Identify Internal Candidates for Roles with Skills Tests

For many businesses, filling open positions presents several challenges. The longer and more intensive the search for candidates is, the more it can end up costing you, both in HR resources and in lost production. However, developing a pool of internal candidates for your open positions can help to reduce hiring time while also decreasing the chances of an unsatisfactory hire.

According to LinkedIn, the percentage of open positions filled through internal promotions has declined from 90% to 33% or less since the 1970s. However, LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2020 report suggests that hiring internal candidates is poised to become a major HR trend in the coming years.

Strategically, hiring internal candidates makes sense. While external hires undergo interviews, reference vetting, and skills testing, you can only learn so much about a candidate before they arrive at your workplace. This raises the potential for a cultural mismatch, which could lead to reduced productivity and a heightened chance that your new hire will look elsewhere within the next few years, leading you once again through the hiring cycle.

Internal candidates, on the other hand, are more likely to be familiar with the company and its corporate culture. Likewise, you will be more familiar with the bodies of work from your in-house candidates, giving you more quantifiable assurances that your candidate will have the necessary skills to perform their new role at a high level.

How Internal Candidates Are Recruited

There are several ways in which companies can try to match open positions to current employees. SHRM lists four primary methods of internal recruiting, noting that companies typically deploy a combination of:

1. Internal postings
2. Planning for progression
3. Manager recommendations
4. Internal databases of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs)

With internal postings and recommendations from managers, the company relies on either current employees nominating themselves or supervisors making recommendations to match candidates to new positions. While this is a good starting point, it can lack the precision of other methods of identifying potential candidates. Indeed, relying on managerial recommendations can lead to supervisors attempting to pass on “difficult” employees to other departments.

Developing a pool of potential internal candidates for a position should start with developing a detailed database of KSAs. With eSkill’s vast library of customizable skills testing tools, you can deploy ready-made skills tests or create a custom test, even adding your own created content to fully assess the KSAs of your employees. 

Using Skills Testing to Identify and Develop Internal Candidates

Your new database of employee skill sets provides you with several advantages when it comes to your workforce. eSkill allows you to create reports that help to identify employee strengths and weaknesses, both on an individual and a macro level. Not only does this help to determine who may be best suited for promotion into a new role, but it can identify any knowledge gaps within your company, which can be addressed with employee development.

With skills assessment testing, you can measure your employees’ current level of expertise in many skills, then target your development efforts to raise necessary skills. After training, you can administer your skills test again, which will provide you with quantifiable data on the effectiveness of that development.

This targeted development allows you to not only identify internal candidates and upskill your workforce to create more candidates, giving you the flexibility to adjust work responsibilities as needed while also deepening your pool of candidates for promotion.

Hiring Internal Candidates

While increasing your pool of internal candidates can offer you a greater range of employees to select from, it can also make it difficult to choose the “right” person. Oftentimes, the more choices you are presented with, the more difficult it can be to choose due to a fear of missing out on the right candidate.

Writing for Business.com, Komal Dangi discusses how best to decide between multiple internal candidates by tracking a candidate’s work history within the organization to discussing the candidate with their peers, much of her advice is similar to the kind of vetting you would do with an external hire. However, there is much easier access to a richer trove of information with this approach.

Despite that, Dangi also recommends testing problem-solving capabilities as a method for distinguishing candidates. While her method is to present an in-person test, eSkill offers many Skills Tests that would perform the same function, but remove any potential unconscious bias that might result from in-person testing. In this way, skills testing can be a powerful tool to separate candidates that might otherwise be neck-and-neck for the same position.

Interested in Identifying Internal Candidates with Skills Tests?

Learn how skills testing can help you build a pool of internal, “promotable” candidates who can be considered for open roles within your company. Request a demo today.