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Guide to internal promotions | How to plan & prioritize for the best fit

When there’s a new leadership position to fill, it’s tempting to want to hire externally.

Hiring internally can create another vacancy to fill or even stoke fears of favoritism. Plus, external hires can bring the skills your organization may lack for the position.

However, promoting from within the company can be the difference between fostering a motivated, loyal workforce and facing increased turnover and disengagement. 

Developing an internal promotions plan allows you to take a strategic approach to employee career development goals and proactively recognize growth opportunities. Having an internal promotion model in place also helps you identify and outline roles and responsibilities and find the best fit. 

In this article, you’ll read about:

• What an internal promotion is 
• The value of internal promotions

Promoting internally vs. hiring externally

• A six-step internal promotions development plan

🚀 An easy, equitable promotion process doesn’t have to be out of reach  ‍Leapsome’s suite of tools empowers you to make people decisions fairly, effectively, and transparently. Check out the product in a 5-minute self-serve tour. 👉 Take a self-serve tour

What is an internal promotion?

An internal promotion happens when an internal candidate is promoted to a new position — instead of the organization hiring an external candidate. Another interpretation of the term internal promotion is when an employee acquires the necessary skills to reach the next level of their professional journey. 

These promotions generally encompass:

• Changes in responsibilities 
• A new job title
• A salary increment or pay increase 
• More specialized tasks

People ops professionals and leaders typically rely on factors like performance and 360° reviews , experience levels, skills, and accomplishments to execute successful internal promotions.

⭐ Looking for more tips on carrying out successful employee promotions? Check out our comprehensive guide to employee promotions .

The advantages of internal promotion

Internal promotions demonstrate your investment in employee development and recognize your people’s hard work. By hiring internally, you show that your organization provides growth opportunities and has a fair and transparent promotion policy . Gaining respect is only one of the advantages of internal promotion — and there’s data to support all of them.

To see how different organizations have successfully applied these principles, check out these examples of effective employee development plans .

Increased retention

Promoting internally can help increase worker retention. Tracy Cauley, HR Manager at Vem Medical found that their organization retained internally promoted team members 15% more than other employees. 

“By promoting excessive-acting personnel to management positions, we showcased our commitment to career increase and development,” Cauley noted. ‍

Higher engagement during training

Have you ever seen a stagnating team member suddenly decide to upskill after they’ve parted ways with the company? Internal promotions also benefit employee training as they provide people with clear goals.

It’s a way to ensure that team members continue to develop within your organization rather than grow after they leave. When employees know that there is a chance of a promotion on the other side of upskilling, they’re more likely to want to complete modules and coaching sessions and put their learnings into practice.

As an example, Vem Medical not only provided transparent guidelines for promotions, but also offered development programs and continuous development opportunities that aligned with those promotions. Consequently, they saw a 25% increase in current employees applying for new roles internally. 

“​​From an effectiveness standpoint, objective, transparent, and inclusive promotion practices continuously yield impressive results in employee engagement and retention. When employees understand what is expected of them and how the evaluation process works, they’re more motivated to improve their performance and aspire towards growth opportunities within the company.” ‍ — Jessica Bane, Operations Director of Go Promotional

Reduced turnover

An interview with Gartner showed that 55% of employees expect a promotion within two years. Aligning promotions with these career development expectations boosts job satisfaction and keeps team members with your organization for longer.

However, it’s not only turnover from promoted employees that’s affected — the direct reports of promoted team members tend to stay longer, too. 

Anna Williams, HR Manager at Digital Silk , shared an example with us where she promoted an internal designer to a leadership role. “Thanks to our transparent promotions plan, he felt encouraged to communicate his career aspirations,” she said. “We then evaluated him based on his performance, 360° feedback, and potential. Impressively, upon his promotion, we observed a marked increase in team productivity, lower turnover within his team, and a morale boost.”

This helps build a healthy workplace that fosters employee satisfaction, development , engagement, and enablement.

“In companies that exclusively hire from the outside, employees might feel that the only way for them to [grow] (…) is to switch companies. But when you promote from within, employees will feel that their hard work is paying off, giving them a reason to stay.” ‍ — Bill Harrison, CEO of ComplianceBridge

💪 Empower managers to make internal promotion decisions. ‍ Leapsome lets you build an equitable and scalable promotion process to motivate your employees and help them grow. ‍ 👉 Learn more  

6-step internal promotions development plan

Internal promotion development plans increase transparency within your organization and outline the steps employees must take to achieve promotions.

Additionally, promotion development plans enable you to be more proactive about your promotion decisions by encouraging managers and reports to continuously think about their professional growth. ‍

1. Determine what you need

To define what you need from your internal hires and what skills you’re looking for, you first need to get clear on your company’s current status. Ask yourself:

• Is our management team equipped to support current employees? If your leaders don’t have the capacity or skills to mentor new hires and help them get the hang of their new roles, you’d be setting them up for failure. Setting up employee onboarding guides helps increase performance and gives new employees the support they need to succeed. Additionally, management needs to have the skills to hold useful career development conversations and create a plan for their reports.
• Are our employees engaged and satisfied with their positions? Conduct regular pulse and engagement surveys to understand your people’s engagement levels and whether or not they’re satisfied with their current career paths. If not, it might be time for an internal promotion, a shift in responsibilities and compensation, or a 1:1 check-in to find out more about the problem. ‍
• Can we benefit from a fresh perspective? Sometimes, certain problems can only be solved with a fresh pair of eyes. If that’s the case for your company, an external hire could be a great solution.
• Does our company have an established development framework ? Where your employees are on their development and learning path gives you a clear overview of their current skill set and who’s due for a promotion.

💡 Support your managers’ conversations with our career progression framework template

2. Put together a job description with all the necessary skills

A clear job description guides you in your promotion process, helps you find the right candidate, and manages expectations. Assess the skills and experience levels of existing employees in the same or similar roles to help you narrow down what you’re looking for.

Additionally, if you’re planning to communicate the open position company-wide, you’ll use this job description to announce the new opportunity. Include details like:

• Skills and qualifications
• Role objectives ‍

3. Establish your promotion criteria

Objective promotion criteria will help you narrow down your internal candidates and find the best fit more easily. That’s because you can use these assessment metrics to guide your decision-making process. 

Suppose you’re looking for a candidate that has excellent communication skills. In that case, you’ll know to mainly consider employees who have consistently received positive feedback from their managers and peers in this area. 

Other criteria to consider include:

• Achievements
• Seniority or tenure 
• Working style 
• Professional goals 
• Growth potential 
• Rapport with peers 
• Willingness to learn
• Alignment with company values

💡 Remember: While considering achievements is important, don’t forget to look at “failures” — how a person faces a problem, what they learn from it, and how they apply those lessons are all equally important.

4. Be transparent about promotion decisions

Transparency is crucial to creating a healthy workplace — especially when it comes to promotion decisions. One of the most meaningful ways to avoid a toxic work culture and demonstrate your commitment to transparency is to openly communicate how management handles promotions within your organization.

 Some questions you can answer for your people include:

• Is this an open or closed promotion?
• Who can apply for this position?
• Why has this position become available? 
• What data will inform your final promotion decision?
• What are the criteria for this promotion?

Shutting the red curtains on these decisions can lead to staff feeling confused at best — and overlooked at worst. Additionally, being open about internal promotions and development paths shows other employees that they’ll have the same chances for advancing their careers in the future. ‍

5. Communicate the promotion decision with employees

The timely announcement of employee promotions is great for transparency and allows for a company-wide celebration of your people — boosting morale and fostering a sense of community.

Your all-hands meetings or company newsletter are great places to make these announcements. Alternatively, consider your company’s Slack or Microsoft Teams channels. ‍

6. Have employee engagement & development frameworks in place

Robust employee development plans and development frameworks help employees remain engaged , even if they don’t have the necessary skills to qualify for a particular position. 

Some steps you can take in your training and engagement process include:

• Creating an employee engagement action plan to improve employee experience and keep your finger on the pulse of your people’s engagement and satisfaction levels. Your survey results can then guide your development initiatives. ‍
• ‍ Arranging regular 1:1 meetings with employees to discuss their personal and professional goals. ‍ ‍
• Creating a personalized career progression framework that illustrates the competencies an employee needs to develop before taking on a new role. ‍ ‍
• Keeping the conversation going, especially with unsuccessful candidates who might feel overlooked. This helps make your and your employee’s arguments clearer and keeps them motivated and engaged.

💡 Remember: Promotions aren’t the only way to reward employees who consistently go above and beyond. A performance bonus is a great way to acknowledge the value and hard work of employees who don’t yet qualify for a promotion.

7. Follow up

Promotions aren’t one-and-done tasks. Make sure to have a streamlined onboarding process planned — including the tasks needed to ensure a seamless handover — so the transition is smooth for everybody.

Additionally, check in with your employees regularly through 1:1s and team meetings to ensure they have the resources they need to succeed. You can also assign them a mentor or buddy to support them and show them the ropes so they can confidently grow into their new role.

📚 Developing internally? A manager shouldn’t have to figure out how to develop their team on their own. Use our free employee development plan template to put your team on the right path to growth.

Promoting internally is a great way to retain and nurture talent and strengthen your company’s brand and culture. However, without promotion policies that ensure fairness and invest in learning and development (L&D), it can lead to unhealthy competition and favoritism. Let’s look at some of the benefits and drawbacks of internal promotions in more detail. ‍

Promoting internally

Promoting internally is an effective way to cut recruitment costs and invest in employee development , but it can also lead to challenging workplace situations. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach. ‍

Internal promotion benefits

• Saves money — By significantly shortening the hiring process, human resources departments can reduce the costs associated with advertising open positions and interviewing and sourcing candidates.
• Reduces training time and speeds up the onboarding process — Your internal candidates are already familiar with your organization’s processes and systems, significantly cutting down on the time and money you have to invest in their training.
• Boosts retention rates — Providing opportunities for employee growth shows people that they don’t need to leave the company to further their careers.
• Improves team motivation and morale — Current team members will be more motivated when they see hard work being rewarded at your company.
• Ensures culture fit — Your existing employees already know your company culture, which eliminates the risk of a position being filled by someone who isn’t a culture fit.

“Managing expectations and preserving team dynamics after a promotion are common challenges. We prioritize having honest conversations, provide helpful criticism, and give all staff members the chance to grow professionally to address these. In the end, internal promotions foster talent while reaffirming our dedication to staff development, increasing engagement, and reducing turnover rates .” ‍ — Sebastian Petrosi, HR Manager of How to Watch

Internal promotion drawbacks

• Can lead to challenging situations — If it isn’t handled well, an internal promotion could cause unhealthy competition and resentment between team members.
• Limits fresh perspectives — Promoting from within can mean organizations remain stuck in their ways. That’s because internal candidates don’t bring new perspectives into the mix like external hires do.
• Creates another open position — When one of your existing employees moves up in your company, you make a gap in your current workforce. ‍

Hiring externally

Hiring a candidate externally can bring new, unexpected ideas into your organization, but it can also lower employee morale and retention. Let’s look at the pros and cons of welcoming someone new into your company. ‍

External hiring benefits

• Opens up a larger talent pool — You can assess more candidates if you look outside your organization. In addition, if you’re a remote company or use a hybrid work model, you can consider candidates from more diverse backgrounds and geographical locations.
• Brings diversity of thought and perspective — A fresh pair of eyes can, sometimes, identify areas of improvement more easily and drive positive change.

