What If Karl Marx Were The Director of Recruiting?

My partner in crime at Fistful of Talent, Tim Tolan, had an excellent post yesterday entitled Looking For Talent?  Always Look Outside Your Company.  It is part of a point/counter point discussion between Tim and the mighty Kris Dunn for a Workforce Management series.  I have many thoughts on this topic so I decided to share some of them with you here. 

I am going to come right out and say it.  I think organizations with documented process or policy that require them to look at and/or hire internal talent absent a side by side comparison with external talent are practicing a form of talent management/recruiting communism.  Let me explain.

When I was the Director of Talent Acquisition at Quicken Loans we had a saying within the organization that went something like "What got us where we are will not get us where we want to go."  The point is that what you have done and the work you have done up until this point will not necessarily breed success in the future.  Great organizations need to constantly evolve and get better.  Rarely can this type of performance improvement evolution happen without an influx of talent from outside the walls of the organization.  Constant promotion from within is a form of corporate "inbreeding" that is dangerous and often leads to innovation stagnation, acceptance of norms, inefficiency and general acceptance of mediocre performance. 

More after the jump!

Tim has already made many of the same points I would have made (probably more eloquently as well) but to be more dramatic (imagine that) I equate this practice of only looking "within" to a form of communism.  It is the Karl Marx philosophy of hiring and talent management if Karl Marx were a Director of HR or Talent Acquisition.  On a quick side not, notice that Karl Marx has his hand in his jacket, Napoleon style, in the picture I used.  That is because he has heart burn over how bad his ideas are not because everyone of his time posed for pictures in this odd manner.

Back to the topic.  This type of internal focus in hiring virtually ensures that the very best don't get the job, only the very best within a specific organization.  What if the very best within a specific organization isn't really that good?  What if the very best within an organization isn't good enough to take the team, division or company where they need to go in order to get better performance, greater efficiency etc.?  Employing this approach virtually ensures that the very best don't get the job because the very best might not even get consideration.  There is no competition for the open position.  Lack of competition, as we have learned with communism, doesn't work out so well. 

This is why so many organizations with an intense union presence are literally bleeding out because of inefficiency, lack of performance and lowering of quality in order to feed a union mentality of entitlement.  Nothing comes closer to communism in America than unions.  Under the guise of looking out for the "common laborer", unions have successfully created an environment where good old American business values such as pay for performance, promotion based on performance alone and making business decisions that are right for the customer and/or business are secondary to tenure based pay, next in line gets the promotion and demanding concession after concession regardless of the impact on the customer or business.  Many unions have succeeded in creating their Utopian world of workplace equality by ensuring that all are equally likely to eventually lose their jobs because unions are bleeding companies to death.  No where is this more vividly portrayed than in the promotion, job posting and internal transfer policies that unionized companies are forced to follow.  Policies that almost assure an organization will not put the best talent in the open position but, rather, the next talent in the open position.

What is more frustrating and perplexing is that non-unionized companies have built career opportunity, job positing, promotion and talent acquisition strategies on these same principles.  This effectively ensures a low performing organization by preventing competition in the recruiting and selection process. 

When it comes time to fill an open position it is right and equitable to look at internal talent.  It is also right, equitable, in the best interest of the business, in the best interest of the shareholders and in the best interest of American corporate health that companies create a situation where internal talent competes with and is evaluated against external talent. 

I think this will ensure that the very best person gets the job.  What a novel concept!