Existing Employees Are Struggling: Helping Your Internal Candidates Compete With Your External Candidates
Your internal employees are woefully underprepared to compete against the hordes of external candidates flooding your interview process with polished resumes and sharp interview skills. Here are a few tips to help make it a fair fight.
TL/DR
- Internal candidates often struggle to compete with external candidates due to outdated resumes and rusty interview skills.
- Encourage employees to apply for higher-level roles, as many assume their managers will promote them without action.
- Provide resume coaching to help internal candidates create polished resumes that match the quality of external applicants.
- Offer interview training with face-to-face practice and actionable feedback to improve internal candidates’ performance.
- Investing in internal candidates boosts retention, signals growth opportunities, and yields a high return on investment.
Existing Employees Are Struggling
I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve had an employee in my office, frustrated that they can’t seem to make it past interviews into the next-level role they desire. They’ve done the work, they have the credentials, they understand the company culture, and they have solid performance reviews. But when the interviews are done, they are not the candidate of choice. When the employee asks for feedback on what they could have done better during the interview process, they receive vague feedback, if they receive feedback at all.
Every organization touts how much they promote from within, and many promotions are made without a role being posted. But whenever an organization posts a job on their careers site, they leave their internal employees at a disadvantage.
What do we expect from internal candidate resumes?
The last time they spent real time on a resume was when you hired them years ago. Meanwhile, there’s an army of external candidates that have met with four different resume coaches and revised their resume 27 times. So yeah, the external candidate looks impressive on paper, you’re looking at a heavily edited document.
What do we expect from internal candidate interviews?
The last time they interviewed for a role was when you hired them years ago. Meanwhile, there’s an army of external candidates that are interviewing on a daily basis. So yeah, the external candidate sounds really polished, they’re practicing their interview skills.
If organizations want their employees to have a snowballs chance to win externally posted positions, there are three things they need to do really well.
Here are a few tips to help make it a fair fight.
Encourage employees to apply
The first thing is to encourage current employees to apply in the first place. There are so many employees that have the skills needed to step into a higher role, but no one has encouraged them to want that for themselves. There are so many people that feel that “my boss knows me, they will promote me when I’m ready.” Maybe they will, but often they don’t. Our organizations need to ensure our managers are empowering the people on their teams to be mindful about their career.
Provide resume coaching
The next thing is to provide resume coaching. Your employees don’t know the level of quality a resume needs to have to run the applicant tracking system gauntlet. Organizations need to help internal candidates get their resume in the same ballpark of quality as the external candidates. Even with internal candidates, the hiring manager may not have much familiarity with them. So when the hiring manager is selecting the best candidate out of all those being interviewed, don’t let your internal candidate be the victim of a less than polished resume.
Offer interview training
Organizations also need to provide interview training for their employees. Not just a how-to guide, we need to invest the resources to have a person sit with the employee face-to-face, ask interview questions, then give them actionable feedback.
Summary
Organizations have the opportunity to both help themselves and their employees when they support them as internal candidates. Internally promoted candidates stay with their organizations longer than externally hired candidates. More internally promoted candidates also sends a signal through your organization about the rewards that are available. So invest those resources in your internal candidates, the return on investment is high.
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