“It’s important to freshen up the team every now and then, too, to bring in fresh ideas and new perspectives. While a close-knit team is certainly a valuable asset for any company to have, it can create an insular, somewhat stale atmosphere if you’re not careful.” ‍ — Peter Strahan, Founder & CEO of Lantech

External hiring drawbacks

• Doesn’t promote internal employee development — Your people want to grow as professionals over time and need their title, compensation, and responsibilities to reflect that. Hiring an external candidate to fill an open position doesn’t support those kinds of employee ambitions and goals.
• Lowers team member morale — Internal talent can feel overlooked, which has a negative impact on their satisfaction and engagement levels.
• Increases turnover rate — If employees don’t see future growth opportunities in your organization, they’re much more likely to leave your company to look for a better position elsewhere. ‍

Nurture promotions within your company with Leapsome

A lot goes into promoting from within your company. Your organization’s promotion processes need to be equitable, fair, and transparent while making it easy to find the right candidates and support internal growth. Internal promotions require a lot of forethought. That’s where Leapsome comes in. 

Our promotion management tool helps you automate your company’s promotion and compensation processes and create scalable, unbiased, and consistent workflows.

‍ It also lets you collaborate with key stakeholders and integrates with our tools for personalized career development paths, performance reviews, team alignment, and more. Because putting your people first and achieving business goals can go hand in hand. ‍

🚀 Build scalable and equitable promotion processes with Leapsome Leapsome’s promotion and compensation tools empower managers and leaders to make more data-informed decisions and increase employee trust. ‍ 👉 Book a demo

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A guide to developing an internal promotion plan for your company

Why look for outside talent when you have great employees within your company who know the culture, the business, etc.? Internal promotion is just that: selecting people who already work in the organisation, who have the skills and knowledge required to take on new responsibilities. 

This type of initiative has a highly positive impact on the company: cost savings, improved motivation and engagement.

Here we explain exactly what it's all about. if you would like to know more about employee training and development read here . 

What is internal promotion?

Internal promotion is a selection method where the organisation's existing employees are the candidates. So, rather than searching for external talent, it means promoting employees who have shown themselves to be capable of taking on new responsibilities. 

In general, factors such as experience, training and skills demonstrated by candidates to date are taken into account in this process. Performance evaluations are often used to identify internal talent and ascertain who deserves to move up the ladder. 

Internal promotion policies are employed both in private companies as well as public authorities . 

The advantages of internal promotion

Introducing internal promotion procedures has huge advantages, both for the company and its employees.

Reduced r ecruitment time

Internal candidates are already part of the company, so it takes less time to find and “convince them”, meaning no more drawn out recruitment processes.

What's more, evaluating professionals who are part of the company is much simpler:

• Their track record is accessible.
• They are comfortable with the company culture.
• They probably don’t need to be interviewed by the team leader. 

All this reduces the time involved at each stage of the recruitment process, and, consequently, the time-to-hire. 

It also makes the onboarding process quicker and simpler

Every professional requires some time to find their feet in a new role , but internal hires are usually more efficient in this sense.  The employee:

• Already knows how the company and its internal policies work.
• Is acquainted with their new team members.
• May already know the nature and responsibilities of their new position.

Lower recruitment costs

Internal recruitment is much cheaper than external as it does not require:

• Advertising the vacancy on job portals. It's much easier to let candidates know about opportunities via email or a poster on the notice board.
• Devoting time to sift through CVs or review databases , as simply asking team leaders or reviewing the last performance evaluations will be enough to find suitable profiles.

Bolster staff engagement

Internal promotion in the company sends the message that employees are valued and worth investing in. It gives employees the opportunity to advance their careers . Allowing them to access other positions that may interest them is good for boosting motivation and engagement.  This helps to construct a culture of trust and retain talent. 

Types of internal promotions in organisations

Within companies, there can be different types of internal promotions . We normally distinguish between three: 

Horizontal promotion

Horizontal internal promotion is when a worker moves to a higher grade in a different department in the company. 

Vertical promotion

This is probably the most well-known type of internal promotion and involves the worker moving to a more senior role than they held to date. It usually involves more responsibility and, accordingly, a pay rise. 

Temporary promotion

There are also cases in which an employee r eceives a temporary promotion to cover a colleague's absence or maternity/paternity leave . Therefore, once this period is over, the employee will return to their previous position. 

The importance of internal promotion

There’s nothing like internal promotion in an organisation to inspire and motivate employees. It is a valuable tool which can be used to achieve different objectives:

• A survey carried out by the consultancy Great Place to Work, published in the media , revealed that when people believe internal promotions are managed effectively, they are twice as likely to put in extra effort at work.
• Offering employees a challenge and goal to strive towards allows them to constantly improve, learn and develop .
• A clear internal promotion policy reduces staff turnover by half .

These are just some examples that demonstrate the importance of internal promotion. External candidates may seem enticing, but it has been shown that acquiring internal talent yields greater advantages for the company .

5 steps to implementing an internal development plan

Internal selection procedures are not so different from external ones. The main difference lies in the preparatory work, in which the recruiter needs to meticulously analyse the current workforce to find candidates. 

1. Define the company’s needs

The first step of internal promotion is to set out the company’s requirements and, with that in mind, the areas needing improvement or the positions that need to be covered.  At this point it is crucial to craft a good job description for the vacancy and describe all the essential professional skills and abilities that the ideal candidate will possess.

2. Establish staff selection criteria 

When looking for internal talent in the company, we should establish a range of objective criteria to shortlist possible candidates for the vacancy. It is important to take into account:

• Achievements or results obtained.
• Organisational capacity.

We should also pay attention to the following factors:

• The employee’s availability and interest.
• Empathy and relationship with colleagues.
• Career path outside the company.

3. Analyse the company's HR

The time has come to analyse the internal talent in search of possible candidates. You can use your HR software to go over each employee’s record , review their last evaluations, etc. This will help you progress faster and more confidently. 

It is important that candidate selection is based on the factors mentioned above to ensure it remains valid and useful. Otherwise, if we are led by other criteria, it’s possible we could miss the perfect candidate. 

Another option is to advertise the vacancies and allow all staff to apply for them. You can do this by sending an email or attaching a poster to the notice board.

4. Speak to the candidates

Contact the shortlisted candidates and tell them the news. It is important to provide all the details about the position they are applying for, including what their new responsibilities would be and the financial terms.  In the same way, you should explain to them how the selection process will work if they decide to go ahead.  Offer them 48 hours to decide if they want to participate or not. 

5. Conduct the final evaluation

The moment has come to decide which of the candidates will advance within the company. Design a selection process based on an objective evaluation of their skills and abilities for the position. It is also helpful to carry out interviews with other members of the organisation to compare results.  With all this information, you can make your final decision and choose the most suitable candidate.

The main trends in internal promotion

• In economic crises, when budgets are squeezed, internal promotion is an interesting solution to avoid incurring new recruitment costs.
• More and more companies are using HR software with Artificial Intelligence to carry out internal selection procedures.
• There are also predictive analytics programs emerging that are capable of “guessing” which employee will offer better results in a certain role. 

Empowering your employees: A blueprint for internal promotion planning

Deciding whether to hire external candidates or promote from within is a question every recruiter faces from time to time. Promoting from within the company often helps create a healthier work culture and a more successful organization.

However, in every business, some amount of employee turnover is expected. So one of the ways to reduce employee turnover is to have a strong internal promotion plan. This makes your employees feel more valued and appreciated.

But how do you decide who to promote? How do you evaluate team members’ skills and performance in the most accurate and objective way possible?

Suppose your criteria for promotion are based on compliance with business ethics or deep expertise in a specific area. Either way, your approach to evaluating employees’ skills is critical to the success of your internal promotion initiatives – and, ultimately, of your organization. 

In this article, we’ll explain why an internal promotion plan might be just what you need to empower your employees. We’ll also show you how to set up the right internal promotion scheme to bolster employee motivation.

Table of contents

What is an internal promotion, what is the importance of internal promotion, types of internal promotions in organizations, 6 steps to develop an internal promotion plan, empower your employees and help them grow with testgorilla.

Internal promotion is a selection process where you promote existing employees of your organization to new positions. Instead of searching for talent outside your organization, you get to promote team members who have shown they can handle new responsibilities.

Most times, internal performance evaluations help you identify top internal talent. As such, it positively impacts your company enabling you to save money and improve employee motivation and engagement.

Internal promotion tops the list of ways to inspire and motivate your employees. If you are also looking to create a healthy work environment that fosters employee growth, satisfaction, and enablement, internal promotion can help you achieve that.

Promoting internally is a great way to nurture talent and strengthen your company’s brand and culture. Also, it shows that your company has a fair and transparent promotion policy.

In 2022, global spending on hiring external employees was at $25 bn , according to Statista’s Research Department. Hence, as the expenses of getting external recruits continue to rise, internal promotions will give you the financial leverage your business needs to thrive.

To properly practice and maximize internal promotions, you need to know the types of internal promotions available in organizations today. Consider the following:

1. Horizontal promotion

Horizontal promotion entails a promotion where an employee remains on the same level within your organization but moves to a different department. In essence, this kind of internal promotion is lateral and comes with a departmental change.

Here, the responsibilities may not increase but will change due to the change of department. Compensations and rewards for talent are usually less than in vertical promotions.

2. Vertical promotion

Vertical internal promotions are certainly the most popular kind of internal promotion. Here, the employee moves to a more senior role within the same department. Like most promotions, vertical promotions come with a pay raise and more responsibilities.

To be promoted, employees need to show they have gained sufficient experience and skills for the new role. 

3. Temporary promotion

In this case, the promotion of an employee is only meant to be a temporary solution during the absence of another team member. It could result from maternity or paternity leave, staff shortages, or prolonged sick leaves, for example. 

Since this promotion is just for a period of time, the employee will return to their previous position once their coworker is back. 

The internal recruitment process is similar to a standard external selection process. However, as a recruiter or hiring manager, you must take note of the following to ensure you select the right employee for promotion.

1. Identify your present organizational needs 

The first step in creating a successful internal promotion plan is understanding your company’s needs. For example, what kind of talent or skills will the role require? Do you have employees who could comfortably fill these roles?

Answering these questions would enable you to clarify your needs and develop the right blueprint.

2. Create a job description with the necessary skills

Next, you’ll need to create a good job description for the vacancy. On it, you should indicate the essential professional skills, abilities, and expertise the ideal candidate should possess.

A clear job description helps you narrow down what you are looking for and manage your expectations. This way, you’ll be able to spend more time focusing on the best potential candidates rather than on individuals who do not even have the required skills.

3. Establish staff promotion criteria

Sound promotion criteria allow you to create metrics that guide your decision-making process.

For example, let’s say you want a candidate with fantastic leadership and management skills . You should look out for employees who consistently receive excellent feedback from their managers and peers in this field – and you can even use skills tests to confirm their observations. 

The key thing to focus on is the consistency with which the employees receive positive feedback. This way, you’ll be sure they’ll deliver consistent quality after the promotion. 

4. Be transparent about the promotion process

One thing all healthy workplaces have in common is that they are transparent about their procedures and selection criteria, especially when it comes to recruitment and promotions. 

So, to avoid creating a toxic work culture and environment, you must always be transparent.

