What’s the best way to find the right fit for an open role? JR Keller, assistant professor at the Cornell ILR School, and Angela Cheng-Cimini ’92, chief human resources officer for Harvard Business Publishing, explain the advantages and pitfalls of the internal hiring process.
The majority of jobs today are filled by hiring internal candidates in a process that is faster than an external search and enables individuals with institutional knowledge to impact an organization more quickly in new roles.
In this Cornell Keynotes podcast episode, JR Keller, assistant professor at the Cornell ILR School, and Angela Cheng-Cimini ’92, chief human resources officer for Harvard Business Publishing, explore aspects of internal talent mobility, including:
Learn more in JR Keller’s eCornell certificate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Building a Diverse Workforce.
Did you enjoy this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast? Watch the full Keynote.
Note: This transcript was generated using AI and has not yet been reviewed for accuracy by a human editor.
Chris Wofford
On today's show, we are joined by JR Keller from the Cornell ILR school and Harvard business publishing's Angela Cheng-Cimini for a look at what's happening in hiring and how you, our viewers, can improve practices at your organization through talent mobility. JR and Angela, welcome to the studio. Thanks for joining me.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Thanks for having us.
JR Keller
Yes, thank you.
Chris Wofford
Let's dig right into it. So, JR, the majority of jobs today are filled by hiring internal candidates. Can you talk about why this is the case?
JR Keller
Yeah, there are a ton of reasons, almost too many to go through. But some of the top of mind, the ones that that I think are the most straightforward are that it's faster. Right. You have an open job to fill in your organization and you have somebody that's already there. You can find them much quicker. You can transition them to the role much quicker.
JR Keller
You think about all that time that we spend going out and searching for candidates, reviewing resumes, going through multiple rounds of interviews. Even if you go through a fairly rigorous internal selection process, it almost never takes that amount of time.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
And the irony of that is for organizations that do internal mobility really well, I think still the overwhelming perception is that you're still going outside way too often. So I think organizations need to do a better job of showcasing that There is actually a good sense of internal mobility.
JR Keller
Yeah, and that's a really good point because one of the other big benefits of internal mobility, what research has shown some research that I've done that I really love is that it has motivational spillovers. So if you as an organization have a history of promoting people internally, of moving them around or prioritizing internal candidates for jobs, even those employees who aren't moving right now will see that and they'll be more likely to stick around because they will see themselves as being prioritized in the future.
JR Keller
Right. But to do that, you have to make sure that they know that.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
I love that. That should be a metric that every organization tracks. Right. So alongside your diversity, your attrition, your tenure, it should be the percentage of people who get promoted in the year. Absolutely.
Chris Wofford
Is that a figure that organizations run around with or at least make publicly, you know, kind of understandable in the organization or what?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Well, it's I think it's something I think it's something that candidates should absolutely dig into when they're checking out a new organization.
Chris Wofford
Yeah, exactly. Interviewing your employer kind of.
JR Keller
Question, I think to the extent that you see this, it's maybe reported internally on H.R. dashboards, but that's right. You're hoping that people are talking about this on Glassdoor or very God based or not necessarily advertising. That's right.
Chris Wofford
And a new vanity metric to aspire to.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
It's a great way to hold your organization to account.
Chris Wofford
Yeah, exactly. Angela, let me ask you, so given the relative health and the fluidity of today's job market, how about institutional knowledge? It's incredibly valuable for an organization to have this. Can you talk a little bit about how this figures into internal mobility among talent?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
It dovetails exactly into what JR was talking about. I like the learning curve is truncated so much because you don't have to tell people how to politically navigate who the important constituents are, who the stakeholders are, or even more importantly, what the mission of the organization is, because they already innately have that knowledge. All of that stuff needs to be imparted to new hires, and I think a lot of organizations sort of skip over that the like.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
We'll just learn it on the job as opposed to really gifting it to them right up front, whether that's in a formal onboarding or the manager has it all scoped out. They set up one on ones right out of the gate for people. So institutional knowledge is of critical lynchpin to really getting somebody to be as fully functioning as quickly as possible.
JR Keller
Yeah, I kind of wonder if you think about asking, you know, asking one of your friends about what's it like to work at a company. A they're rarely going to talk about, here's the technology stack that we use and here's this, But it's people are nice or people are a little combative or it's really fast paced or it's collegial, right?
