Rejected internal job applicants are twice as likely to quit

Isn't that the Fortune 10?

This is extremely common. A company can't allow for nepotism or favoritism, so it requires a public posting for any open position. Qualified external applicants see the posting and apply. The managers hire the internal candidate they wanted to hire anyway. It's all a huge waste of everyone's time. I'd bet that a large percentage of job postings are insincere in this way.

I agree that doing so can be a mistake, but at times it's necessary, and likely less of a risk than promoting internally.

I suspect that these aren't the folks companies want to keep in the first place.

On average of course, there will be exceptions. Not trying to imply anything about you, OP.

Also, do you trust your manager? Just because they checked some boxes in some system doesn’t mean they are actually advocating for you.

It sounds like you probably need to understand the process better.

No just that but the interviews are a good chance to learn what skills and attitudes are valued by the places that are hiring the positions that you are interested in.

Years ago I applied for a C-level position at a company I worked for, somewhat to my surprise sailed through the interview process, and was officially offered the job.

A few days later the CEO stopped by for a chat and told me they weren't going to offer me the job. He seemed surprised when I told him I'd already been offered it despite that everyone involved in the process had met and agreed to offer it to me.

Cue shenanigans, partly self-inflicted, because I really wanted that job.

Turns out they had someone else in mind they wanted to give it to (I'm not sure at what point they'd realised this) so they added some additional selections stages that were basically engineered to ensure I'd fail so they could give the job to this other person.

With hindsight I should have quit there and then, and sued them for constructive dismissal.

I didn't do that because a relative with whom I was close was terminally ill and I didn't think it was a good time to act in a way that felt rash with everything around that going on. I was also concerned about having to deal with a potentially protracted legal case in the midst of all this, and how I'd keep paying my mortgage with no income.

Still, this was a mistake. I should have done it. I'll explain why below.

I ended up staying for about another year, although I'd obviously made the decision that I was going to leave at the first opportunity. For part of that year I worked for the person they'd given the job to. It was shit. For the rest of it I was in a different team, where I actually worked pretty hard, but that work was targeted (by me) at skilling myself up to enable myself to find a new position. I'm not saying it didn't benefit the company, but any such benefit was very much a secondary objective.

As you can imagine, this was by far and away the most humiliating episode of my career, and I came away from it extremely disillusioned, and with my confidence in tatters. Even all these years later, typing this now and in some limited form reliving the experience, I find myself surprised by how angry I still feel. The one positive is that it's had a profound impact on the way I choose to deal with people, and obviously particularly when hiring. A key lesson is know what you're looking for and be clear about that.

After I left - with nothing else lined up - I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I ended up contracting for about two and a half years, just because the money was decent and I just couldn't tolerate the thought of being somebody's employee. I got over it eventually.

I'm now a CTO at a growing company that's maybe 30% larger than the company where I was originally offered/de-offered a C-level job was at that time, and have been since the beginning of 2020. For political reasons my role in 2019 was an EVP position, but you could squint and say I've been doing this role for getting on three years.

Nonetheless, that episode, and particularly the decision I made not to quit and sue, probably cost me 5 - 7 years in my career. That's time and money I won't get back. And it was, I think, that decision (or perhaps lack of a decision) more than anything else that led to the loss of confidence and disillusionment, because what I was mostly disillusioned with was myself. If I'd acted I think I would have felt quite differently because, even though the situation would still have been deeply unpleasant, showing that agency would have made it easier for me to own the outcome.

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying that if you're not progressing the way you want to with your current company, don't mess around: find a role with a different company where you can progress the way you want to.

I think sometimes management is their own worst enemy in not taking a chance on their own people.

If a certain position is filled from an internal transfer, that transfer leaves a new open position. Eventually, you need a hire a new person. A chain of internal transfers beforehand is just extra people to train and more paperwork to deal with.

>* Hint: They don’t.

But they also might. Sort of...

You don't usually hire someone with the expectation that they will come up with a magic bullet solution - Usually you already know the silver bullet and are actually hiring someone who can sledgehammer it in while existing internal teams are reluctant.

Sometimes its easier for an external person to do this, rather than an internal person.

I'm a supply chain consultant and regularly get brought in to implement change where there are often change-reluctant internal teams, which are held back by legitimate reasons why x won't work, even though x needs to be made to work. I say sledgehammer only to mean that sometimes you have to be very steadfast in the fact that the change is happening, and that all the reasons people give you for it not working are problems that you/them need to solve rather than reasons it won't go ahead.

Despite what I said above, personally I think companies just need the right mix of internal and external candidates - too many internal and the company gets too held back in 'the way things are done, and have always been done'. Too many external and there is a total lack of organisational memory and nobody knows how to do anything.

It's worth doing right as most work is, but managers want fast solutions and typically are not incentivized to take their time.

Most devs, if HN is any indication, believe that jumping ship every 1-2 years is the best way to move up. But if you have senior devs who were juniors at the same company just a few years ago, you'll probably be more likely to stick around.

Unless one is an outright wizard at what they do, which is rare, what should make anyone think a company needs to keep them around? We are all replaceable. Companies should only hire internally if it makes sense. The fact is that 99% of us are just adequate in the eyes of our employers, and if they play their cards right, they have more to gain by hiring new team members than ones they know they aren't that enamored with.

If you move the internal person and hire someone to backfill, you have two people who need to be trained and who might not be a good fit at for the particular job.

I've spent most of my career in consulting organizations, and sometimes our clients have been orgs with a high percentage of "lifer" employees for whatever reason. (Often, this is because the employer is one of only a few good, white-collar employers in an area, which is its own cost.)

Orgs with insufficient new blood get stuck. They think of the Company Way as the only way, and policy begins to replace thought pretty much across the board.