Showing your commitment to being unbiased and objective by giving clear information on how your HR team and leadership handles internal promotions reassures employees of the possibilities to advance their careers in the future and helps instill trust and confidence.

5. Use your HR tech to gain deeper insights on your employees

A survey by Gartner shows that 58% of companies rely on HR technologies for recruitment. But did you know that you could use your HR tech stack for internal promotions, too? 

You can use your HR software to review each employee’s record and analyze talent better, which will enable you to move faster through the internal recruitment process. 

Candidate selection should be based on performance, skills, and growth potential to ensure you promote the right person. HR technologies enable you to have full visibility into the performance of your employees. 

6. Conduct a final examination or interview

After assessing candidates’ skills and narrowing down your selection to the most promising ones, conduct a final interview with each one of them to see who’s the best fit.

You can use a skills test before the interview to verify the skill level of all contenders for the role. Using the information you gather from such tests would put you in a better position to choose the perfect fit among your employees, as it enables you to be unbiased and objective – which, when you personally know applicants, can be a challenge.

Every employee’s desire is to progress in their career. Internal promotions facilitate this and give you room to discover skilled talent among your existing staff. 

With our detailed step-by-step guide above, you’ll have no problem drafting the blueprint for your internal promotion plan and evaluate your employees’ skills – which is best done with the help of the right skills assessment platform.

TestGorilla is one of the best skills testing platforms out there and it has a plethora of resources and features to help you assess your employees and promote them internally. 

To create the perfect internal promotion scheme in your company, select up to five tests to include in an assessment and ask your employees to take it to see who’s the perfect fit. 

Get started for free to enhance the career growth of your employees.

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Developing a Robust Internal Promotion Plan

Internal promotion is more than just filling vacant positions, as a point of convenience. Rather, internal promotion is an investment in nurturing talent and therefore bolstering organizational growth plans. Essentially, internal promotion identifies and focuses on the career advancement of the existing workforce, in line with your company's vision.

By looking first at the internal skill base, your company can show a solid commitment to employee growth and readiness to retain, fostering a culture of opportunity. This methodology heightens morale and motivation, promoting loyalty and an overall sense of well-being throughout your organization.

Practically speaking, internal promotion plans help to create a strong talent pipeline, securing continuity in leadership, skill maintenance, company culture, and inherent knowledge. In this blog, we explore the pillars of developing an internal promotion plan. As we focus on the nuances of developing such, we highlight its significance in propelling commercial success and enabling team members to reach their full potential.

Building the foundation of a robust internal promotion plan

Developing a strong internal promotion plan demands a dedication to transparency. Objectively defined requirements for promotions promise equity and negate conflict and confusion. Building trust with employees is paramount, as is doing away with any feeling of favoritism. In developing clear guidelines, companies create a foundation where employees know the requirements for promotion and can pragmatically work in the direction of achieving them.

Also, pinpointing future leaders is important for company growth. Ongoing assessments and progression plans play a pivotal role in spotting team members with the potential to shine in management.

With tools like performance evaluations and leadership assessments, you can select high-potential employees and nurture them with targeted development plans. By investing in the talent you already have your company can consolidate its leadership options and build a culture of continuous improvement.

The pillars of effective internal mobility

Effective internal mobility strategies are needed to develop talent. Development paths should be tailored to each individual, offering the required skills to take on new challenges. This element of personalization should be relevant to an employee's career goals and strategy for promotion.

Targeted training must be designed according to each employee’s goals.

Mentorship programs can play a significant role in an employee’s journey toward promotion. Of course, the ability to provide mentoring programs depends on the availability of coaches and mentors with relevant knowledge. If feasible, mentorship can offer support through valuable guidance, confirmation, experience, and advice.

Value should be placed on continuous improvement and learning. Generating an environment where employees take pride in wanting to know more is a crucial pillar, enabling employees to achieve career advancement, as well as making sure they do well in their new roles.

In promoting an ethos of growth, and providing the tools for ongoing development, your employees will feel stimulated and confident in the support they receive.

Implementing your internal promotion strategy

Implementing an effective internal promotion strategy demands an approach that prioritizes clear communication, involving an ongoing assessment and feedback loop, as well as the celebration of milestones achieved. Transparent communication about promotion opportunities is crucial in generating trust and mitigating conflict, jealousy, and other resentment. Effective communication is:

• Uncomplicated
• Informative

Assessments and feedback are important in not only making informed promotion decisions but also in refining promotion strategies. Periodic performance evaluations and formal/informal feedback give valuable insights into employees' strengths, and weaknesses, and therefore an estimation of where the employee currently stands against promotion. Conducting objective assessments helps to ensure equity throughout the promotion process. Even if the feedback offered might be negative, employees would rather know where they stand, than be left in the dark.

All achievements should be recognized by the company, whether they are steps towards promotion, initiatives taken, or the accomplishment of a promotion itself. This consistent celebration reinforces a culture of progression and internal mobility. The celebration of promotion should not be confined to the team members and management. All promotions should be publicly announced and celebrated widely. This approach motivates other team members to strive for their goals.

In the notion of efficiency and continuous improvement, all the feedback gathered can be scrutinized to refine the company’s overall promotion strategies.

Elevating your team through strategic internal promotion

A well-considered internal promotion strategy encourages employee engagement and promises organizational growth down the line. In committing internal talent, through transparency, personalized training, and attention to continuous improvement, your company can develop a culture of progression.

Have a look at our resources to find out how Thomas can support your business with talent management development objectives. We have developed solutions for every step of the talent management process, including promotion plans.

Download our free guide 7 Steps to Evolve Your Talent Culture to learn more about retaining talent and internal promotion.

Or if you’d prefer to talk through your options get in touch with us today.

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Building a Solid Internal Business Plan: Expert Guidance and Insights

An internal business plan is like a compass for your organization, guiding your team towards common goals and strategies. In this guide, we’ll break down each component of an internal business plan in simpler terms and share expert tips to help you create a plan that keeps your team on the same page.

Key Highlights

• An internal business plan is a roadmap that guides your team towards common goals and strategies.
• It helps align your team, make better decisions, and achieve success.
• Create a clear and concise plan with SMART goals, action steps, and communication strategies.

What is Internal Business Plan?

A business plan acts as a blueprint for your organization’s future, detailing its goals, strategies, and financial projections. An internal business plan takes this concept further, focusing specifically on aligning your team and ensuring everyone understands their roles and responsibilities in achieving your shared vision.

Differences Between Internal and External Business Plans:

Here’s a breakdown of the key differences between internal and external business plans:

What's the Purpose of an Internal Business Plan?

Think of an internal business plan as your team’s GPS for success. It’s all about getting everyone on the same page and heading toward the same goals. Unlike the fancy plans you show off to investors, this one is all about making sure your team knows where you’re headed and how to get there together.

Here's Why It Matters:

• Teamwork and Focus: It spells out what your gang is trying to achieve and gives everyone a clear focus on the mission.
• Smarter Choices: Helps everyone make better decisions by laying out the game plan. It's like having a playbook for your business moves.
• Using Resources Wisely: Shows where the money, people, and tech need to go, making sure everything's used just right.
• Making Everyone Accountable: Sets goals and ways to measure success so that everyone's accountable for their part.
• Happy Teams: When everyone knows what they're doing and why, it makes the team feel united and pumped up.
• Spotting Trouble Early: It's like having a radar for problems, so you can plan ahead and steer clear of disasters.

An internal business plan isn’t just a document—it’s your team’s guidebook, making sure everyone’s rowing in the same direction and making the right moves to reach those big goals.

Benefits of an Internal Business Plan:

• Improved Communication and Alignment: Creates a shared understanding of goals, strategies, and responsibilities within the organization.
• Enhanced Decision-Making: Provides a data-driven foundation for strategic decision-making and resource allocation.
• Increased Accountability and Performance: Establishes key performance indicators (KPIs) and promotes accountability for achieving goals.
• Boosted Team Morale and Motivation: A clear roadmap fosters a sense of purpose and direction for team members.
• Improved Risk Management: Identifies potential challenges and facilitates the development of contingency plans.

Overall, an internal business plan serves as a vital tool for achieving organizational goals, fostering collaboration, and ensuring long-term success.

Checkout our free sample business plans now!

1. mission and vision: your organization's purpose (around 200 words).

Your mission defines why your organization exists, while your vision outlines what you aim to achieve in the future. Keep these statements clear and inspiring, as they set the direction for your entire team.

• Expert Tip 1: "Your mission and vision should motivate and unite your team. They're your organization's North Star." - Maria Rodriguez, Management Consultant.

2. Organizational Goals: What You Want to Achieve (Around 250 words)

Lay out your short-term and long-term goals. Make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). These goals give your team a sense of purpose and direction.

• Expert Tip 2: "Goals should be like checkpoints in a race - clear and achievable. They keep your team focused and motivated." - Mark Thompson, Organizational Strategist.

3. SWOT Analysis: Understanding Your Internal Landscape (Around 300 words)

Conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This helps your team understand your current position and potential challenges.

• Expert Tip 3: "SWOT analysis is like a diagnostic checkup. It helps you know where you're strong and where you need to improve." - Emily Turner, Business Analyst.

4. Key Strategies: How You'll Achieve Your Goals (Around 250 words)

Outline the strategies your organization will use to achieve its goals. These could include expanding to new markets, improving processes, or developing new products or services.

• Expert Tip 4: "Your strategies should align with your goals. They're the 'how' behind your 'what'." - David Reynolds, Strategy Consultant.

5. Action Plans: Who Does What (Around 350 words)

Break your strategies down into actionable steps. Assign responsibilities to specific team members, set deadlines, and define key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress.

• Expert Tip 5: "Action plans turn ideas into actions. They make your strategies a reality." - Laura Martinez, Project Manager.

6. Budget and Resources: What You Need (Around 250 words)

Detail the budget and resources required to execute your action plans. This includes finances, manpower, technology, and any other resources necessary for success.

• Expert Tip 6: "Budgets ensure you have the resources to implement your plans. They're like a financial roadmap." - Susan James, Financial Analyst.

7. Monitoring and Evaluation: Keeping Things on Track (Around 300 words)

Explain how you’ll monitor progress and evaluate the success of your action plans. Regular assessments help your team stay on course and make adjustments as needed.

• Expert Tip 7: "Monitoring and evaluation ensure you're headed in the right direction. It's about continuous improvement." - John Stevens, Management Expert.

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8. communication plan: keeping everyone informed (around 200 words).

Describe how you’ll communicate the plan to your team. Transparency and clear communication are crucial to ensure everyone understands their roles and responsibilities.

• Expert Tip 8: "A well-communicated plan fosters teamwork and alignment. It's the glue that holds your organization together." - Maria Rodriguez, Communication Specialist.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

While crafting and implementing your internal business plan, be mindful of these common pitfalls:

• 1. Lack of Clarity and Specificity: Vague goals and objectives lead to confusion and hinder progress. Ensure your plan outlines SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals with clear action steps.
• 2. Ignoring Internal Analysis: Neglecting a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) leaves you blind to internal challenges and untapped potential. Conduct a thorough assessment to gain a realistic understanding of your organization's capabilities.
• 3. Unrealistic Budgeting: Overestimating resources or underestimating costs can derail your plan. Develop a realistic budget based on accurate data and forecasts to avoid financial constraints.
• 4. Inadequate Communication: Failing to communicate the plan effectively to your team leads to misalignment and inefficiency. Foster open communication channels and ensure everyone understands their roles and responsibilities.
• 5. Rigid and Inflexible Approach: The business landscape is dynamic, so your plan should be adaptable. Be prepared to adjust your strategies and tactics as needed based on market changes, performance data, and feedback.