JR Keller
It's really about how to get things done and how the organization works informally. And it's really hard to learn that from outside the organization. Yeah.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
And here's a quick tip for anybody who's a manager to a new team, write a user's guide. This is how I operate best and this is how I would like to know how my team works, right? So it's just sort of like I prefer email to text messages. I prefer that we meet once a month for 30 minutes versus twice a week for an hour.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
You know, whatever it is. Like a user's guide to me as a leader is a great way to help shorten the times. The institutional knowledge.
Chris Wofford
You had talked to about the value of institutional knowledge related to boomerang hires. Tell me a little bit about that. You just ran a study on this.
JR Keller
Yeah. So I worked with my colleague Becca Keough at our school, and we looked at an eight year period at a large health care organization and looked at all the internal hires, all the boomerang hires, all the external hires. We were surprised, number one, and the number of boomerang hires.
Chris Wofford
Let's talk about boomerang hires real quick. Some people might not be familiar with that concept. It is kind of what it sounds like, somebody that's left the organization that is coming back.
JR Keller
Exactly.
Chris Wofford
Fired or otherwise.
JR Keller
Fired or otherwise. Okay. Most of the boomerangs will have left voluntarily for some reason and then will come back often because the grass is always greener. You kind of wonder man. They I get paid a little more somewhere else. I'll just I want a new adventure. And then you're like, I really kind of had a good where I was before.
JR Keller
And it used to be that employers are very unwilling to bring people back because it was a signal of disloyalty. So they worried that they hired people back then. It would encourage other employees to leave. And now they're realizing that, listen, if this is great talent, let's welcome welcoming back into the organization.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Well, what was fascinating about your research was that you showed that was true even for people who weren't necessarily the best performers or who were asked to leave. So even there's a bump there.
JR Keller
Yeah. So the big finding was that boomerangs outperformed new external hires regardless of what they had done in the organization, how long they'd been, you know, we were able to run all these super cool statistical analyzes. But what that allows to do is really hone in on the fact that the reason they were so successful is because they knew how the organization worked and how to get things done.
JR Keller
And one of those big things is if you've ever had a new member join your team, there's a little bit of resistance. If they try to change things like a little bit of sense. We want to reject outsiders. But boomerangs aren't seen as outsiders, right? They're seen as sort of the prodigal sons or the family coming in. And when they have new ideas and new perspectives, which is one of the things we really like and external hires, they know how to frame them in a way that fits with the history and norms of the organization.
JR Keller
And so they don't they are able to better position their work as adding to the organization instead of disrupting what we have, how we've always done things.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Yeah, there's no tissue rejection.
JR Keller
It's a great way to put it.
Chris Wofford
Great analogy for sure. JR, Let's talk about hiring process a little bit. You've written about how different hiring processes can have a downstream impact on employee performance, retention, salary, etc.. Talk about some of these processes.
JR Keller
Yeah. So I think the two biggest processes that most organizations use to move people around internally are what I've called posting and slotting. So posting is as straightforward as it sounds. It is posting a job, posting it internally. You may also posted externally, but the fact that it's posted with that clear job description so that everybody in the organization can see that there is this open opportunity and if they're interested in that job, can submit their application where they show off their skills and abilities and qualification and can basically try to sell themselves to the hiring manager.
JR Keller
So slotting is a much different process and one that I think a lot of us have either experienced or seen, which is where you have a manager who basically reaches out to their network or already knows people. And instead of having an open competition for this role, they tap somebody on the shoulder and say, I might say, Angela, you're really a great fit for this role.
JR Keller
Do you want it? But I don't actually consider anybody else in the organization.
Chris Wofford
Can you talk about the potential detrimental effect of posting when you know darn well the person you intend to hire for that job? I found this dynamic pretty interesting.
JR Keller
Yeah. So let me tell you a little bit about why posting is so great and then why sort of this fake posting is even worse. Okay, so you have this good of the bad and the good is that what my research has shown is that when managers post jobs, the candidates that they hire, perform better, are more likely to be promoted, are less likely to live, and they get paid more.
