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Internal Recruitment and its Legal Issues

Recruitment is one of the anchor components of organizational staffing, which Heneman, Judge, and Mueller-Kammeyer (2015) define as the process of acquiring, deploying, and retaining an organization’s skilled employees to improve its effectiveness and performance. The recruitment process involves identifying vacancies or new job positions and using different strategies or methods to attract applicants. The process can be external or internal depending on the needed skills, knowledge, abilities, and other characteristics as well as the qualifications of the existing employees. unlike external recruiting where an organization seeks to fill an open job position from the outside, internal recruiting focuses on filling the vacancy using the existing labor resources within the organization.

Each of these approaches requires legal considerations and compliance with employment laws to avoid lawsuits that may arise during the recruitment and selection process such as discrimination on the basis of race, age, gender, and other factors. With this in mind, the current paper discusses some of the internal recruiting methods that an HR director should use to promote an existing employee to fill a newly created job position within the organization. The advantages and disadvantages of using this recruitment approach are also highlighted before going on to discuss the legal regulations and equal employment laws applicable to the internal recruiting process.     

System of Recruitment the HR should Use

Heneman, Judge, and Mueller-Kammeyer (2015) remind us that “an effective recruitment process is the cornerstone of an effective staffing system” (207). This is because effective and successful recruitment attracts high-quality and skilled applicants, meaning that high-tier applicants will be available for selection and final hiring, thereby enabling the organization to easily attain its staffing goals. By definition, recruitment is the process of attracting potential future employees who possess the knowledge, skills, and other characteristics (KSAOs) that will help to improve the organization’s performance and accelerate the attainment of its strategic goals. Internal recruitment is, therefore, the process of identifying and attracting the existing workforce and using them to vacancies in the organization rather than looking for people from outside.

Heneman, Judge, and Mueller-Kammeyer (2015) identify three main internal recruitment systems; namely, open, closed, and hybrid recruitment systems. A closed recruitment system is where employees are not informed about the job vacancies or promotions; instead, the information is available to only the contacted employees, those in charge of placement, and line managers in departments where the vacancies exist. On the other hand, employees are made aware of open positions under the recruitment system. This awareness is created through job postings. Lastly, the hybrid system combines the features of both the open and closed recruitment systems. By virtue of the given scenario, the HR director should employ the hybrid system of internal recruitment.

The HR director should consider using the hybrid system of internal recruiting system to fill the newly created job position for various reasons. First, by using the hybrid systems, the HR director will enjoy the benefits of both the open and closed recruitment systems while using one system to offset the limitations of the other. Second, the hybrid system allows for the identification of qualified candidates in advance, thereby speeding up the recruiting process. Furthermore, the hybrid system, unlike the other two systems make it possible to conduct a thorough search of candidates who have the needed skills, and this is crucial for uncovering hidden talents. Lastly, and most importantly, employing the hybrid system will help the HR director to provide employees with equal opportunities to apply for the vacancy, and thus avoid the issues of disparate treatment in promotion and job transfer. However, the director should be wary of the time-consuming and costly nature of this recruitment system.

Under the hybrid system of internal recruitment, the first method or approach that the HR director should use is internal job posting (OSOIAN & Zaharie, 2014). According to Keller (2018), an internal job posting defines a market-based process that involves an HR manager posting a vacancy internally – on the organization’s bulletin boards, office memoranda, company newsletter, or employees’ email and inviting interested applicants to apply. Internal job postings are a great way of encouraging the current employees to learn about internal promotional opportunities and new positions and respond to the vacancies for they have the interest and needed skills (SHRM, 2020). As Keller (2018) establish further, for instance, job posting improves the quality of hires by increasing the pool of applicants at the recruiting stage.

Another internal recruiting method at the HR director’s disposal is employee nominations and referrals. Here, the director should ask line managers, supervisors, or even other employees (peers) to nominate or refer high performing and skilled employees as internal candidates for the job position (Breaugh, 2012). While this approach seems a bit informal, it is one of the most cost-effective and less time-consuming ways of getting qualified candidates, especially when the managers are familiar with the employee's work and reputation in another department. However, only managers who have integrity and morals and adhere strongly to the organization’s values of impartiality should be consulted since the nominations approach is infamous for breeding favoritism and unlawful discrimination (SHRM, 2020).

Lastly, the HR director should use the KSAOs (knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics) database or profile to identify a suitable employee for the new position (Ahsan, Ho & Khan, 2013). As Heneman, Judge, and Mueller-Kammeyer (2015) points out, today’s organizations often use human resource information systems (HRISs) and talent management systems to monitor and to track employee performance, career development, as well as the utilization of skills and abilities, and other personnel-related issues. As such, most employees have a KSAOs profile that HR managers can use to identify individuals for job transfer or promotion.