Tips to Overcome Challenges

• Seek feedback: Enlist the help of colleagues and stakeholders to review your plan and identify areas for improvement.
• Promote collaboration: Encourage open communication and brainstorming sessions to foster innovative ideas and solutions.
• Track progress regularly: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress and identify areas needing adjustments.
• Be proactive: Anticipate potential challenges and develop contingency plans to minimize disruptions.
• Embrace flexibility: Be prepared to adapt your plan as needed based on evolving circumstances.

Measuring Success

Effective metrics for internal business plan success.

• Goal Achievement: Track progress towards achieving your defined SMART goals.
• Financial Performance: Monitor key financial metrics like revenue, profitability, and cost-effectiveness.
• Operational Efficiency: Measure improvements in efficiency through process metrics like cycle time and error rates.
• Team Performance: Evaluate team effectiveness by tracking KPIs like productivity, engagement, and satisfaction.
• Market Share and Growth: Monitor your market share and growth rate to assess your competitive position and market penetration.

Interpreting Data and Making Data-Driven Decisions:

• Analyze trends and patterns: Identify trends and patterns emerging from your data to understand the underlying drivers of success or failure.
• Investigate root causes: Delve deeper into the root causes behind performance data to pinpoint areas for improvement.
• Test and experiment: Utilize A/B testing and other experimental methods to validate your assumptions and optimize your strategies.
• Communicate data insights: Share key data insights with your team to promote transparency and inform decision-making.
• Make data-driven decisions: Base your strategic decisions on evidence and insights gleaned from your data analysis.

By implementing these tips and practices, you can avoid common pitfalls and effectively measure the success of your internal business plan. Remember, a successful plan requires continuous monitoring, feedback, and adaptation to ensure it remains relevant and effective in driving your organization towards its goals. Ready to write an internal business plan but don’t know what to do? Explore WiseBusinessPlans’ professional business plan writers to get started today!

What Must an Entrepreneur Do after Creating a Business Plan?

With your internal business plan finalized, it’s time to shift gears and focus on its execution. This crucial phase requires action, dedication, and strategic implementation to transform your vision into reality. Here’s what you, as an entrepreneur, must do after creating an internal business plan:

1. Secure Funding

• Assess your financial needs: Review your budget and determine the funding required to execute your plan. Explore various funding options, including personal savings, loans, grants, and angel investors.
• Craft a compelling pitch: Develop a concise and persuasive pitch deck that highlights your vision, market potential, and financial projections to attract investors.
• Build relationships with potential investors: Network with individuals and organizations interested in your industry and build relationships that can pave the way for funding opportunities.

2. Assemble Your Team

• Identify key roles: Determine the skills and expertise needed to implement your plan effectively.
• Recruit talented individuals: Find passionate and qualified individuals who share your vision and values, and build a cohesive and motivated team.
• Delegate and empower: Assign tasks and responsibilities based on individual strengths, fostering ownership and accountability within your team.

3. Execute Your Strategies

• Break down your plan into action steps: Divide your strategies into manageable tasks with clear deadlines.
• Implement best practices: Utilize proven strategies and methodologies aligned with your industry and goals.
• Monitor progress and adapt: Regularly track progress against your goals, identify areas needing improvement, and adapt your strategies as needed.

4. Foster Communication and Collaboration

• Communicate openly and transparently: Keep your team informed of progress, challenges, and decisions.
• Encourage feedback and input: Create an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing ideas and concerns.
• Build trust and collaboration: Foster a collaborative culture that encourages teamwork and shared ownership of success.

5. Measure Performance and Analyze Data

• Track key performance indicators (KPIs): Identify specific metrics aligned with your goals and regularly track their progress.
• Analyze data and draw insights: Utilize data to identify trends, understand performance drivers, and make data-driven decisions.
• Continuously improve: Leverage data insights to identify areas for improvement and adapt your strategies to optimize performance.

By following these steps after crafting your internal business plan, leveraging a well-designed business plan template can further assist in effectively translating your vision into action, propelling your entrepreneurial journey towards success.

Hire our award-winning business plan writers now!

In summary, creating an internal business plan is about providing your team with a roadmap to success. By simplifying each section and focusing on clear communication, you’ll not only set your team on the right path but also promote unity and collaboration within your organization. Your internal business plan is your tool for achieving your mission and turning your vision into reality.

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8 Steps to Write a Useful Internal Business Plan

Noah Parsons

7 min. read

Updated July 29, 2024

One of the best uses for a business plan is as an internal management tool to help you run your business. Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to write a full business plan that you’d traditionally use to pursue funding or pitch to investors. 

Instead, you can stick with a simple internal business plan model that keeps your document lean and easy to communicate. 

• What is an internal business plan?

An internal business plan keeps your team in sync with your business strategy, sets financial goals and budgets, and helps you track business performance so you can manage your business better. It’s a document that can easily be distributed across multiple communications channels, encourages employee engagement, and leans into uncovering issues and competitive advantages for your business.

To simplify the planning process, I recommend using a growth planning method to create an internal business plan. This method focuses on creating simpler, shorter business plans that are designed to function as internal communications plans. 

Growth plans are useful tools for internal business planning because they’re shorter, easier to update, and focused on succinctly describing your business strategy and financial goals. Think of it as a more robust and expansive executive summary that is meant to be analyzed, updated, and referenced consistently. 

What is the difference between an internal and external business plan?

An internal business plan is a tool that is built to serve you and make your business easier to manage. It’s the most effective business plan for internal analysis and should be the focal point for regular strategy sessions. Internal business plans are also frequently used to quickly explore new business ideas to determine if they are viable. 

The audience for an internal business plan is typically your business partners and employees. It is usually not shared beyond the close circle of people who are involved in your business on a day-to-day basis. With the limited audience and the focus on business strategy and management, internal business plans are typically less formal. They don’t include much of what is included in an external business plan. 

External business plans, on the other hand, are used to present your business to people outside of your organization. They are typically part of the fundraising process and are used to communicate your business strategies and your team to lenders and investors. External business plans are also used when you are buying or selling a business.

Because of the focus on educating outsiders about your business, external business plans usually include more detailed information about the team behind the business, the business history, and milestones that have been achieved. The format is also more formal and typically a little longer than an internal business plan.

• What is the internal purpose of a business plan?

Within your business, an internal business plan is used to define your business strategy, define who your ideal customers are, outline a more detailed marketing plan, and set your revenue goals and expense budgets.

Business planning is often associated with fundraising and startups, but there’s a lot of value for existing businesses to create a simple internal business plan:

Define your business strategy

A solid business strategy is key to a successful business. Defining your strategy also helps you maintain focus as you grow. Opportunities are always presenting themselves and as a business owner, you need to know what your strategy is and determine if an opportunity fits with your strategy or not. 

There are also times when you may want to shift your strategy, but this should be done thoughtfully. With a defined business strategy, you’ll have the guidance you need to steer your business in the right direction.

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Bring everyone up to speed

Especially as your team grows, it’s important that everyone works towards the same goal. It can be easy for different people to have different visions of where your business is going. These different visions can make your business less efficient as people work towards disparate goals. 

A good internal business plan keeps everyone aligned and can encourage more consistent and valuable employee communication. In many ways, it should be the document that helps define your internal communications strategy and even your company culture. After all, if you have a clear vision that you can easily convey, the easier it will be to engage and grow your business.

Focus on forecasts and performance

One of the most important management tools at your disposal is a budget and forecast. An internal business plan should always include a forecast that sets revenue goals for your business as well as budgets to guide spending. These forecasts and budgets should be reviewed on a regular basis, at least monthly, and refined as you go based on how your business is performing.

• How to write an internal business plan

Internal business plans are simple and direct. Ditch the long paragraphs and lengthy explanations and instead focus on simple bulleted lists and short sentences. Remember, the plan is for you, so make it a tool that you’ll use and update on a regular basis. Long documents are rarely updated while simple, one-page business plans are easy to keep current and use.

Here’s what to include in your internal business plan:

1. Value proposition

This is a one-sentence summary of your business. What value do you provide and to whom do you provide it? You can use this section to share your mission statement – it’s a reminder to your team about the overarching purpose of your business.

2. The problem and your solution

It’s often easy to describe the products and services you offer. However, the most important part of this section is defining the problem that you solve for your customers. A strong definition of the problems you help your customers solve will keep you focused as you explore new revenue opportunities.

3. Target market and the competition

As important as defining your customers’ problems is to define who your target customers are. This helps ensure that marketing campaigns are focused and that your team knows who you are trying to reach. You should also track the alternatives that your customers might consider and why they might choose a competitor over you.

4. Sales channels and marketing activities

Your internal business plan should define how you sell your products and services and what marketing channels you’ll use to reach your customers. If you’re expanding into new markets, your internal business plan can help you guide that activity.

6. Financial projections

At the very least, you’ll want to forecast sales and set expense budgets to guide your team. Beyond that, cash flow forecasts provide crucial insights into if and when you should consider raising additional funding or opening a line of credit to support business growth. 

7. Milestones

Milestones define key goals and objectives for your team. This isn’t about setting day-to-day tasks but setting a few key goals for the upcoming months. You’ll keep your team focused on the most important objectives by setting milestones.

8. Your team

If your team isn’t growing, you can skip this section for internal business planning. But, if a key part of your business strategy is to hire and add important team members, identify your key team growth areas.

• Make use of your internal plan

Are you ready to write a business plan? Download our free one-page business plan template to build your own internal business plan. This framework will help you produce a simple plan that outlines your strategy and key milestones. If you find that a more detailed business plan is necessary, download our free traditional business plan template instead.

From there, build out your financial forecasts and budgets. Start with a sales forecast and expense budget so you can generate a complete profit & loss statement. Ideally, you should also create a cash flow forecast.

Now, it’s time to implement your plan. Start a regular plan review process with a monthly plan review meeting. Go over your strategy and compare your sales forecast and expense budget to your actual results.

During your monthly review, you can tweak your strategy and update your revenue goals to reflect what is actually happening in your business. You can also adjust expense budgets based on actual spending and changing revenue goals. If you find yourself needing a more robust tool to help with this analysis, you may want to check out LivePlan’s reporting and forecasting features .

The key to good internal planning is to keep it lightweight and nimble. A good internal plan is the tool you need to bring together smart strategic management and fiscal responsibility so you can grow your business. Still not convinced? Check out these key reasons why writing a business plan is worth your time .

Noah is the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan. He started his career at Yahoo! and then helped start the user review site Epinions.com. From there he started a software distribution business in the UK before coming to Palo Alto Software to run the marketing and product teams.

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How to Create Clear Paths for Internal Promotions and Advancement

If you want to retain top talent and keep them motivated, you have to give them a clear career path to follow..

One of the key considerations in making personnel decisions is whether to develop talent in-house or hire externally. A hallmark advantage of promoting from within is the employee's built-in organizational knowledge, encompassing culture, processes, relationships, and more. But these decisions should be based on merit, not convenience or onus, and are best made when a deliberate, long-term strategy is formed and then equitably applied.

