'recycled' workers--the best applicant pool?
Did any of you receive the mailing from OfficeTeam--How to Hire Smart? It has a list of the best ways to find good employees.
#1 is "recruit from within" and #2 is "hire former employees." I agree that present and former employees are a "known quantity (and quality)" who are proven to work well in the company culture. However, recruiting from this pool can result in some problems, beginning with lack of new ideas.
What do you all think?
Comments
Hey-There's a white paper on this website called "Recruiting? Look for Different Thinking."
Maybe balance recruiting the "known quantities," as you say, with some "new blood" that can also diversify the workforce.
I haven't seen this mailing but in my opinion recruiting needs to be a combination of many things in order to be successful. Recruiting from within is a good thing as long as the person is put in the right job and given the tools to succeed. If it is not the right fit for them and/or they can't do the job then one of two things is going to happen - you will have to terminate them or they will leave. When you hire former employees you know what you are getting but you have to first look at why they left in the first place. An example - Was it to go to make more money at the same job somewhere else? If so, are they going to just leave again when another offer comes their way? External hiring has pros and cons as well. The OP mentioned bringing in new ideas, which is true. There are other good things that someone new can bring - experience from another organization, new skills, etc. On the reverse side, if you don't have a solid hiring process that lets you evaluate whether the person is a good fit for the position and your company culture then you might as well throw darts at some resumes and pick the one that the dart hits.
You really have to consider the position you are trying to fill, how quickly you need someone to ramp up and what your company culture is like to determine the hiring strategy that will work for you. There is not a "one size, fits all" approach for hiring. You can look at what successful companies in your industry, in your size, etc. have done and modify this to fit your organization.
We get about 30% of applicants from current and former employee referrals.
The nice thing about a rehire, which tends to be seasonal for us, is you know what you're getting. For some jobs, like automotive assembly, that can be pretty easy to determine. For other jobs, like advertising creativity, that can be pretty difficult to determine.
I have actually had angry managers in my office because we post jobs internally. We still do it, but they don't always like it. Let me rephrase that. They love it if they have the opening. They hate if another manager has an opening and they have employees applying for that open position.
They call it cannibalizing our staff.
I would never stand in the way of someone wanting to better themselves and bring more to the table. But I do, in a strange kind of twisted way, see their point. They worked hard to get a good employee in the door for them, now someone within the company is stealing that employee from them.
I have actually had angry managers in my office because we post jobs internally. We still do it, but they don't always like it. Let me rephrase that. They love it if they have the opening. They hate if another manager has an opening and they have employees applying for that open position.
They call it cannibalizing our staff.
I would never stand in the way of someone wanting to better themselves and bring more to the table. But I do, in a strange kind of twisted way, see their point. They worked hard to get a good employee in the door for them, now someone within the company is stealing that employee from them.
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Some companies require a release from the current supervisor in order to make application in order to prevent problems like this. That opens other problems that I think are more dangerous but it's something to look into if this is a big issue for you.
We have two sales programs, one of which is an elite program. We canibalize the other sales teams to put the best reps on the elite program. Each time we do that, we pay $100 to the supervisor who helped make that person great. They now trot out their best representatives every chance they get. They also focus more on individual development, which is what we want.
Yeah, TX, we do currently require that the employee notify the supervisor first but unless the supervisor has a good valid reason (like if the customer that employee is working for would pull their business because of the employee going to another dept) they can't stop them. And like you said, just that they know can be an issue.
I like the idea of offering a bonus to the supervisor. We don't have much of a sales team though so I'm trying to wrap my mind around how this would work in our company.