JR Keller
So it's really a win win for the manager and the employees. Okay. And the reason it's twofold is, one, even the most well-connected manager in any organization only knows so many people, right? So if you're reaching out informally to find people, there could be hidden talent in the organization. And it's really easy when you post a job to find those because they come to you instead of you having to search them.
JR Keller
The other thing that it does is it really disciplines managerial decision making. So you actually have to write a job description, which sounds like that shouldn't make a difference, but you actually have to spend a lot of time thinking about like, what do I actually need now for this job? And then ideally, because you have set out that criteria, you're more likely to look for that information instead of relying on sort of, Do I like this person, but do they actually have this coding skill or whatever it might be?
JR Keller
And the last piece is you have to reject the internal candidates that you.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Don't run rejecting your own.
JR Keller
Because you're rejecting and you're more likely to want to be able to be clear about this was done objectively. And so you're making decisions based on people's ability to do the job so that you can communicate to the candidate that you don't hire, that that was the reason you made those decisions.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So I'll just touch on something you said, which is about the job description. So at Harvard Business Publishing, I'm really encouraging hiring managers to make those as short, as sweet as possible. It really distill it down to what are the three or four key competencies and what are the two or three key roles. Because people like to write like these five page job descriptions, which only one in a thousand people can fill, right?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Because you're looking for the unicorn. So it also enhances your diversity efforts because you're opening up the aperture to many more candidates. So to the degree that you are slotting, at least give that person a lot of opportunity to show that they can do much more and give perhaps other candidates. If you do decide to go posting to really reveal themselves in the moment when you might not have considered them originally.
JR Keller
That's a great point. I encourage my students, whether they're the undergrads or masters or the executives, stick to 300 words on a posting, right? That's a page. It's actually a lot more than you think it is. It is. But if you discipline yourself, then you're going to take off this stuff that doesn't.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Like you Want me to write good communication skills? That's a given. It's a giveaway. Like, why is it still a thing? And all those.
JR Keller
And what does that mean? Is it mean you can have a good interpersonal conversation? Does it mean you can write good email? I show my students a Liberty Mutual job posting every semester, and it's an actuarial position where you don't talk to anybody and you run numbers and you submit it to the team and the number.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Of events to of our areas. But the number.
JR Keller
One preferred qualification is great communication skills.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
That's a that's an a template.
JR Keller
It's in a template.
Chris Wofford
Yeah. Ability to be flexible.
JR Keller
Yeah.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Exactly. Whatever team player.
Chris Wofford
So let's talk about a relational process like slotting, right. So how can this have less than optimal outcomes? What sometimes happens with sliding?
JR Keller
One of the things that happens is that you overlook other talent. The other piece is we talked a little bit about the motivational spillover effects for internal hiring, but the idea here is that people think that they will be considered for advancement opportunities right? And if they're seeing sort of people get tapped on the shoulder and move, then they feel this is part of a click or a good old boys club often.
JR Keller
And so it's all about who you know, as opposed to what you do. And so it actually becomes a little bit demotivating because it seems like there's this secret sauce for getting ahead in the organization and only some people know what it is. And if I'm on the outside, why do I want to stick around here?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
And contemporary leadership is becoming increasingly more about transparency, right? I just want to understand what the rules are so that I can play on an equal footing with everybody else.
JR Keller
And I think oftentimes when managers are slotting people, they're actually doing it because they think they're making the best decision because we know that person so well. But one of the things is that when we think about decision making, right, we know we know their skills and abilities, but we maybe tend to overlook their weaknesses or we're overvaluing how much we get along with them or like them.
JR Keller
And while all that stuff is certainly important, we shouldn't be making decisions about if somebody can do the job based on whether we're friends with them. And so I think it's often unintentionally right. They think they're making a better decision. I think that's why the results of the work that I did, that policy matters. It was so surprising really well.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
And I think too, that when someone goes through a posting process and they get the job, they've gone through some sort of legitimate gantlet. So everybody else in the process knows, Yeah, we all start from the same place and we ran for it and one person came out on top versus the sledding. You might question whether or not that was a legitimate hire, right?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
You're not doing that candidate any favors because people will question how valid that decision was.
