Weighing Your Options: Promoting vs Hiring Externally

It’s a quite common dilemma to figure out if you need to hire externally or promote from within to see improvement with your business. There are benefits to both. We will now go over the pros and cons to each side.

Hiring Externally 

Pros 

• Can help a company gain new perspectives - Oftentimes, hiring a new candidate will allow businesses to gain new ideas that they would not have gotten internally. These hires could be from a different industry and their ideas could make a difference. They also might see flaws in your business model that you were too close to see. The external hires could help improve your business due to their original distance. 
• Gives you more people to consider -  When looking at a pool of candidates for a job, you are able to have a wider pool of people when hiring externally. If you hire internally, it’s going to be a smaller pool. You also could be exposed to people of higher skill sets than the employees you currently have on your team. 
• No conflict within the existing team - Employees in your business will not feel like they are competing for a position if it is already announced to be an external hire joining the team. This makes the environment calmer and you don’t need to worry about any potential conflict. 

Cons 

• More time and money searching - It can take a while to set up the hiring platforms and advertisements saying that you are looking to hire. If the need for a person is immediate, it will be hard to fill it right away due to the time setting up the logistics.
• You don’t get all the information from their resume - At the end of the day, you only have a few interviews to be able to determine whether or not this person is good for the job. You can look at references but there still can be uncertainty with the offer. 
• You don’t know for certain that they will fit into the office dynamic - When people interview, they are on their best behavior and talk up their abilities and strengths. You can never be certain that they will fit in with your employees and your pace of work. You don’t know their true personality and how well that will mesh with the office environment.

Promoting from Within

Pros 

• Positive morale for staff - Hiring from within shows that an employee’s work is valued and they will be rewarded for their time going above and beyond expectations. This will also show other employees that if they work hard, they could be promoted in the future. If the promotion is for a managerial role, people can feel more comfortable that they know who they will be working with than an outside recruit.
• Keep your costs down - Internal recruits will save you money because you don’t need to spend money on external recruiting. You will not need to spend money on sites promoting your position. 
• You know the candidate - Interviews can be much more relaxed when you know the applicants from personally working with them. This allows you to skip the awkwardness of a first interview and ask them what they hope to contribute in the new position. 

Cons

• Stuck in an endless loop of filling positions - You probably will now need to fill in your promoted employee’s position unless they are just getting a promotion of responsibilities rather than a completely different title. This can be frustrating because you probably would have to hire an external candidate to end the repetition of hiring to fill. 
• Lack of change - You are keeping the same ideas that have been in your office already. This may promote a sense of conformity with ideas. The culture will continue to be the same because there is nothing causing a change. You just may lack some originality due to promoting and not hiring externally. 
• Competition between workers - People may become competitive with a position opening up. If employees don’t like the person who gets the promotion, they may leave because they don’t feel properly supported. They also may leave because they don’t feel valued if someone with less experience in the company gets the promotion instead of them. 

Overall, consider your employees and the need within your organization to determine whether or not it would be more beneficial to promote or hire externally.