existing talent have identified their desire to be fast tracked, consider tailoring a policy for this group and build KPIs based on higher levels of performance, competencies, deliverables and volunteerism. Time in a role is not the clearest measure of ROI, so consider alternative metrics.
Once you’ve refreshed your internal hiring policy, remain consistent in its implementation. And finally, include it in your onboarding process. If a new employee knows what to expect in terms of internal opportunities, and sees it in practice, it will reinforce your company’s employer brand.
There are numerous advantages to an improved internal hiring strategy. Not only does it reinforce your employer brand and EVP, it reduces cost per hire, elevates employee engagement and performance, develops a best in class talent pool. The ROI is easily measurable and a true sign of a powerful leadership team and corporate culture that doesn’t just attract, but retains the best talent in the industry.
About Blu Ivy Group
Blu Ivy Group is a leading employer branding and employee engagement consultancy that aligns your organization with contemporary workplace paradigms. Blu Ivy Group’s mission is to help client’s build award-winning people practices, inspire extraordinary employee engagement, and cultivate unique and desirable workplaces.
Blu Ivy Group provides integrated solutions in employer brand and engagement research, strategic consulting, employer brand integration, creative and talent communications.
Blu Ivy Group is a trusted partner to many of North America’s most respected employer brands. For more information, go to www.bluivygroup.com