JR Keller
That's a great point. And you mentioned sort of this going through the gantlet. I mentioned earlier that internal hires hired through posting make more, and that's because they know they've gone through the gantlet and these two things happen. It's so cool is that I just went through a competition so I know I'm the best person and that you want me.
JR Keller
And so I'm willing to ask you for more money.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So I know my value.
JR Keller
I know my value, but if you just slotted me into a role, why would I do anything that might rock that boat? So I'm not going to say, can I have 10% more than what you offered? But it also it allows then you as a manager to go to h.r. And say, listen, we should pay this person 10% more than what our initial offer was because we went through a rigorous selection process right?
JR Keller
And so it ends up right that that this process benefits the employee, too, from a financial perspective. And you might say, well, do I want to pay my employees more, paying them 10% more? My effects are really closer to four. But even if you pay them 10% more, think about the performance benefits and the retention benefits and the motivational benefits.
JR Keller
So it's really a more of a win win for everybody.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Hey, before about fake slotting, but there is still a place for real slotting, right? Like if you're looking for the next CEO, you may or may not have that within the ranks, but so long as people understand that going outside or tapping someone that you've been grooming for the last five years, people get it. That's been in the works for a long time.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
We understand why that person is next in line. So there are there are times when spotting is a completely legitimate and actually the better way to fill a.
JR Keller
But what you don't want to do is as a manager, if you have a candidate that you know you're going to hire is then go through the process of posting that job. That's right. Because then everyone else, no, they know they see you and it's a sham and they get demotivated and they get upset and it doesn't. And then that they have some resentment to the candidate who got slotted into that role.
JR Keller
And so I think that it is an issue of like, how do we handle if we know that posting is really default, the best process, But we know sometimes this more relational hiring is going to happen. How do we how do we manage that?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Yeah, I think it's all in the communications, right? I mean, people are full grown adults. We forget sometimes they're CEO of the personal households. I think sometimes we forget that they're just as smart at work as they are at home. And we we don't give them a benefit of the doubt that if we just share with them the rationale that we're like, okay.
JR Keller
Yeah, and I accept that. I think that's right. I think that's the biggest thing is transparency and communication procedurally. There's also two things that I've seen work. One is if you're required to post like this is just this is our policy as an organization, then you could actually put like a little addendum on the posting that says there has been a preferred candidate, there is a preferred candidate for this position so that folks know that if they're applying there, chances are great.
JR Keller
But we're still considering other people. So it's again, it's just a different way to communicate and the other is to actually just have another process, right. So can you petition or have some sort of place like if we've had somebody go through a leadership development program, particularly fill these roles, maybe we we get permission to actually slot people into those roles.
Chris Wofford
Hey, let's talk about career pathing.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Hey, let's do that.
Chris Wofford
And how you think about this. At Harvard Business Publishing, you've got a visual for us. We'll pick that up a second. But you know, the employee journey, the processes around it, talk about how you do it at Harvard.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So when I started in the role about two years ago, I sat in on Exit interviews because I wanted to understand why people were choosing to leave this fantastic organization at a time when I was choosing to join. And at that time, the number one reason was lack of career development. People could not envision themselves in a role beyond the one that they were in today.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
I'm like, Well, that's a problem I can solve. It doesn't even necessarily cost me a lot of money.
Chris Wofford
And this was something, a trend or something that you saw uniformly as exit interviews. Absolutely was a bit of a shocker.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So not really, but it was a shocker that it taken us so long to devise a solution to. Sure. So if we want to go ahead and share the slide, what I'll show with you is this is in a nutshell, the framework that we've got that we're using. So what you'll see is all the levels of the jobs and you'll see that it has two tracks.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
The yellow are the individual contributor roles and the white are those that manage people and they come back and they converge at the senior director role. But then we have three buckets of competencies, core competencies that apply to everybody, regardless of discipline, function and tenure, role based companies, competencies. So the technical skills that people need and then leadership competencies which in this version apply to everybody, because our premise is that everybody is a leader, whether or not they have formal people responsibility or not.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
And so what you see is that based upon the colors or the numbers, they're meant to represent the same thing, that there are stacks of skills that you need to start to accumulate. So if you are currently in a coordinator right out of school and you aspire to be CEO, you'll choose a track. Let's say it's marketing and you will see that the skills you need to accumulate and then at what level they need to manifest themselves.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
And there are four levels. So the blue is foundational, medium blue is working knowledge, dark blue is extensive knowledge and dark green is subject matter. Expert and the boxes stack upon themselves so that you can see clearly what it is. I need to be a marketing director and at what skills. And so these are published across the organization.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
We have 20 of these ladders across different disciplines, and I kind of think of it as a choose your own adventure. If I want to move sideways, if I want to move upwards, if I want to take a step back, what does that look like? And I know clearly what the skills are and what level are it's required.
