What Is Internal Mobility and Why Is It Important?
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What Is Internal Mobility and Why Is It Important?

By Admin 4 min read

Internal mobility is key to retention, productivity and happy employees, but only 33% of companies have strong internal mobility policies. Sourcing candidates from your company can solve many HR and hiring issues—improving your employer brand and helping you attract top talent—and provide you with a loyal workforce and future leaders. Putting an internal mobility strategy in place isn’t difficult either (especially with the help of Pypa HR and Pypa Hire). Let’s look at internal mobility and why you need it:

What Is Internal Mobility?

Internal mobility is hiring from within your organization. There are two types of internal mobility:

  • Vertical growth: An employee moves from a junior position to a more senior one (i.e., promoted), usually within the same department.
  • Lateral growth: An employee moves of roughly the same seniority position in a different team or department. 

Both these types of internal mobility are very useful for your company and should be taken into consideration. 

Why Is Internal Mobility So Important?

Why is internal mobility so vitally important for your company? Let’s look at some of the most pressing reasons:

Retention

Issues with retention can be solved with internal mobility because internal mobility does a great job of addressing employee grievances. But why is internal mobility so helpful for retention?

  • Employees want to be promoted: Lack of opportunities for promotion and career advancement is a big reason to resign. 41% percent of employees stay longer at their companies when there’s a clear internal mobility strategy in place. 
  • Employees passed over for promotion quit: Passing over internal candidates for promotion without proper consideration is dangerous. Employees are often bitter at being overlooked and sometimes even quit. 
  • Fewer layoffs: If you can move people between departments, you don’t have to lay off staff when their teams or departments aren’t busy (for example, if the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting your sales).

Retention is a big issue due to the Great Resignation, which means that internal mobility is more important than ever.

Employee Engagement

Internal mobility is a priceless tool for employee engagement. It’s not just the prospect of promotion and a raise—employees want career development opportunities, training, upskilling, and to try out different things. Employee engagement also increases:

Productivity

The possibility of promotion encourages employees to work hard, knowing they will be rewarded. But it’s not just vertical internal mobility that has this effect; lateral internal mobility also leads to increased productivity because employees who change departments bring different ways of thinking about problems and with these, creativity and innovation. Additionally, workers who upskill and have access to training are also more skilled, leading, again, to increased productivity. And we all know that increased productivity means increased ROI.   

Employees Already Know Your Company

Your employees, unlike outside hires, already know your company inside out, which not only means they don’t need onboarding (saving you time and money), but they will have valuable insights and informed ideas about how your company can grow. And employees who are already familiar with your company can be groomed into something even more valuable—leaders.  

Allows You To Mentor Your Future Leaders

Employees who have been promoted up the company as part of your internal mobility strategy are your future leaders. They’re loyal and knowledgeable about your company. As your company’s current leadership, you can mentor them and ensure your company stays in strong hands.

Cheaper

Hiring from within is cheaper for several reasons: 

  • Lower hiring costs: it’s free to advertise within your company, and if you already have qualified candidates in your team, you don’t have to spend time and money advertising on job boards. 
  • You know what you’re getting: You know your employees and their work ethic because you’ve worked with them, making them a safer hire (and less risk) than someone who you’ve only met once or twice.
  • Onboarding: You don’t have to worry about onboarding an existing employee who is already familiar with your company’s works and (presumably) has all the equipment they need.

Employer Brand

Internal mobility can boost your employer’s brand. This is especially true for your employees, for whom internal mobility is definitely a plus, but also for candidates. A strong internal mobility policy will attract top talent to your company. If you advertise it properly, internal mobility can become essential to your employer brand.

How Do You Do Internal Mobility? 

Now that you know why you need internal mobility, let’s look at how you can put an internal mobility strategy into place:

Make Employees Aware of New Opportunities

One of the most important parts of encouraging internal mobility is advertising jobs within your company. Advertise jobs wherever you communicate with your employees (such as the community section in Pypa HR) and announce that you’re hiring at meetings. 

Encourage your employees to apply for open positions. You may need to talk to managers about the benefits of internal mobility, as some will be unwilling to give up their best workers. 

Give Your Employees a Good Candidate Experience

As mentioned above, employees will not be happy if they are unfairly treated as internal candidates. This means ensuring that all your external and internal candidates are treated fairly is crucial.

To ensure your internal candidates have a good candidate experience, interview them the same way as all your other candidates, and, if they don’t get the job, give them feedback on why. You can also:

Offer Training

Offer training and development so that employees can move up through your company. Internal mobility aside, training is key to employee engagement and will increase your productivity. Moreover, training is easy to schedule with human resources management software like Pypa HR.

Have Clear Career Paths

Talk with your employees about options for advancement, or better yet, come up with clear career paths for all your employees and candidates (and make sure they know their options). 

Internal mobility—hiring within your organization—is crucial to employee retention and engagement, ROI and future leadership. By taking simple steps like offering training and advertising positions, you can make the most of internal mobility and come out ahead of competitors who are not making effort. Need help with HR or recruiting? Check out Pypa HR and Pypa Hire today!

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By Admin 4 min read

Originally written 9 Feb, 2023 . Updated on 9 Feb, 2023

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