Recruitment is an instrumental part of any business entity and it is not wrong to say that recruits new and old represent a company and determine its performance, success, and reputation. But when someone hears the word “recruitment”, some people picture putting up advertisements, organizing promotional booths, arranging interviews, filing tedious legal documents, and planning costly orientations. Recruitment does not always have to be that daunting and expensive; sometimes, filling a spot can be as simple as asking someone sitting right next to you to step up. And yes, it is possible.
Internal recruitment is a highly common, reliable, and inexpensive ways to fill certain openings. They’re also less administrative and do not require waiting a long time because internal recruits are more or less already integrated into the organization.
Myanmar employers usually limit their recruiting preferences to external sources, assuming that new entries are usually fresher, more innovative, easier to be trained, and readily put to use. Although the assumption is logical to a certain extent, there are many occasions where internal recruits outperform the external ones due to several reasons. Here below are five situations something as such happens.
1) When the company is recruiting for executive positions
Managerial or executive positions call for more deliberation since they play a much bigger part in the company’s strategic executions which can affect the business on a larger scale than can operational employees. Recruiting a manager is indeed rather taxing work because they need to have a good understanding of the company setting, culture, people, operations, and statistics in order to make well-informed decisions about long term company plans.
Promoting the best performing employees to manager roles can sometimes be a better alternative than recruiting new managers from the outside for two reasons; first, as mentioned above, there’s no one who knows better about a company’s performance than its own employees. Second, managers have to be in charge of leadership and team supervision and a company’s existing promotees can pull off such functions much better than outsiders who, even with an extended team management experience, may be new to the intricacies of a particular organization.
In Myanmar, many employers who recruit for executive or managerial openings intentionally search for candidates with several years of experience to ensure that the managers embody adequate leadership skills that come with experience. However, this does not always have to be the case. When you promote your own employees who have enough years of experience at your company to managers, they can prove to be more competent and seamless at transiting to the new managerial role than external employees in their late professional ages adapting to a new culture.
2) When the company is short on time and budget
Sometime roles must be filled urgently and do not allow much time for a formal round of recruitment. Frequently in this case, the company is forced to ease their expectations toward its new recruits due to budget constraints and what the remuneration package on offer is. Also, any new employee internal or external needs some amount of time for onboarding and understanding how the processes for the new role flow. Internal recruitments can eliminate this issue by allowing existing employees to take up the new roles quicker and in a more cost effective manner.
Recruiting current employees does not call for long waiting periods usually taken for a formal recruitment comprising assessment stages like screening, interviewing, onboarding, etc. It also does not require the employers to exhaust a lot of budget for recruitment marketing and advertising. Also, when the employees officially take up the new internal role, they won’t have to go through long and structured onboarding processes, thus shortening the time it takes to fully equip the employees with what they need to be able to effectively carry out their new roles.
Myanmar employers tend not to allocate much budget to recruiting new employees because digital marketing in Myanmar tends to reach a lot of people simply through organic promotion without having to purchase post boosts due to a very high percentage of people on certain social media platforms (like Facebook).
In addition, in Myanmar, many job seekers usually apply to many jobs at a time and when they are accepted into a more competitive job, they are more likely to opt to accept that role without much notice. Imagine your company has as opening for an urgent role and you cannot find anyone to fill that slot in due course; then, you may be better off starting your search from the existing pool of employees to expedite the process.
In cases when your company is limited on time and budget and you also do not have enough internal employees to relocate, promote, etc, JobNet’s customers turn to its CRM function. JobNet's CRM always allows companies to check the market conditions before opening the position externally: one can check the market capacity by searching the CRM database to find potential suitable candidates. In addition, JobNet's salary survey can tell if a companiy’s allocated budget for a new position meets current conditions of the employee market.
3) When the role calls for credibility and expertise
Some roles at a company can be require a quick study and may not have high tolerance toward inexperience, even more so for companies with complex operational activities. Such roles have requirements germane to a particular company, function, or product that no external recruit may be sufficiently knowledgeable about. There can also be the kinds of roles that call for secrecy or privacy so as not to allow any intellectual property leakage. Internal recruits outperform external recruits when the scenarios are as such.
In Myanmar, credibility and expertise are believed to be closely correlated with age and experience. Although somewhat applicable, this concept is not standardized in many other Asian countries. Many Myanmar employers have this conception hardwired and it is worth knowing that there is nothing wrong with internally recruiting younger employees within your company for other roles because Myanmar is now inundated with educated millennials who can keep abreast with their older, more experienced counterparts.
4) When there is a need for continuing the HR pipeline
HR succession is an important aspect of a business and there can always be a need to have an old timer in the company; someone who has been inside the organization long enough to know the unique attributes of the company, fellow employees and the business landscape, or simply an employee who share the interests of the owners and care about their success as much as they cares about their own salary. Such employees can be quite rare in the market and can sometimes only be retained by promoting them or relocating them to where they can enjoy better career opportunities and monetary rewards. They can be ‘internally recruited’ for different roles that can better incentivize them and turn them into even more loyal employees.
Myanmar today is teeming with startup ventures and entrepreneurial businesses that would benefit from the employees remaining for some time because the employees of a startup are technically the earliest members of that company; and the company would prefer passing on the tribal knowledge they know about the startup operations to future employees so as not to disrupt the transition and hence, the health of the new business.
5) When the company needs to adjust the employee turnover
Some companies are quite sensitive toward turnover rates which determine how long an employee tends to stay with a company. The turnover report can say a lot about the working conditions of the company and how much the employees are happy with their employers. A low turnover rate indicates positive employee behaviour while a high rate means many employees do not stick with company for long. One way to optimize the turnover rate is through internal recruitments; employees who do not prove competent for a particular role can be relocated or demoted to a more suitable role than outright dismissing them; employees who prove to be managerially competent can even be promoted to leadership positions. This way, there is a lower need to permanently relinquish the employees and configure their roles for a better business landscape.
Many international companies are now investing in Myanmar and they may be extremely keen in partnering with Myanmar local companies to understand business prospects. Such international corporates usually look at the statistical figures of the local companies while considering stakeholdership or partnership, and a negative employee turnover rate, although not related to financial ratios, can leave a bad impression on potential partners and even can serve to lose international collaborators to your rival companies with better business benchmarks.