Chris Wofford
What are some of the other inputs of the data or the tracking that goes along with this? Right. So see, you've given a new employee this and welcome to your coordinator position. I understand you're going to aspire to be become CEO. Yeah. How do you measure and track things throughout beyond the annual review or you know, something along those?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Yeah. So our new performance review process has alternating conversations each quarter. So one that's about how are you doing against your goals and then how are you doing against your professional development ambitions. So we're making sure it's a mix of, you know, KPIs, but also what are your aspirations and are we attending equally to both and are you moving at the pace and the cadence we would expect to see?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So for coordinator, Right. We just want to make sure that they're learning on the job and they're being exposed, whereas if they're direct or they're taking on really cool assignments, they've got clear deliverables, they're hitting on time and on budget and we've got all this evidence behind the scenes that people can match up so we can qualify like, are you doing the things that we've explicitly stated are necessary at this level?
Chris Wofford
Is this common practice?
JR Keller
It is. It is something that many organizations aspire to do, but it is hard. How long did this take you? Why is together nine months?
Chris Wofford
Why is it hard?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Well, because you have to define basically what are the key skills, and then you have to identify all the different career ladders. And you're not going to develop a career ladder for each person. So you have to find the synergies across them. And then you want to make sure that the empirical evidence of what takes someone to be a director is actually valid in your organization.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So we had 120 incumbents enroll, help us build this out. So at an immediate credibility when we rolled.
JR Keller
It out, I think that's really important to get insights from the people who are doing the job and the people who are doing the job well, especially. And to me, I really like this because I like the phrase you use the choose your own adventure, because I know you talked about career ladder, but then very few organizations right there are Harvard Business Publishing at Cornell.
JR Keller
There is not one clear. You come in at a particular entry level job and you work your way up because organizations morph. They change people's desires of what they want to do, change. And so what this does is allows people to see in almost infinite number of paths. Yes. And so we tell employees, build your own career. Right.
JR Keller
But we have to give them some insight into what that might actually look like and hear your visually showing them tangibly what some different options are.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So one of my favorite use cases was we had someone in marketing who really wanted to pivot to coming to h.r. Because her passion was diy so she was a marketing director. We matched up her skills against the career ladder. I'm like, okay, you're not as far along. So she came over as a manager, but that conversation was super easy because we could show like, okay, these are the technical skills you need.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
They're not quite as developed and they were marketing, and so you're going to take a step back. But now she also knows what it is she needs to go get to become a director and are super transparent.
JR Keller
It's great. And I really like if you think about coupling this with good job descriptions and posting jobs when they become available is you're showing by posting jobs, you're also allowing people who maybe aren't actively pursuing just looking at the internal job board and seeing what different roles might be out there. It's like, I didn't even know that was a job here.
JR Keller
Yeah, that sounds kind of cool.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
And I have some of those guys.
JR Keller
I have some of them, but what else do I need? And then, hey, there's a model I can go look at and then I can maybe have a conversation with my manager or look at our online learning learning management system, whatever it is, and figure out how do I position myself to go after this? Either relatively soon or three or four years down the road.
Chris Wofford
Let's talk about the manager's role within these processes. That's something that we haven't talked about quite yet.
JR Keller
But yeah, this is something that I become increasingly focused on because I think we can, as organizations, as H.R., develop these great policies and practices. But the individuals with the most influence on any employee's career is their direct manager. There's lots of other people, right? But at any given point in time, the manager has really direct influence on your career outcomes, for good or for bad, right?
JR Keller
So if we think about good managers, we tend in the literature to call them career sponsors, right? So this is managers who actively talk to you about what your career aspirations are. And don't just do that when they hire you. So what do you want to do five years from now and then? Don't talk to you for the next five years, but are regularly asking you if your aspirations are changing and what you want to do, what you're interested in.