One example, early in my career -- before I went to consulting, even -- was a place I worked for 2 years in the mid-90s. They were a 100% VAX shop much later than the rest of the industry, and were known to pretty much hire new technical people only right of of college. As a result, they ended up technically isolated from the mainstream.

Once they realized that they were spending WAY more on homegrown solutions than they would on a commercial DB, it was really too late -- new grads didn't want to work on a dying platform, and the veterans had no experience working on anything other than the homegrown stuff.

I wonder how much the present work-from-home situation has insulated people from this, as people can't just be invited to check out a company when the company is remote.

- Two of those applications were ignored. No response at all from the recruiter.

- Another jumped on a call to say the requirements were "dumbed-down" to get more diverse applicants to apply. Women tend not to apply for jobs they think they are unqualified for.

- Last was pulled as I was told I had to go through the promotion process.

I was shut down right when I inquired, and told that the company wanted some outside talent. Wow okay, even though my performance reviews were dazzling. So they hired two guys who had zero familiarity with the industry and zero familiarity with our stack. One had to be fired because he was insane and did nothing all day but try to be some motivational speaker in a technical role. I liked the other guy, but it was another person I had to explain stuff to when he had preconceived notions that were incorrect. He was cool, but HR/execs really screwed up the positioning.

There was a later time when they were going to have a leadership vacuum. I decided it best to quit at that time because they were going to ask me to help by advancing _only_ when they needed me as a backup. However, when I asked them to advance, they just said not interested. So too bad, had a better offer to advance elsewhere and their interest in me was clear.

This is totally it, putting a team member through rejection without giving them a growth plan and telling them you want them to succeed or grow basically gives them a map to the door

Consider the fact that a company is a pyramid, and that there really isn't any material opportunity for advancement for 90% of the staff.

That's basically an implication of the structure of the org itself, which should be fairly discernible to any participant.

So the rational posture for most staffers at every level is going to have to by default: "There are limited opportunities for advancement". Once step further and you realize that advancement it probably going to be fairly competitive, though not always meritocratic, it is what it is.

So the implication that 'it's hard to advance' is not something the company should really need to tell employees, it's something mature workers should really understand and internalize.

That said - there's a lot of room for advancement in high growth companies, so look for those if you're keen on that.

> Second, a rejected candidate’s likelihood of leaving was cut in half if they were passed over in favor of an internal candidate, rather than an external candidate.

The sage wisdom from the ILM professor was essentially to avoid pissing off rejected candidates by not interviewing them, as interviewing is a signal that the employees are qualified.

That’s pretty fucked up, when you think about what that means from a practical perspective. You’re either interviewing people who are unqualified (some of whom will get positions due to circumstances) or turn selection of candidates over to a star chamber.

Sounds great for morale. Lol.

I think in many cases people think they deserve a promotion based on seniority—but they don’t show signs of going above-and-beyond. Simply working somewhere longer does NOT warrant any merit increase in my mind. Doing extra things to help the company in ways beyond ones role deserves merit increase/promotion.

I’d argue more times than not, folks consider time-spent on the job a sole factor in guaranteeing that promotion.

For instance, someone new might join a company and have a skill set above and beyond folks who have 2+ years of seniority. That new employee might demonstrate exceeding merit in two months of employment—and in my mind, the new hire should get the promotion.

Granted, that’s comparing two employees who work at a company already. I suppose in the interview process it would be based on fact (existing employee) versus word of reference and how well the new hire sells their abilities.

And that’s why I’m not in management because I’d rather not have to deal with making those decisions!

1. Am I learning? Improving Skills? Gaining Insight? Working with Interesting People/Problems?

2. Am I getting paid enough for the value I provide?

The best positions have both, but it's not always that simple. I can forgo 2 for a time if 1 is really happening because in the end, the skills will eventually lead to better prospects. I also can do a boring not as growing job if it pays well. I think people get stuck though after all their learning and skill building and the friction of finding something new stops them. (I know from experience, its a lot of effort to switch things up)

If you can't allow people that, you would at least need to make sure the message back to them didn't come off the wrong way.

If the company has lower standards for internal hires, and tells managers to expect and encourage internal mobility among their reports, and gives raises and salary transparency (i.e. you're a level 2 engineer, this is the range that we pay level 2 engineers, and you're in the Xth percentile), internal mobility looks awesome.

While there are some inherent advantages (location and benefits consistency), you're right that many companies try to price those advantages in or worse, and it's often a bad deal. It's up to the company not to do that

In those cases you can move as fast as the "rising star" and not deal with the massive chaos/uncertainty of switching jobs.

Every new job is a sea of uncertainty: you don't know underlying power structures, and for techies, your technical ability is strongly constrained by the intricacies/NIH nature of build systems, frameworks used, libraries, and existing code bases.

guess we'll never know

I believe based on the rest of the study that people who are attempting to transfer internally care about the team/company/work area but want the mobility and if you hire external candidates they don't believe they will have a chance at other roles either (which they perceive will be biased toward external candidates as well)

The study itself shows that if the company hires someone else from within the organization, the effect disappears. So at very least from the data one can't immediately conclude what you assumed.

> First, internal candidates who were rejected after interviewing with the hiring manager were half as likely to exit as those rejected earlier in the process.

Tech interviews have such a high degree of random in them.

The only way an internal applicant increases the likelihood of me showing someone the door is if I find out that a manager in my org has inappropriately shown the door to an employee demonstrating ambition.

Eg. If we have 5 internal aplocants for one position, 4 people are going to be rejected. And we certainly did not have contact with their previous team. Actualoy their managee might not even know they were trying to transfer.

If the opposite result was stated here one could have easily come up with many "intuitive" explanations.