Internal recruiting: four tips

Personnel policy is just like customer acquisition: it is often much more difficult to find new ones than to keep your current ones. Yet in business we often focus mainly on the growth: how do I get new customers and the best employees? However, sometimes the best new employees are people you have employed for a long time.

Entire recruitment departments can be full-time busy with the search for new employees. However, it is quite possible that the greatest talents are already walking around somewhere in your company. But how do you, as an entrepreneur, gain insight into the development of your employees? How do you ensure that they continue to grow? And how do you keep them inboard at all? We give you four practical tips to be able to recruit internally in the long run.

Tip 1: Keep an eye on your back door

Ask an average entrepreneur why staff members leave their company and most will think that it is because employees have found a job with a higher salary or better conditions elsewhere. However, research among people who change jobs suggests something else. Growth and development opportunities are by far the most important reason for people in the Netherlands to quit their jobs and start working elsewhere.

Does this also apply to the employees who give up their job with you? How do you find out? You could start by conducting exit interviews with all your releasing employees. Not to blame them or put them on fire, but to find out in a pleasant conversation what the most important motivation was to apply elsewhere. The answers will ultimately tell you what you could possibly have done to keep these people on board.

Tip 2: Make development and growth important

There will be few entrepreneurs who hinder their employees in their development. You will not say 'no' if one of your employees wants to participate in one day training. But do you really stimulate it? Is development and development an important part of the employment of your staff?

Many people need a stick to get started with their development. If it is not there, they will come to a standstill and eventually become unhappy and therefore less productive. For example, by making an annual development budget available and periodically discussing future plans and career opportunities, you can help employees enormously. Staff who are developing not only get better at their current job, but may eventually become suitable for other positions within your company.

Own employees are frustrated when they see that external entrants get better working conditions.

Tip 3: Own staff first

Little is more frustrating for employees than external entrants who immediately get better terms of employment than themselves. You have been committed to a company for years, you are always doing your best, and here comes someone from outside who receives one more salary from day one. Therefore, challenge your recruitment staff: your own staff first. Is that important vacancy really impossible to fill with someone we already have in our own ranks? What is more important: experience as a manager elsewhere, or thorough knowledge of your own company here?

Tip 4: Be transparent about your company mission and embrace it

The above only works if your employees feel that they are part of a company with a thoughtful approach mission. A mission they also believe in and want to do their bit for. What is the right of existence of your company? Why do your people get out of bed every day to make a case for the cause?

On to good ones employer branding To do this - and not only apply this externally, but also internally - you can let your staff embrace your company mission. They will then be less inclined to leave your company - after all, the mission is not yet complete - and also want to develop further to increase their contribution. In the long term you will find that you spend less and less time searching for suitable staff. In this way you keep more and more time for the actual running of your company.

Read this page to learn more about (online) recruitment.