JR Keller
Ask you what you like about your job. Don't like about your job, are introducing you to other people in the organization, or maybe finding you projects, making you visible, allowing you to present to people so you build a brand in the organization. But conversely, you had managers who were maybe you just had managers who don't do that, but you could also have managers who have a really high performing member of their team and are super afraid to lose them.
JR Keller
And so they actively discourage them from looking for other opportunities or sort of tuck them away in the corner and let them do this really great work, but don't want anybody else to know how good they are and they are slowing down that individuals advancement, intentionally or not.
Chris Wofford
Hoarding.
JR Keller
Hoarding.
Chris Wofford
Let me ask you about this. And this is sort of off script here, but what about talent loaning from one department to another? The marketing person aspires to work in DTI. You know, something along those lines, maybe kick them over to that department for 5 hours a month, 10 hours a month. Really? You think about that practice?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
I love that it's so hard to execute in real life, right? I mean, as it is, we're strained. Most companies are strained like very few companies have more assets than they know what to do with. Most of us are scrambling to get more hands on project. So organizations have to be super intentional. So we're trying to implement the 10% role, which is like try 10% of your month's time to go pursue another passion, to go get another experience outside of your day to day work.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
We haven't quite reached that. It remains on my radar, but it's not quite akin to hoarding. It's not with bad intention, it's not being selfish. It's just that the amount of work that needs to get done that it's hard to think about having them go pursue something that's maybe not directly related to their day to day job, but it's a great idea.
JR Keller
I bet there's been a lot written about these internal gig markets. Yeah, and they are really like in theory, awesome. Yeah, but as you said, I could have said it better. To pull them off in practice is really hard because the other element is say you're in marketing and you want to learn h.r. Who has time in h.r.
JR Keller
To teach you that.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Brands the roi when they go back to marketing. So i sent you up and i'm not sure i get any me as a manager. I'm not sure i get anything from that.
JR Keller
Yeah, there's actually been there's a really interesting study on the U.S. civil service which actually has a version of this and in general it's been positively received. But one of the big negatives that participants reported is I actually got exposure and got new skills and then I go back to my job and I'm stuck here and I'm actually more dissatisfied than I was before because I now I know that I'm better prepared.
JR Keller
There's all this stuff out there. And so, yeah, managing that is a real tricky piece.
Chris Wofford
One would hope it's the exception and the rule. I have a thought provoking question from viewer Justin who asks, Given today's economic uncertainty and slowing growth, many companies are implementing controlled hiring practices or external hiring freezes when their external hiring faucet is off. How do you best optimize your internal hiring practices, first of all, and external hiring faucets being turned off?
Chris Wofford
Is this a thing?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Yes.
Chris Wofford
Really? Why?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
absolutely. The economics are bad, right? I mean, the tech industry in particular is suffering from huge layoffs. Right. I mean, very, very good people are now on the streets looking for their next gig.
JR Keller
Yeah. And lots of other industry is just not hiring or using return to office and other programs to kind of allow people to naturally kind of leave without having to engage in layoffs. So there's a huge slowdown.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
But having said that, your best talent will always have options. So organizations will still have attrition, which means. Justin there will still be opportunities for internal mobility, but it doesn't go to zero.
JR Keller
Yeah, but I will say that it was part of the difficulty in hiring during COVID or the difficulty in hiring, and the emphasis on retention really supercharges the interest in internal hiring. And what's happening now with organizations is they're saying we can't bring in people externally. And so we do actually have to really think how we make the best use of our talent.
JR Keller
And so it is again, thinking about I think it was more retention, mobility with a retention issue with COVID, and now it's more mobility with a development like we need to develop people to do the work that we need. And so if anything, I think it's having organizations double down on those efforts.
Chris Wofford
Perfect. Great question. Good answer. Did you have.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
No, That was it.
JR Keller
Can I follow up a little bit on the recording topic that we've talked about? Because I don't think we gave it quite enough attention. Good. I mean, this is you talk to talent acquisition or and talent development folks in organizations and this is there number one priority or number one concern as to why mobility isn't working at their organization is managers not letting their people go.