That said, consider these best practices when creating paths for promotion and advancement within your organization.

Determine if and when this strategy is appropriate.

Establishing paths for advancement encourages dedication, increases retention, and improves morale, but this strategy doesn't necessarily work for every position--or every organization, for that matter. A company that is struggling or trying to break into a new market, for example, is likely to benefit from external hires.  

Some of the key indicators that an organization is suited to putting promotion paths in place include:

• Business is thriving (build on existing strengths)
• There is a need for, and variety of, skill-specific positions
• Management is equipped to sustain a continuous cycle comprising planning efforts and performance reviews
• The organization has a deep-seated history or culture that may be difficult to infiltrate

Gauging anticipated talent needs with your leadership team should be a routine part of business operations. For the sake of frequency, consider making this a staple during quarterly business reviews.

Define promotion paths early.

Make it known that your company prioritizes, values, and actively promotes career development by carving out promotion paths with employees early on in their tenures.

One of the most important factors in fair and successful internal advancement is transparency. Each step should outline specific, actionable criteria that establishes and warrants progression to the next level.

Track employee progress within the defined promotion path.

Creating career paths not only helps employees visualize their progression--having constant challenges and goals to work toward keeps them motivated and engaged with their work. This path is not one they should travel alone, though. Carving out a career plan is something employees should be heavily involved in, and even spearhead, but managers have a shared responsibility to continuously support their employees in scaling that path, to the benefit of both the employee and the company.

Certain skills can be developed independently--for example, by taking courses and acquiring certifications--but others must be taught by someone from within the organization.

One of the trademark qualities of this management style is team skill-sharing, whereby employees are encouraged to rely on and learn from each other, rather than just their manager. That said, managers can also proactively support direct reports by giving them strategic projects and platforms to showcase their skills and ideas.

Complement promotions with a virtuous cycle of encouragement

Typically, employees are more likely to give extra effort and to plan a long-term future with their company when they believe promotions are available to them. Creating such circumstances requires acknowledgement of team members at various levels.

Lack of recognition is an often-cited reason for people leaving their jobs, so it is important to commend employees for hard work in between promotions. When promotion announcements do occur, make it an inclusive celebration by offering praise to team members whose efforts helped position the business and candidate to advance. Everyone like to be on a winning team, even if they're not the MVP.

It is in the best interest of all parties for employers to be aware of what brought their employees to their company and what is keeping them there. Creating paths for advancement keeps everyone on the same page and accountable for working toward independent and group success. 

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Connect crm, get on rhythm, get free access to rhythm for sales managers ›, how to run an internal promotion process.

A poorly handled promotion process can have unexpected consequences, like your top performers leaving. Trust me, I learned this lesson the hard way. Even if you and your company have the best intentions, without careful planning and communication, you can still screw things up.

People take the results of an interview personally. As the leader of your department, it’s your job to communicate the potential outcomes of the hiring process–and next steps from there. Here’s how to handle your internal promotion process so you can retain top talent when filling open roles.

Structuring your interview process

Assuming someone isn’t tapped for a promotion, candidates are typically asked to interview or present a case study; they need to show what they can do before they get the job. While companies occasionally decide to only interview external candidates for an open role, most of the time, internal candidates are encouraged to apply as well.

As a leader in your business, you’re the shepherd for your internal candidates. Your job is to make the process clear and ensure that everyone feels involved. Err on the side of being absurdly transparent throughout the entire process and treat each candidate with respect and dignity.

Every time you interview internal candidates, follow these steps:

• Schedule 2 or 3 interviews with the hiring manager and other stakeholders
• Have candidates present a case study to an interview panel
• Solicit references from their peers

It’s imperative that you schedule the same interviewers for each candidate. Otherwise, you risk accusations of favoritism after one interviewer is swapped out for another. It’s better to push back the interview to when everyone is available. You can objectively compare candidates when you have the same interviewers and ask candidates to present the same case study.

Preparing your internal candidates ahead of time

Have a level-setting conversation with internal candidates before the interview. When you have three employees all vying and interviewing for a manager role, two of them won’t get the job. As a manager, help them emotionally prepare for all outcomes.

Assure them that they still have a place at your company and a chance for a promotion in the future. More roles will open up over time and, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter whether they move up today or next quarter. It’s not a ding to their career process. By preparing them, you can increase your chance at retaining them as reliable performers and stop them from leaving the company.

Be clear on compensation

In sales, managers usually make less money than high-performing reps. Communicate that being a manager is a stepping stone in building their career and necessary to develop their skills as an operator . Once they move on to become a Director or VP, they’ll make a lot more money than they did as an IC.

Be transparent and share the compensation band ahead of any scheduled interviews. This can clarify what a step up can mean for your top-performing ICs and their paycheck. They may not be interested in going through the process anymore, saving everyone time and energy.

Balancing internal and external candidates

Have a good reason to hire externally. External candidates seem to have this aura of being a hero that can come in and change everything and it's so great. But that’s only wishful thinking. You won’t always have those results. Don’t underestimate your internal candidates, they’re more capable than you realize and already deeply understand your business.

In the case where you have both internal and external candidates for a role, aggressively over-communicate with the internal people throughout the process. Explain that you’re advocating for them to be included in the interview process and tell them exactly when you’ll have updated information for them.

There’s a 100% chance that, if you leave an internal candidate in the dark about the process, they’ll be very upset by it. You’re leaving them to worry, thinking that “you know me. Why won’t you share the truth with me?” Avoid this by consistently over-communicating.

Apply the same expectations to both internal and external candidates. For some reason, companies set up additional hurdles for their internal people. This conveys the message that you’re doing them a favor by allowing them to interview, but have your sights set on other options. If your internal candidates find out that the external new hire had to work less hard to get the job, they’ll understandably be upset.

Internal candidates need to be interviewed towards the end of your process, not the beginning. You might think that you’re simply getting the internal steps out of the way early, but it’s nerve-racking to be in a months-long hiring process.

It’s also really depressing to interview for a promotion and then find out you’re in a holding pattern while the business interviews a lot more people. This is a company-ending moment for many people. Don’t send the message that you’re trying to find a better option externally.

Managing your rep’s move to another team

When one of your reps wants to interview for an open role in another department, be proactive and connect with the hiring manager ahead of time to build a charter together and agree on SLAs to abide by. You don’t want to lose a good rep because they had a negative hiring experience with another team.

Let’s say that your sales rep wants to interview for a marketing role. As their manager, you need to be the guardian of their experience. I’ve personally screwed up in the past by trusting my hiring colleagues to treat everyone with dignity in the interview process. I’ve lost three reps who wanted to move teams but ended up leaving the company after poor treatment.

I know now that I need to talk to the other VP about the details of the interview process, the timing of the decision, and how they intend to communicate to my rep throughout the process. It might seem like a “feel good” company moment when you allow anyone internally to apply to a position, but if you don’t intend to hire them, you’re doing more harm than good.

Committing to post-interview support

Once someone is selected, you need to level set with the other candidates. In fact, the person who gets the job is the least important person at this stage. The other candidates spent a lot of time and energy trying to secure this job, so take time to communicate why they weren't chosen.

Give them all of the evidence in a document that’s no less than 5 pages long, with 4 or 5 themes and specific feedback about how to fix their problems. The next time a role opens up, they’ll feel prepared and have a higher chance of getting the job.

If you want to keep your employees, this is critically important. Make it a commitment on your part. You’re delivering a gift to your reps by taking the time to write actionable feedback. Candidates should leave the interview process wearing a badge of honor, knowing that next time they’ll be more ready.

Some feedback is hard to hear, especially for reps with great metrics. A rep may be a great seller and hit 180% of quota, but lost the promotion to another rep who only hit 105% of quota. Remind them that high performance only earns them a chance at the job, it doesn’t buy them the role.

Here are examples of feedback you can include in your 5 pager:

• The other candidate had more tenure with the company. Stick it out and you’ll be better qualified next time.
• You didn't think big enough in the case study. Work on being more strategic rather than tactical.
• In your peer references, it was called out that you had a few outbursts on Slack about the marketing team. Focus on learning how to work more collaboratively.  

Include your senior leadership in the process as well. Once someone is selected, have the CEO and CFO send a congratulatory email. They should also reach out to the internal candidates that didn’t get the role and encourage them to improve and try again. This will show that your company is still invested in their long-term success.

Manage the process, you keep your top performers

Managing the interview process for your sales reps, especially when they’re looking at a role in a different department, can be a lot of work–and may not benefit you directly. But if you don’t commit to a positive interview experience for internal candidates, you risk losing top performers who feel snubbed by the company, and maybe even you.  

Want to learn how to give actionable feedback to your reps? Check out our guide on how to build a culture of feedback at your company.

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Internal Marketing: What Is It & 18+ Examples You Can Use

It used to be that companies could use old-school marketing tactics aimed directly at their target customers. 

Corporate social media accounts, advertising, white papers, conferences. You get the idea.

And for the most part, that was good enough.

But times have changed. 

It’s no longer enough for a company to talk about itself. In 2017, for the first time in nearly two decades, people’s trust declined in every kind of institution - including business.

Instead, people are turning to people they know or can relate to:

• 96% of consumers don’t trust ads
• After a company’s technical experts, a “regular” employee is the most trusted voice a company has .

It’s clear: to truly reach their customers, companies need their employees’ buy-in and vocal support.

But how can companies get that support?

Enter: Internal Marketing.

What Is Internal Marketing?

Internal marketing is the promotion of a company’s vision, mission, and culture to its employees with the objective of gaining their support.

The companies that are the best at internal marketing treat employees as internal customers who need to be convinced of the company mission.

They don’t take their employees’ support of the company as a given, and instead make a deliberate effort to earn it.

Because these top companies know how powerful it is when their (often large) employee base buys-in to what the company is doing, then spreads the word outside of the company via interactions with customers, friends, family, and social media.

These businesses understand that their corporate voice isn’t enough, and that customers develop opinions about the company well before using their product or service. 

Unsurprisingly, the benefits of internal marketing are numerous:

• Increased employee satisfaction and engagement
• Greater brand reach
• More trusted marketing
• Better customer service
• Improved recruiting and employer brand

Internal Marketing Examples

As with traditional marketing, you can execute internal marketing through a variety of tactics.

Internal marketing has one goal in mind: to earn your employees’ enthusiastic support. The idea being that that support will in turn be communicated externally by the employees themselves.

So how you get to that objective is really only limited by your creativity.

However, there are a few tried-and-true tactics that show up often in successful internal marketing.

Consistent Communication of Company’s Mission, Vision, & Values

Why This Matters: This is your company’s north star. It’s not enough to have your mission and values tucked away in a shared drive or plastered on the walls. You have to refer to them often, and have leadership that truly believes in them and adheres to them. Because employees care. In fact, 73% of employees who believe they work for a "purpose-driven" company are engaged , versus only 23% of those who don't.

How to Execute It: You probably already have a mission, vision, and values. The key is to identify opportunities to communicate and revisit them regularly as part of your internal marketing. Think weekly meetings, quarterly reviews, employee performance reviews, and so on.

A Strong 1-2 Year Plan

Why This Matters: Employees want to know what they’re building towards. While the mission and vision are great for big picture, long term thinking, they don’t spell out the details of the near term. Having a clear, positive plan for the next 12-24 months will help employees feel secure and optimistic. They’ll be on the same page with company leadership and know exactly what their day-to-day activities are leading up to in the near term.

