Why is the company willing to recruit "airborne troops" instead of internal promotion?

As an old employee, you may be annoyed, but from the perspective of the enterprise, there are indeed reasonable factors to do so. Matthew Bidwell, a professor of management at Wharton College, said that compared with employees who were promoted internally, the performance of external recruiters in the same position was generally poor in the first two years. When they enjoyed a higher salary (about 18% to 20%), they were more likely to quit and jump ship. However, if these people can survive two years, their promotion speed will far exceed that of employees promoted internally. "There is no single way to select candidates for most positions. Sometimes they choose to recruit from outside, and sometimes they will be promoted from within the company. " Bidwell said, "I really want to know how these two different ways will affect the job performance of the final entrants." He wrote his research results into a paper entitled "Pay more and get less: the influence of external employment and internal mobility". Bidwell said that this issue is very important to the organization. After all, this is related to the composition of their employees, especially senior employees: should they be "trained from within" or recruited from the labor market? He said: "My research results show that the cost of external recruitment is relatively high, but the benefits of choosing internal staff mobility are higher." In the past three decades, enterprises have abandoned the lifelong employment system and started to seek for experienced workers by relying on the external labor market. Bidwell's research is carried out against the background of great increase in employee mobility. Through the comparative analysis of job performance and salary, Bidwell revealed the characteristics of internal promotion and external recruitment, so that employees can better understand that "different decisions in their careers will lead to different results," he wrote in the paper. Generally speaking, external recruiters need a two-year "running-in period" to adapt to new positions. Bidwell said that this is because external recruiters need time to adapt to the new environment, mainly because they need to establish new contacts during this time. Although the salaries of external recruiters are much higher than those of employees promoted internally, "this is by no means a good thing," he said. "In the first few years, many people will choose to resign. This is mostly because they have not developed the necessary work skills, which makes their work performance far below expectations. At this time, someone will choose to resign automatically. " During the research, Bidwell noticed the obvious difference between external recruitment and internal promotion. "People recruited from outside (compared with employees promoted from inside) are more educated and experienced. This should be the reason why they can get a high salary. " He said, "If you don't know much about the employees you want to hire, you will tend to rely only on those things that can be observed from the outside." Including the education level and experience level on the resume, which Bidwell called "external observation attribute". However, he pointed out that "education level and experience level are not indicators to measure whether a person is qualified for a certain position." This can explain why the salaries of employees hired from outside are so much higher than those promoted from inside for the same position. If these people have excellent resumes and it is recognized that it is easy to find new jobs, they can naturally ask for higher salaries. At the same time, high salary can also be regarded as compensation. After all, a new position means facing an unfamiliar working environment. Bidwell said that he has been confirmed by many hiring managers, and usually needs to pay an extra salary of 10% to 20% to recruit people from jobs with "security and sense of accomplishment". He admits that this research result may make employees in the organization feel frustrated. "Although sad, job-hopping will indeed enhance personal value and raise wages. The question now is, should internal employees ask for a raise by threatening to resign? " Bidwell said, for example, in academia, a new job offer is a necessary condition for raising wages. "But in some organizations, it is likely to be regarded as disloyal and lead to dismissal." Bidwell suggested, "If you like your job, work honestly. Although you may think that job-hopping will not affect your work performance, in fact, it usually takes a long time for your work level to recover. You know, job skills are not so easy to take away. " Obviously, Bidwell is more supportive of internal promotion. "Although the salary will be less, you can work more freely, which means that your job is more secure." During the research, Bidwell analyzed the data of the personnel department of American investment banks from 2003 to 2009. Records show that the number of people recruited externally here is twice that of those promoted internally. In his paper, he wrote that investment banks are "an excellent example of studying internal and external personnel mobility, because the performance of investment banks depends more on the skills of employees, thus enhancing the importance of personnel selection." In addition, investment bank employees "have a well-known reputation for job-hopping, which makes investment banks have regular external recruitment behavior at all levels." At the same time, investment banks also have an important feature, that is, promotion is often closely related to individual's previous work performance. Promotion often means promotion of titles, such as vice president or supervisor, but the job content often changes little. In fact, as Bidwell pointed out, in many organizations, promotion does not mean a change in job content. On the contrary, the increase of responsibilities is gradually evolving, and promotion is only recognition of previous work. When considering the future needs of employees, should organizations still consider the source of high-end employees: recruitment or promotion? Bidwell found that in different organizations, different positions have similar patterns. After analyzing the professional investors (traders, salesmen, research analysts and investment bankers) and logistics executives of an investment bank, he found that the relationship between salary and performance is consistent. In addition, the survey results of another investment bank and a publishing company are the same, both of which are "external recruiters have higher salaries, but their performance is poor." He concluded that the job content after promotion is very important. Different from other promotion situations, if the promoted employee is transferred to a new team, the promoted employee will often not do better than the external recruiter. Bidwell believes that "good work standards are closely related to the work content. Therefore, even if there are personnel changes within the organization, excessive changes in the work content will affect the work. " Bidwell said that overall, since the early 1980s, external recruitment has become more and more frequent, especially for large organizations and senior positions with high experience requirements. "In the past, small companies often recruited externally, while large companies tended to promote internally. But now the situation has changed, and large companies have begun to give up internal employee mobility and begin to adopt external recruitment. " "Enterprises should understand that it is not easy to introduce employees with excellent resumes." Bidwell said, "At the same time, enterprises sometimes choose to recruit from abroad because of the concept that' foreign monks can recite scriptures'. When they see a great resume, managers often ignore the shortcomings of external recruitment and shout, "That's settled." On the other hand, "promoting employees from within means that the company must have a long-term vision and know how many talents it needs in the future." Bidwell said. This requires managers to ensure that insiders know that they have such promotion opportunities. "Internal promotion naturally has its own costs. For example, internal promotion means spending money to train employees, rather than letting others help you train employees like external recruitment. " He added that the non-competition clause also complicates the flow of employees between enterprises in a competitive state. "Although this is not obvious in investment banks, the non-competition clause is becoming more and more important. This is especially true for positions with exclusive work skills. " Bidwell pointed out in his paper that the difference between external recruitment and internal promotion is based on the following two factors: the first is the skills brought by employees in their previous posts, and the second is the mutual understanding between enterprises and employees. He said that external recruiters need to learn a lot. Even if it requires "high-level general skills, such as securities research, scientific research and surgery ... although these jobs depend on the' knowledge and skills' of a single worker, they also need extensive coordination with others in the organization." Internally promoted employees have a deep understanding of the enterprise. "They may have acquired skills suitable for the enterprise, which is what newly recruited employees lack." Bidwell wrote in the paper. Bidwell's paper also mentioned that the two-way choice between the company and external employees is a very difficult process. This is because the information held by both parties is extremely incomplete. The company wants to evaluate the real strength of employees, and employees want to know whether this position is in line with their hobbies and abilities. "At the same time, companies need to know more about internal employees. For example, an enterprise can not only know the employees' previous work performance, but also know whether employees have been able to adapt to their own organizational system. Bidwell said that his paper "shows the value of maintaining internal staff turnover. Because internal employee mobility allows companies to find employees with lower salary requirements but better performance. When describing in detail the obvious advantages of internal promotion over external recruitment, he added: "These findings help to explain why the internal labor market of enterprises began to recover under the pressure of increased employee mobility. "