JR Keller
And so this is something that I've been wanting to tackle for years and only recently, I think hopefully kind of cracked the code on this a little bit. Because when we think about an individual manager having a super talented person on their team, the number one thing they're worried about is if I let them go, how am I going to get the work done?
JR Keller
How am I going to replace them? Right. And so they're we know that it's really good for the organization to move people around. People will stick around, they'll get develop, they'll go to where their skills are better matched. It's great for employees. It really is not good for individual managers because there's a constant flow of people in and out of their team.
JR Keller
And so how do you sell managers on the benefits of sponsoring their employees and encouraging mobility? And so we were talking about metrics. And so we looked a colleague of mine, Catherine de Luger's, at Penn State University, and I did a study with another large firm and found that when managers were more effective at promoting their employees and not just keeping them on their team, but giving them an inflated job title, but actually sending them out to other parts of the organization when they posted jobs for their team internally, they got flooded with applications, not just a bunch of mediocre applications, but applications from high performers and applications from people in other business units and
JR Keller
functions. Because employees talk, the number one thing employees gossip about is their manager, right? And so managers develop reputations for developing talent. And so people want to go work for managers who have a track record of getting their employees promoted. And they really want to avoid working for managers who don't.
Chris Wofford
And that person succeeded in their role, right? So they're like, well, I'm you know, I'm gunning for a really solid position from somebody who demonstrated really amazing work.
JR Keller
Exactly. And you think, right, our true talent, the talent right. Or the high potential is the folks that we always talk and are about sticking around. They want to keep that. Those are the people who really often care most about career advancement. And so they're really deliberate on. We did all these interviews and it was amazing how much time those high potential folks spent thinking about which manager do I want to go work for next?
JR Keller
Right. Real big central part of those conversations.
Chris Wofford
At Harvard Business Publishing, there's a free agency policy, which I think is brilliant. Tell us how this works at your organization.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Yeah. So when managers fail to do a good job of pushing them, we put in mechanisms in place where we pull. So we have a program that we call free agency, which essentially says that once someone has been enrolled for 18 months, they are free to apply to any other job that's posted in the organization. And if they are successful in that bid for that role, the manager must release them within 60 days.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So they can't afford them. We said that it's actually not appropriate, nor are you allowed to hoard the talent. You have to let them go. So it's incumbent upon them to put together a transition plan so that the other manager on the other end doesn't have to wait forever to get that time. But we think 18 months is the right horizon because it takes about 3 to 6 months for people to come up to speed and then a year for them to really have impact and then we can have them move on.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
So we have found that policy to be really wonderful in helping to promote internal mobility.
JR Keller
I love it. I'm really curious, when you implemented this, did you get any pushback from managers?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. They're like, I need 24 months, 18 months is not is not long enough and I need 90 days to transition them on. And I think we need to put levels on that. Like it's only for people below, you know, director level you can't like that's not what you would do.
JR Keller
What did you tell them?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
We said, no. I said no. We actually need to make sure that we have a free market for talent. This benefits everybody. We would much rather keep the talent in-house than have them leave and leave the organization altogether.
JR Keller
I think it's really great too. I'm wondering if you noticed this, but I think part of what it does is it it incentivizes this more off the stick incentive. It incentivizes managers to be better managers, because if you're a really good manager, people will still stick around. Right? They might delay a promotion for six months or a year to spend more time working with somebody that they really like and really appreciate and feel that they can learn from.
JR Keller
And so you kind of tell managers if your people are leaving and you don't want them to give them a provide a value proposition for them to be.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Better.
JR Keller
Be better.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
I mean, the thing is, people don't leave organizations. They leave their managers. Right. To your point about how managers have an outsized impact on their career, they have an outsized impact on the entire employee experience because that's the person who influences their day to day work the most. So to the extent that a manager can be nurturing and supportive and transparent and their biggest cheerleader, that will make all the difference, even if there are other factors that are less than optimal.
JR Keller
And I'll tell you that when doing interviews for this, this sponsorship and hoarding paper, and we did about 50 interviews with companies around the world, we had a surprising number of managers who admitted to hoarding talent, but we asked them to reflect on their approach to developing talent, and it was almost all from role models. So it was the managers that we then saw in the data had a really great track record of getting their employees promoted, had had somebody who had done that for them before, and the managers who were more likely to hold on to their talent, they weren't necessarily nefarious, right.