Advantages and Disadvantages of HR Recruitment

HR recruitment, just like other forms of recruitment has various advantages and disadvantages as discussed below.

Advantages

The first advantage of internal recruiting is bordered around the amount of hiring and onboarding time. Today’s growing competition for talents means that finding an individual with the right skills and persuading him/her to join an organization as an employee can be quite challenging and more time-consuming. Recruiting internally ensures that the time taken to find and engage candidates, as well as onboard them after selection is greatly reduced. The second advantage of internal recruiting, as highlighted by DeVaro (2020), is that it has a low downside risk given that uncertainty about the productivity of new hires is very minimal. Employees who are hired internally tend to understand the company culture and norms, and more importantly, they are aware of their performance expectations (Paycor, 2020). Moreover, HR recruitment spurs the acquisitions and development of specialized skins and knowledge since employees will anticipate longer careers with the organization. Internal recruitment also creates incentives at lower levels that will encourage junior employees to demonstrate high performance so that they can be considered for new vacancies left by employees who ascended to higher job levels. Lastly, internal recruitment reduces recruitment costs since it does not require advertising of vacancies nor training of new hires.         

Disadvantages

Despite its many advantages, recruiting internally comes with several drawbacks, the first being that it limits “the infusion of new knowledge, ideas, and skills” into the organization (DeVaro, 2020 p. 1). Indeed, internal recruiting creates conditions where the organization is unable to hire a diverse workforce with fresh and innovative ideas. Second, hiring internally has the potential to breed resentment among some employees, especially those who feel that there was disparate treatment in the hiring process. This may cause the employees to start looking for employment opportunities elsewhere. Additionally, the approach limits the size of the applicant pool, which means that the organization may miss out on talented and skilled individuals. Moreover, internal hiring, through promotion or transfer, creates new vacancies that call for additional recruitment, selection, onboarding, and training costs (DeVaro, 2020).         

Legal Regulations and Equal Employment Opportunity Laws

Both the external and internal recruitment approaches are governed by legal regulations and equal employment laws that seek to discourage HR managers and their organizations from discrimination and disparate treatment of prospective employees during the recruitment process.  Providing equal employment opportunities, therefore, allows an organization to develop a diverse workforce (Stoilkovska, Ilieva & Gjakovski, 2015) while, at the same time, complying with legal regulations and laws. Heneman, Judge, and Mueller-Kammeyer (2015) identify six major provisions under the federal equal employment opportunity (EEO) and Affirmative Action (laws). They are: 1) Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts (1964, 1978, 1991); 2) Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967); 3) Americans With Disabilities Act (1990, 2008); 4) Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (2008); 5) Rehabilitation Act (1973); and 6) Executive Order 11246 (1965, 1967, 2014). Although these laws differ in terms of the protected individuals or classes such as sex, disability, age, and nationality, they both focus on ensuring that all potential employees have equal access to job openings and that they are treated with impartiality during recruitment and selection.

Internal recruitment is hinged on the upward mobility of employees within the organization, which can be a source of disparate treatment and disparate impact in terms of unequal access to promotion opportunities among certain employee groups, especially people with disabilities, women, and minorities among other groups. As Heneman, Judge, and Mueller-Kammeyer (2015) advise, these legal issues can be overcome by implementing affirmative-action oriented programs to help increase the representation of vulnerable and protected groups (women, bisexuals, and gender non-conforming people, minorities, and those living with physical disabilities) across all levels within the organization (Breaugh, 2009).

Another measure to avoid legal issues when recruiting internally is to keep a database and profiles of the employees’ skills and KSAOs so they can be used to justify the promotion of the selected employees in case resentment and objection arises. Moreover, the organization should engage in succession planning practices and communicate to all employees the skills, competencies, and abilities needed for future promotions so that the employees can participate in additional training and education to meet the promotion requirements (Compton, 2009). Lastly, the organization should eliminate practices that present barriers to protected groups in their job mobility paths by ensuring that all employees within the organization have equal access to tools for optimum job performance and continuous learning.

Legal Considerations of Internal and External Recruiting

Legal considerations in the recruitment process, whether internal or external, are bordered around the issues of favoritism, discrimination, and disparate treatment. Employers should judge candidates based on their skills, experience, knowledge, competence, and other objective criteria and not on personal factors such as sex, religion, age, physical disability, sexual orientation, nationality/ethnicity, and race (Breaugh, 2009) as this would amount to discrimination which is prohibited under the Equality Act of 2010 and other EEO laws.