How to Execute It: Work with leadership to document your 1-2 year plan. Then communicate it regularly with everyone in the company - a critical step given 71% of employees are unable to identify their company’s strategy . Each department and employee should understand exactly how they contribute to the success of the plan.

Seeking & Acting on Employee Feedback

Why This Matters: The first two examples have been more “top-down” in nature. That’s why employee feedback is a critical element - it sends the message to employees that their voice is heard, too. Not all feedback can (or should) be implemented, of course. But all feedback should be acknowledged.

How to Execute It: Start getting feedback on your employee experience. You can use something simple and free like Google Forms , or more robust and purpose-built for employee feedback like TINYpulse . Heck, we’ve even seen teams use Trello boards to be fully transparent about their feedback and its implementation status. Whatever you choose, it’s important that you’re genuinely interested in the feedback, and are willing to make changes based on that feedback.

Clear, Centralized Internal Communication

Why This Matters: You’ve likely noticed by now that communication is a central theme when it comes to internal marketing. After all, communication is critical to any great relationship; the relationship between employer and employees is no exception. The key with internal marketing is to ensure your messages don’t get lost among email, chat, social media, and so on.

How to Execute It: Limit use of traditional communication channels for internal marketing. Tools like email and chat are designed for productivity. They’re not suited for delivering more thoughtful, “bigger picture” communications meant to boost morale, gain strategic buy-in, and gather feedback. Instead, focus your messaging on a dedicated, centralized communications hub like Swaybase .

A Social Media-Friendly Environment

Why This Matters: 8 in 10 workers report using social media in the workplace . And 98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal use; 50% are already posting about their company online. It’s a given that employees are active on social media and they’re talking about you. Make sure it’s done the right way and supports the business.

How to Execute It: Start by creating a social media policy that embraces the modern realities of social media in the workplace. Clarify expectations of employee behavior online - and then make it easy for them to share pre-approved content with their personal networks through a more formal employee advocacy program.

Better Learning & Development

Why This Matters: Simply put, today’s talent cares about training. 94% percent of employees would stay with a company longer if that company invested in learning, and 40% of employees who receive poor training leave their positions in the first year with the company.

How to Execute It: Training (or Learning & Development, if you prefer a more holistic term) is a big topic. Start small. Begin by identifying the gaps in your employees’ skills. The best way to do this? Ask your employees where they feel they need to develop their skills.

Provide the Benefits Employees Want

Why This Matters: While salary is often top of mind, employees also care about benefits. So much so, that the right benefits can convince employees to choose a lower paying job over a higher paying one. Parents in particular value flexible hours and work-life balance more than salary.

How to Execute It: Ask your employees what they’d like. Then work with leadership and HR to make at least one positive change in the benefits offered at your company. Keep in mind: it doesn’t have to cost top dollar. As the chart shows, after health insurance, employees value relatively low-cost benefits, including flexible hours, more paid vacation time, and work-from-home options.

Eat Your Own (Product/Service) Dogfood

Why This Matters: Unappetizing image aside - it’s long been a mantra to “ eat your own dogfood ,” meaning use your own product or service. Why? Because doing so turns your employees into customers, which in turn helps your employees better understand your external customers. It also brings your employees closer to the very thing you’re creating and selling, enabling them to be better ambassadors for the company.

How to Execute It: Work with leadership to make your product or service available to employees. In some cases, full and unfettered access may be impossible or unfeasible. For instance, Airbnb can’t give away unlimited free stays to employees. But they could give away a handful of free stays a year. Find what’s right for you.

Additional Examples of Internal Marketing

Some additional examples include:

• More frequent promotion cycles
• Celebrating new business deals and major milestones
• Monthly employee spotlights
• Company-wide brainstorming for new products/services
• Creating and sharing the company’s “origin story”
• Process improvement workshops between departments
• Reorganized / improved office layout
• Free company swag/gear
• Performance-based incentives
• Interdepartmental rotational programs

Remember, you can be as creative as you like with your internal marketing.

The objective is always the same: to win your employees’ support.

So don’t feel restricted! 

It’s completely up to you to determine the best means for achieving that objective.

Implementing Your Internal Marketing The Right Way

You’ve identified the need for internal marketing and communicated the benefits of it to company leadership. 

You’ve brainstormed various examples and tactics you’re willing to consider.

How do you proceed from here?

Step 1: Identify Key Stakeholders

Everyone in the company will be impacted by your internal marketing. And for each department, that may look a little different. So identify a lead “point of contact” within each department who can weigh in on the ideal way to roll out your internal marketing for their department.

Step 2: Lay a Foundation for Communication

As we’ve seen, communication is a common thread throughout most of your internal marketing efforts. Establish a centralized internal communication method that is separate from the noisy, overcrowded traditional channels like email and chat. 

Step 3: Prioritize Your Tactics

With a direct line of communication to your employees, you can begin to roll out your first tactic. Start small and focus on something from your list that is relatively easy for your organization to implement.

Step 4: Make it Foolproof for Employees to Spread the Word

Internal marketing done right leads to employees who will want to advocate for you outside your four walls. We mentioned it earlier, but you need to make it easy for your employees to communicate their positive take on the company with the people in their personal networks. If you’ve picked the right communications tool , then it already has a social media component built in that you and your employees can use.

Step 5: Measure the External Impact

This may be counterintuitive, but keep in mind that a main reason for doing internal marketing in the first place is for the external benefits it drives:

Most of those benefits are external.

Therefore, it makes sense to track external performance indicators, such as:

• Marketing metrics (social media reach and engagement)
• Hiring metrics (time to hire, offer accept rate)
• Customer satisfaction (Net Promoter Score, customer turnover)

We may sound like a broken record, but ultimately your internal marketing will come down to how well you communicate with your employees.

After all, not only do you want your message to be heard.

You want employees to internalize it. And then to spread the word with the rest of the world.

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Advantages and Considerations of Internal Promotions

The quest for talent is unending, however, amidst the allure of external hires, many organizations overlook the goldmine of potential within their own ranks. Internal promotions, while sometimes overlooked, offer a plethora of benefits that can significantly contribute to a company’s success. Let’s delve into the pros and cons of internal promotions and when they might be the right strategic move for your organization.

Speed and Efficiency: Internal promotions expedite the hiring process. With existing employees, there’s no need to sift through countless resumes or conduct extensive interviews. The familiarity with internal candidates streamlines decision-making, allowing for quicker placement into vacant positions.  

Cost-Effectiveness: External recruitment often comes with hefty expenses, from advertising to onboarding. In contrast, internal promotions mitigate these costs, saving on recruitment fees and potential negotiation expenses. Moreover, investing in existing talent fosters loyalty and long-term commitment.    

Risk Mitigation: Internal candidates come with a proven track record within the organization. Their performance, work ethic, and cultural fit are already known factors, reducing the risk associated with external hires. This familiarity minimizes the chance of mismatched expectations or cultural misalignment.  

Cultural Reinforcement: Demonstrating a commitment to internal growth fosters a positive work culture. Employees feel valued when they see opportunities for advancement within their organization. This, in turn, boosts morale, engagement, and retention rates, contributing to a stronger employer brand.  

Skill Enhancement: Internal promotions offer a platform for skills development and career progression. By investing in training and development programs , organizations can cultivate a pipeline of skilled professionals, ensuring a continuous supply of capable leaders from within.  

Potential for Resentment: Overlooking certain employees for promotion can lead to feelings of resentment and demotivation. Managing expectations and transparent communication are crucial to mitigate such risks and maintain employee morale.  

Skills Gap: While internal candidates bring institutional knowledge, they may lack certain skills required for specialized roles. Organizations must assess the gap between existing skill sets and job requirements, providing necessary training or considering external recruitment when skill deficiencies are significant.  

Complacency: Without external competition, internal candidates may become complacent, leading to a decline in performance and innovation. Implementing performance metrics and setting clear expectations can help counteract such tendencies.  

Limited Perspective: Internal promotions may result in a lack of fresh perspectives and innovative ideas. Organizations must balance the benefits of institutional knowledge with the need for diverse viewpoints to drive creativity and adaptability.  

Strategic Considerations:

Assess Organizational Needs: Evaluate the specific requirements of the role and the organization’s strategic objectives. Determine whether internal candidates possess the necessary skills and potential for growth.

Invest in Development: Provide training and mentorship programs to bridge skill gaps and prepare internal candidates for leadership roles. Encourage continuous learning and professional growth to nurture talent from within.  

Promote Transparency: Communicate openly about promotion criteria, processes, and expectations. Establish a fair and merit-based system to mitigate resentment and promote a culture of trust and transparency.  

Embrace Diversity: While internal promotions offer continuity, diversity of thought is essential for innovation. Strive to balance internal promotions with external hires to bring in fresh perspectives and foster innovation.

For those looking to prioritize internal talent, TalentQuest offers a comprehensive suite of talent management solutions designed to help organizations identify, nurture, and promote talent from within. Through advanced analytics, assessment tools, and development programs, TalentQuest enables businesses to uncover hidden potential and cultivate a pipeline of internal candidates ready for promotion. By leveraging data-driven insights, TalentQuest assists in identifying high-potential employees based on performance, competencies, and alignment with organizational goals.     

Additionally, TalentQuest’s customizable development plans and coaching resources empower employees to enhance their skills and readiness for leadership roles. With TalentQuest, organizations can streamline the internal promotion process, minimize recruitment costs, and foster a culture of talent development and succession planning .  

In conclusion, internal promotions offer numerous advantages, from efficiency and cost-effectiveness to risk mitigation and talent development. By strategically leveraging internal talent, organizations can cultivate a culture of growth, engagement, and innovation, driving long-term success in today’s dynamic business environment.  

Karla Vallecillo MS. Ed

Karla Vallecillo is a Business Development Manager with TalentQuest. She is responsible for seeking, developing and defining close business relationships with potential business partners. After eight years in K-12 education, she joined the TalentQuest team but continues her fierce advocacy…

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How To Manage Through The Five Stages Of Your Own Internal Promotion

Business Management , Executive Onboarding , Leadership Skills , New Leader's Playbook , Onboarding , Shifting Sands , Strategy

All internal promotions are tentative and interim. The minute you think you’ve secured the promotion, you’re on the road to failure. Instead, make sure you’re always the best candidate to do their job, their way, intentionally and deliberately doing your current job well and then progressing through the five stages of internal promotion:

• In the consideration set
• Privately promised
• Publicly designated or named
• Officially appointed or elected

1) In the consideration set

Well-run succession planning produces a set of people that could succeed a job’s incumbent. Making it into that consideration set is the first step towards a future promotion. When you’ve done that, invest to understand the job you’re being considered for and the way that job needs to be done – their job, their way. Make yourself the best possible candidate by continuing to build the strengths required including:

• Talent  – the match between your innate talents and those required in the new role.
• Knowledge  – learned from books, classes, training, etc.
• Skill  – sharpened with intentional, deliberate practice.
• Experience  – gained through activities, projects, programs, assignments and other roles.
• Craft-level artistic sensibilities and caring  – absorbed in apprenticeships to masters.

The breakpoint between being in the consideration set and being promised the job is moving from being one of several candidates for the promotion to being the only candidate.