JR Keller
But they nobody had told them or shown them how to proactively advocate for their employees.
Chris Wofford
What happens to the employee journey when they're not chosen for a job, you know, kind of dealing with rejection, right. What kind of dynamic are we dealing with there and how do managers respond to that?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Well, it's like the seven stages of grief, right? Like there's anger. And then eventually you hope to get them to a place of acceptance and growth. Right. So it's the challenge is how do you make those experiences learning ones versus completely negative and demotivating and that's a skill that managers need to acquire, is how to give feedback in a way that really is constructive.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
I mean, it's probably the biggest leadership challenge, especially for new people, managers, how to have difficult conversations and how to craft really difficult news in a way that hits people, that keeps them dignified and feels respected, but also drives home the learning.
Chris Wofford
And keeps them focused on a path forward. Yes, right. This is an opportunity is a learning opportunity.
JR Keller
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I looked at rejection sort of empirically because it's been fascinating because I have spent the better part of the last decade.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
His first three papers were rejected.
JR Keller
So there was so much this spirit, so much rejection.
Chris Wofford
Yes. No.
JR Keller
That's a hazard of the occupation. But but I've spent like preaching the gospel of markets company open up markets, post jobs, let people apply. But like a side effect is you are asking your people to potentially subject themselves to rejection because you're only generally going to hire one person for a given job. And so how do we think about rejection in a more and it's never going to feel good to be rejected.
JR Keller
It's always better to.
Chris Wofford
Reject the rejected, not in a vacuum, but among their.
JR Keller
Peers. Yeah, and I think like one of the one of the big insights we found was that employees who got interviewed by hiring manager but were rejected were twice as likely to stick around than in place. You apply but only talked to a recruiter or never talked to anybody. You might think, that's super obvious. But it was really interesting to dig into why, and it was because, one, it was a signal that they were valued that the manager was going to take the time to actually talk with.
JR Keller
But it was also super informational. So they got to learn more about the job, the manager got to learn about them, and then often those conversations involved, you're not the perfect candidate for this role or there might be somebody a little better fit. But here's how you can better yourself or better position yourself in the future. And so if we can think about the application process itself as a learning experience and just say, listen, you can apply for jobs and get rejected, but we want you to do it.
JR Keller
We want you to think about this as a way to learn. The way to do that is to make sure we train managers to give good feedback. Then I think we can take a lot of that sting out.
Chris Wofford
And resiliency is a desirable quality as well is voice. It is, you know, ultimately. So how much decisions about whether to hire externally or and how to how to hire internally affect diversity within an organization? How do we think about that?
Angela Cheng-Cimini
I think it depends on sort of what's your baseline, right? If your organization's not diverse already, then continuing to only promote from within can perpetuate that imbalance. So there are times then strategically it is important to inject blood for lots of reasons, right? New thinking, but also just to yeah, diversify your organization. So sometimes external beyond optics.
Chris Wofford
Yeah.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
That's right. Right. In a meaningful way.
Chris Wofford
How about what.
JR Keller
Do you think I that's a perfect answer right? Like you really have to think about what you look like now and what you want to look like in the future, but it's also about, you know, when we think about diversity, certainly demographics comes to mind and is super important. The part of the reason folks who really sort of hammer the drum for demographic diversity is because that comes along with different perspectives and different knowledge and different skills and different backgrounds.
JR Keller
And so we just think about diversity along a broader spectrum, right? I mean, bringing in people who know. Jackie Beatty, Right. That's a diverse skill set coming into the organization.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
That we didn't know we needed six months ago.
Chris Wofford
That's right.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
And we quit and we couldn't we couldn't have grown it in-house. That's right.
JR Keller
Exactly.
Chris Wofford
So it sounds like we've just teased the sequel to today's conversation. JR Keller, Angela Cheng-Cimini thank you for coming in today.
Angela Cheng-Cimini
Thanks for having us.
JR Keller
Thank you.
Chris Wofford
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss new episodes as they're released. Wherever you listen to podcasts to learn more about best practices in internal talent management, check out the episode notes for more information on Professor JR Keller's Human Resources and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Online certificate programs. Thank you for listening.