When filling open roles, what is your company’s hiring approach?

Our reader poll today asks: When filling open roles, what is your company’s hiring approach?

• We always try hard to hire and fill from within first: 66%
• We give a cursory look within but often hire externally: 28%
• We never look at internal talent and always go external: 6%

You’ve got the talent, but are they ready? A significant portion of your hires are coming from within. The obvious benefits here are the person is a known quantity and they fit with your culture. The unknown we forget to consider and prepare for is they are an unknown quality in terms of how they’ll perform at the next level. Just because they were a good individual contributor, that doesn’t mean they’ll be a good manager. Nor a good manager a good director, and so on. What are you doing today to prepare these leaders for tomorrow? Training and developing them after you’ve put them in the new role might be too late. Don’t just build a succession plan and leave it at that. Actively find development and skill building opportunities for these next-generation leaders before you put them in that next level role.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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These results were originally a SmartPulse poll in SmartBrief on Leadership which tracks feedback from more than 240,000 business leaders. Get smarter on leadership and sign up for the SmartBrief on Leadership e-newsletter.