2) Privately promised

Even the best-intentioned private promise of a new job is only a statement of current best thinking. Continue to build your strengths. Identify the few most critical decision-makers and influencers. Actively seek them out and build relationships with them to build their support for you in the promised role.

The breakpoint between being privately promised and “publicly” designated is just that – others are told that you’re getting the job.

3) Publicly designated or named

A public designation is a pivotal moment. Those supporting your promotion will rally around you. Those against it will band together against you. Identify your supporters, detractors and fence-sitters, working to move everyone one step to shift the balance in your favor.

• Turn supporters into champions.
• Move those on the fence into the supporter camp.
• Neutralize the detractors.

Note you’re still campaigning for the job. Keep building your strengths. Start the longer-term fuzzy front-end activities like building more specific relationships, deepening your learning, and starting to plan.

4) Officially appointed or elected

Once you’ve been officially appointed or formally elected, go all-in with your fuzzy front-end activities, building relationships, deepening knowledge, and putting together your personal 100-day action plan with the following components

• Leadership approach
• Personal set up
• Stakeholders , up, across and down internally and externally
• Message  and key communication points
• Pre-start  conversations and activities
• Day One  and early days conversations and activities
• Tactical Capacity building blocks  including imperative, milestones, early wins, role sort and ongoing communication

In some cases, you move into the new role the moment you’re officially appointed or elected. In other cases, there’s a lag.

All roles are tentative and interim. The people that put you in the role can take you out. So, don’t stop. Stay focused on doing their job, their way. Continue to build your strengths. Continue to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones.

And keep your eyes out for changes so you can adjust. People fail in new roles for three reasons: 1) They fail to fit (which is less of a risk in an internal promotion.) 2) They fail to deliver. 3) They fail to adjust to changes down the road. Having mitigated the fit risk before being officially named, concentrate on delivery and adjustment.

Leverage your strengths to deliver what they need, their way.

Keep on the lookout for and pay attention to changes and understand whether they are:

• Minor and temporary – requiring no change on your part
• Minor and enduring – requiring an evolution
• Major and temporary – requiring short-term crisis management or opportunistic action
• Major and enduring – requiring a re-start before the people that put you in the role bring someone else in to restart things.

Click here  for a list of my Forbes articles (of which this is #789) and a summary of my book on executive onboarding:  The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan .

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Internal Promotion: 9 Pros and Cons to Consider Before You Promote From Within

Finding the right fit for an open role can be a real challenge in today’s job market. Companies are struggling with high turnover and niche positions are requiring more specialized skillsets. Not to mention, companies are investing more than ever in their  employer brand , which only increases the level of competition for quality candidates. It’s undeniable—hiring is a complicated process that requires a fluid, ever-evolving strategy. 

The topic of internal promotion only further complicates things. Deciding between whether to hire internal or external applicants—the  “build or buy” question —isn’t an easy thing to do. The truth is, there are pros and cons to going with either option.  

Why Should Your Company Promote Internally?

When looking at the positives of an internal promotion, it’s important to note that this kind of job fill can be mutually beneficial for both the employer and employee. An internal promotion can be a way to recognize high performers and reward them for their work. It can also say a lot about a company when they promote from within. People tend to respect businesses that value and hold onto their workforce. And the benefits don’t end there. 

5 Pros of Internal Promotion

1. it reduces cost. .

It’s expensive to source and recruit new talent. On average, HR professionals and recruiters spend a lot of time finding and converting job seekers into active applicants. A  Glassdoor study  found that the average length of the hiring process in the U.S. is about 23.8 days. Additionally, once a candidate is converted, they’ll often negotiate higher salaries compared to existing employees. Sometimes new hires will also require a signing bonus or even coverage of moving expenses, which an internal promotion would not necessarily need. 

2. It reduces time-to-productivity.

When employees are promoted, they can typically hit the ground running in their new role. Sure there will be elements that may take time to ramp up, but they already have a handle on  company culture  and operations. This can help boost productivity compared to individuals who are brand new to the business. Their already established understanding can save their own time, the team’s time, and an HR professional’s time too. 

3. It improves employee retention. 

If high performers don’t see potential for their own personal growth, they are more likely to disengage and eventually leave a company. Top talent wants to progress, in both title and salary. Businesses should want to retain their top talent and not lose them to competitors. Internally promoting these employees is one way to recognize and reward their performance. Further, when others see one of their peers promoted, they may feel encouraged to strive for an internal promotion themselves—and thus stay on at your company as well. 

4. It bolsters team morale. 

As mentioned, internal promotions don’t only benefit the directly affected employee. These types of job fills can also keep other  employees engaged  and reinvigorate team morale. Witnessing firsthand the success of fellow peers can inspire others to work harder and can also show that hard work is valued, which reinforces a positive outlook across broader groups. 

5. It strengthens your employer brand. 

Job seekers want to apply to an employer brand that resonates with them, one that has a mission that aligns with their own beliefs. People are more attracted to a company culture that supports internal growth than one that struggles with high turnover and employee retention. Internal promotions demonstrate that your company values hard work and is willing to reward it. Recognizing employees in this way can help strengthen your employer brand to both future candidates and consumers. Consumers are also more likely to support a brand that treats their employees well. In fact, a  CareerArc 2017 Employer Branding Study  reveals that 64% of consumers have actually stopped purchasing a brand after learning about the company’s poor employee treatment. What better way is there to show your investment in your employees than to promote from within?

4 Pitfalls of Promoting From Within

While there are worthwhile benefits of promoting internally, there are also some downsides to consider before making a decision. Each hiring opportunity will be different, so weighing the pros and cons can help you make the right choice at the right time. 

1. It can increase failure rates.

Not every internal promotion will be better than an external hire. In fact, the failure rate for an internal promotion is higher than one might think. While still less than an externally hired employee’s failure rate, it’s been found that  about a quarter of internally promoted senior executives fail in their new role . There are many reasons why an internally promoted employee may struggle in their new position—for instance, they may have excelled in one role for a long period of time and not be ready for new responsibilities, or they may have a hard time managing people who used to be their peers. 

2. It may limit outside knowledge or advanced skill sets.

When compared to internal promotions, external hires may have more advanced training that they can now bring to your brand. They may also have more exposure to industry advancements and a fresh perspective for solving age-old company problems. It can be true in these circumstances, that an outsider’s perspective could be more worthwhile. To widen your recruitment net, you may want to consider  social recruiting  to source external candidates and let both internal and external candidates go through the interview cycle.

3. It may invite negative company politics.

 Just as an internal promotion can bolster team morale, it can also tamper with it. Receiving a promotion can open an  employee up to teasing or ridicule —sometimes done in good humor, but other times done out of jealousy. These kinds of challenging situations can distract a recently promoted employee and take them away from their new duties. It can also complicate things for HR departments if harmless teasing evolves into a bullying or harassment situation. 

4. It may drive away a high-functioning employee. 

Some high performers are already in the right spot and placing them in a new role may added unwanted pressure for them. They may want their old position back, but it’s too late. Or, they may take advantage of their new title and additional training but start looking for a new company that is willing to give them more money. Either way, if it doesn’t work out, you’ll lose a valuable employee and still be faced with having to spend time and money filling the position. 

How To Make The Decision Between Hiring Internally vs. Externally

There are pros and cons about every hiring decision you will ever make. When choosing whether to go with an internal or external candidate, make it about potential. Think about the role, but also think about the team and its  cognitive and cultural diversity . Take the time needed to weigh the pros and cons in each hiring situation. This will help you identify your greatest potential and needs, which can ultimately help strengthen your hiring decision. 

Whatever decision you choose, one thing is for sure: employee development is always valuable. If you’re looking to retain your quality employees, read our blog post on the  8 Ways to Boost Employee Development in Your Organization .

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Two Crucial Steps For A Successful Internal Promotion

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Few career transitions offer as much to gain — and to lose — as internal promotions. Whether you’re moving to a new part of the company or just moving from co-worker to boss, there are predictable issues that can be addressed to help you successfully navigate this transition.

When you are new to a company, you typically go through some onboarding process. It may have formal classroom orientations; compulsory, sometimes-painful e-learnings to complete; calendared meet-and-greets and onboarding “buddies” to help you learn the ropes.

So, how do you onboard when you’re internal? You already know the ropes, right? This is especially a risk when you’re making the most treacherous move — from co-worker to boss. At one of my employers, we filled 80% of leadership positions with internal talent. I have made that move myself, and I’ve coached many leaders through this change.

Here are two simple steps to make that transition easier and more successful:

1. Notice how hierarchy changes things.

You are the same person, to be sure. But now that you are the boss, your former co-workers will see you differently — even if you do nothing to encourage this.

This may show up loudly in terms of teasing or mock-referencing your status (e.g., uncharacteristic “Yes, boss” answers). More often though, hierarchy-driven behavior will be very subtle.

For example, it becomes easier to schedule a meeting, because whoever is scheduling starts with your calendar, and others are more willing to flex their time to accommodate yours. In meetings, folks wait for you to arrive before starting, even if you are a couple minutes late and, in discussions, you get to have the last word. You may see folks agreeing more with your point of view, and even laughing more at your jokes.

At the same time, you may notice subtle separations from your co-workers. The follow-up note or post-meeting discussion may not include you as in the past. The offers to grab coffee, pitch in for a gift, fill out an NCAA bracket or join a “When will Cheryl have her baby” sweepstakes start to wane.

Again, you are the same person, so be careful in attributing these experiences to your excellence, or to your deficiencies. Humans are social beings and in any group of people, hierarchy matters.

In this case, the hierarchy has changed, so you and every other teammate will make adjustments that reflect that change. Often, these changes are unspoken, perhaps even unnoticed. Even so, they are a powerful factor in how the team performs under your leadership. That means it’s critical to take the second step:

2. Use hierarchy to change things .

In many companies, it is a negative to be viewed as hierarchical. Reliance on command behavior, pulling rank and using fear to motivate are frowned upon — often, for good reason. “Because I said so” is as effective in most teams as it is in most homes.

However, when you are the boss, people pay close attention to what you say and what you do, especially when you are the new leader. Your actions will set standards — what’s okay and what’s not allowed — even if you never state those standards out loud.

When a co-worker of mine became my boss, he made a point of disrupting the meeting-after-the-meeting pattern of our team by purposely asking for that feedback in the first place. Something like, “Before we break, since I know there will be follow up discussion. Let’s have the after-meeting ideas and concerns now.”

You don’t have to issue a command to indicate what you want from the team. Again, especially when you are a former co-worker, changes in your comments and behavior will send clear signals to the team about what is changing under your leadership.

It is a powerful lesson for a leader to learn that she can actually use her position of power to help the team achieve. In fact, it is expected. Expertise and relationships continue to be critical factors in motivating others but it is okay, even necessary, for leaders to own and use their position power as well.

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• Firings & Layoffs

Promoting from Within: Pros & Cons (+ 8 Tips to Do it Successfully)

A few years ago, one of the managers at my company quit. I was given the daunting task of making the choice — promote from within or make an external hire. So many questions came into my head. I know it’s cheaper to hire internally, but who do I choose? And how do I know they are ready? Am I passing up on a great external candidate?

Internal promotion has a much bigger impact on both employee satisfaction and retention than we realize, you’ll see why later in the article. 

The wrong decision would cost me (and the company) a lot.

