Internal job posting programs

Effective recruitment process is vital to the success of any organization (Barber 1998). However, the major decision to be made is to recruit whether externally or internally. Recruiting tools can help identify prospective candidates internally. It has been noted that “if a company is not recruiting its own employees, someone else will” and that if employees have no internal opportunities to advance, the best performers will look outside.

A frequent complaint of employees is that their company goes outside to fill open positions rather than give promotional opportunities to current employees who might be qualified for the job.

A few years ago, it was unthinkable to post open positions in a nonunion salaried environment. But over the past few years, with Equal Employment Opportunity, the need for companies to maximize their human resources and increasing concern for individual career progression, job posting has become common.

Internal recruitment is typically from two sources: job posting and management decisions. Job posting is, defined as a planned recruitment practice which depends upon the internal human resource (Dass, 1999). Organizations, today, ensure to post few or all the vacant positions for which the current employees may apply. The employers implement the job posting program through a well defined company policy that describes which jobs will be posted, and for what locations. Job posting programs also typically specify eligibility requirements because few employers want employees jumping to different jobs for small salary increases. Employers who can post for positions must usually have at least satisfactory performance and must have a minimum amount of company and job work experience.

Many organizations encourage internal promotions since the superiors feel that an internal job posting policy would improve the employee performance and also help in retaining employees. There are additional benefits as well. First, it is easy for an organization that does internal promotion to analyze the performance level of the current employees than they can check the references and get reliable information on off-the-street hires. Second, internal job posting create less overhead to the organization than hiring from outside since the organizations save on the expenditure related  to  external recruitment processes such as testing, interviewing, selecting and training. Internal job posting programs also reduces the time and effort spent in reviewing the applications from external candidates, and the existing employees in general are aware of the organizational culture, customers, and even internal politics better than do outside applicants. And, of course, outside applicants may have trouble adjusting, which could put them at risk to become turnover statistics. After all, the people who are most recently hired are the ones who intent to leave soon since they have nothing to lose in making turnover decisions.

References

• Barber, A. 1998: Recruiting Employees: Individual and Organization Perspectives, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Dass P (1999) Strategies for Managing Human Resource Diversity: From Resistance to Learning. Academy of Management Executive