In this article, I’ll give you everything you need to make the internal vs. external hiring decision and I’ll include the tips I wish I had when I was making my choice. 

We’ll cover :

• What does “promoting from within” actually mean
• A breakdown of the pros and cons of promoting internally 
• How you can use internal promotion and mobility to cut turnover by 75%
• 8 tips to run a successful internal promotion process

What Is Internal Promotion?

Internal promotion happens when you choose to promote someone within the company, rather than hire someone new. The employee can be promoted from the same team or the company will choose to promote someone with cross-functional skills from another department.

You might decide to use internal promotion when you need to replace someone that leaves the company or when the company is growing and a need for a new managerial position arises. 

Whether or not a company decides to promote someone from within usually depends on the skill level and leadership ability of its existing employees.

Your next question is probably “why should you choose someone internal instead of hiring someone external?”

We’re huge fans of the old pro/con list, so let’s break it down. 

Pros and Cons of Promoting from Within

Pros of promoting from within, 1. reduced recruitment time (and cost).

Even though internal candidates should go through a nearly identical recruitment process, there is one key difference: sorting through non-relevant applications. 

Any recruiter knows that at least half of the applications aren’t relevant to fill the job you’re looking for. But when you’re open to promoting from within, you can control this. 

If you have the right documentation, your HR team can easily define who would be a relevant fit. 

2. Faster onboarding

When you promote internally, the candidate will have already gone through all of the basic company training at the least. At the most, they will have been on the same team and will have nearly all the info they need to start. 

They will still need a bit of training, but they’ll become operational much faster than external hires. 

3. High employee retention

It’s simple — if employees know there is a possibility for them to grow within a company, they are much more likely to stay. 

A Gartner study identified that only one in four employees is confident about their career at their organization, and three in four are open to external opportunities.

That means if you can provide internal promotion and mobility for employees, you could cut turnover by up to 75% . 

But more on how to do that later. 

4. Increased employee development

Internal promotion is synonymous with never-ending challenges and personal development for high performers. 

Which basically guarantees you’ll end up with an all-star team. 

Why? Because you already hired someone performing well enough to be considered for a promotion. By promoting them you’re helping them acquire new skills, making them an even more qualified employee.

How to apply this: Many companies offer graduate programs after internships for this reason. They identify a group of interns with high development potential and train them to become future managers.

5. Better cultural fit  

We’re in the 21st century… people no longer make their job decisions solely on salary and traditional benefits. 

Half the battle of joining a new company is fitting in with the work style, values, and overall vibe. 

By promoting internally you can ensure the new manager not only fits in but also exemplifies the culture you want to exude. 

6. Less risk 

All in all, promoting from within is less of a risk. You won’t end up hiring someone that secretly has no idea how to use excel but faked their way through the entire hiring process.  

You know the internal hire will fit in with the company and has succeeded in their current role. Plus you can confirm their skills with current managers.

But the key to this is going about promoting from within the right way. 

For example, if you promote someone that doesn’t already exemplify the skills needed, you might end up with an employee that’s not performing well. And in this case it’s much harder to deal with a bad promotion than a bad hire. 

I’ll give some tips later to ensure this doesn’t happen to you. 

Now you know all the reasons why you should promote from within, but what about the reasons why it might not work out? 

Cons of promoting from within

1. groupthink .

This basically means there’s no devil’s advocate.

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that happens when a group of people continuously make decisions without challenging them.

And this leads to less strategic and more comfortable decisions, which could seriously impact the company revenue in the long run. Especially in smaller companies that are trying to grow. Making comfortable decisions over and over won’t get you the crazy growth you’re looking for — it’ll do the opposite. 

It’s a risk if you constantly promote people from the same team that have similar ideas and reasoning as their predecessors. 

2. Lack of diversity 

In short, diversifying your employees can combat groupthink and make your company more inclusive.

But internal promotion could go against this if this wasn’t top of mind when the company hired its previous employees.

Make sure to consider this when thinking about internal promotion.

Determine if you’re (unintentionally) promoting one type of person, or leaving growth opportunities open to everyone.  

3. Internal conflict (aka gossip and fighting)

In some cases, you won’t be able to clearly identify one top performer that should be promoted and you’ll need to interview several current employees…

Take it from me, this can cause a lot of internal drama. 

It starts when people find out who applied for the promotion. Then the candidates are pitted against each other but still have to work together. Their co-workers are often asked about their experience working with that person, causing more tension between those employees. Then when you do find the right candidate to promote, the other will often feel a lack of support from management and their existing team, and they might decide to leave the company. 

It’s too much conflict. But this is just a possibility and one that is preventable based on how you handle the promotion process. 

The keys to avoiding this are in the next section. 

4. Passing by a more qualified candidate 

If you promote from within simply because it’s easy and more cost-effective, you’ll often become a victim of this.

You can get into some real trouble if you promote an employee that:

• Isn’t ready for a leadership position.
• Doesn’t have the experience necessary for this job.
• Isn’t easily trainable.

If you promote someone in any of these situations it’ll end up costing you more.

The problem is you’ll eventually have to let them go and find two new hires to replace the position you were trying to fill and the person you prematurely promoted. 

Honestly, if you should or should not promote from within will mostly depend on the candidates available within your company + how you handle the situation. 

Because all in all — the pros usually outweigh the cons when it comes to internal promotion.

We’ll dig into how to avoid these ‘cons’ and how you can set your company up for successful internal promotions in a minute.

How to Decrease Turnover with Internal Promotion and Mobility

Promoting from within doesn’t only cover filling a leadership role with someone lower in the company hierarchy. 

It also means you allow employees to move horizontally in an organization, oftentimes called internal mobility. 

Use internal mobility to your advantage 

With internal mobility, you are open to people changing roles in your company without increasing their seniority. And doing this significantly decreases employee turnover, especially among younger employees. 

A recent tenure study by the US Department of Labor reported: “the median tenure of workers ages 55 to 64 (9.8 years) was more than three times that of workers ages 25 to 34 years (2.8 years)”. 

But internal mobility can definitely improve the numbers for the 25-34 age range. 

How? If you can show your employees that they can change job roles (meaning new responsibilities, teams, and managers), it provides them with the new experience they are craving.

For example, someone working as a Communications Project Manager for Fragrances at L’Oréal could move to a position as a Corporate Communications Manager.  Similar skills are needed for both of these roles but the projects are entirely different (and may even involve changing physical locations).

But to run this transition successfully you’ll need to adopt a few essential internal promotion and mobility practices.

8 tips for successfully promoting from within 

These tips will help your company avoid the ‘cons’ mentioned above and execute a stellar internal promotion process. 

1. Keep the application process the same for internal vs. external employees

On the candidate experience side, the internal candidate should have a nearly identical experience compared to anyone applying externally. 

They should undergo the same application scanning, skill tests, cultural fit interviews, and reference checks that anyone else would. 

This will not only decrease any unconscious biases you or your company may have, but will also significantly decrease the cons of internal promotion. 

It eliminates the possibility of you hiring someone that’s not ready for a promotion and limits the amount of gossip that would happen if you change the hiring process. 

2. Give necessary training to candidates that were promoted from within

Too many companies assume if they hired someone internally they already know everything they need to succeed in their new role. Spoiler: they don’t. 

It’s natural to forget what they are missing because they were clearly qualified enough for the position. But to make sure they succeed in their new position, you need to give them the training they didn’t get in their previous role. 

For example, if you promoted a Junior Content Manager to a Content Team Lead, you would offer leadership training. Or if you made a horizontal promotion to someone from Director of Marketing to Head of People, they would need some training on how your HR team works and any specialized training like diversity and inclusion.

Bottom line here: make sure they aren’t missing any of the info they would have gotten if they had started this role in another company. 

3. Use internal performance tracking and evaluations

First, make sure you’re conducting regular employee evaluations to know which employees are overperforming and might be interested in a promotion. 

Second, keep track of their current skills improvement and the ones they want to start training for. This gives you a better idea of who may be able to move horizontally. 

Both of these can be updated during the skills assessment part of quarterly and yearly employee evaluations! 

Just make sure it’s documented and available to the HR team. 

4. Start regular temperature checks with managers

This is basically just a check-in from employee to manager to determine how the employee is liking their current job. 

It should be a chance to have a completely open chat about where they want their career to go and how the company can help them with this.  

This is also something that should be done during regular evaluations. Quarterly is the best for ensuring positive employee experiences, yearly at the minimum.

5. Reinforce an open-door HR policy 

It’s best to automatically assume that not all managers are going to be supportive of internal promotion and mobility — the HR team should be ready to pick up the slack. 

In this case, that means allowing employees to openly express when their managers aren’t being supportive, and immediately take action to correct it. And if an employee does bring this up, it’s probably time for them to make a horizontal move.

Otherwise you’ll end up with a situation where the employee feels forced to stay in their current role and starts resenting their manager (and later on the company). Eventually, they might quit . 

Preventing this will decrease employee turnover and keep your development culture strong!

6. Incentivize managers who allow for mobility 

Building on previous points, you can incentivize managers to allow their employees to move around. 

This ensures managers aren’t holding their employees back for selfish reasons. 

An example I’ve seen is a company that used an internal mobility incentive program similar to a referral program, offering a bonus to managers based on their employee’s future performance in their new role. 

7. Provide interview training to all employees 

This is the best tip for fighting that ugly Gartner stat about one in four employees not feeling confident in their career at an organization. 

If you aren’t actively showing your employees you care about their career growth, they are going to start looking externally. 

Instead, give them training resources they can access at any time to improve their interview skills. Your employees will be 100% sure that you are preparing them for internal job opportunities.

The best way to do this is with industry and competency-based training. This will help them improve in their current position and prep them for any internal promotion or mobility interviews you throw their way.

8. Offer long-term employee benefits

One last thing you should be doing to encourage internal promotion and mobility (and therefore increase retention) is to offer benefits based on employee tenure. 

Hilton is a great example of this. They offer employees who stay for 20+ years access to team member rates for the rest of their lives. Meaning they can stay at the nicest hotels in the world for a max of $75/night. And if employees stay 10+ years, they get access to friends and family rates for the rest of their lives (35-50% off the standard room rate).

Benefits like this would make any employee think twice before looking externally. 

Key Takeaways 

In the end, I decided to fill my management position from within. 

I opened the position to external candidates, interviewed both internally and externally, and decided to promote one employee and make a horizontal shift for another. Both employees are still there to this day. 

We can clearly see that internal promotion and mobility is great for increasing employee experience and decreasing turnover. 

But let’s keep in mind some of the essential points that make it possible: 

• Internal promotion and mobility shouldn’t be used all the time — you’ll end up limiting company diversity and passing up on great candidates. 
• It needs to be bottom-up and top-down — managers need to support their employees moving and employees need to be open with managers. 
• An internal promotion and mobility process needs to be put in place — employees should get regular training to ensure they will make it to the next level in their career, and get any missing training once they are promoted. 

Now you have everything you need to start hiring from within. And you can always come back to this article if you’re struggling once you begin the process. 

______________________________________________

Need a hand? There are 2 ways we can help you:

• Learn how to build a successful internal promotion strategy here . (Rated with 4.9/5 by 1,000,000 users)
• Give your employees (free) resources to improve their interview skills here . 

Briana Dilworth

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Business Plan Example and Template

Learn how to create a business plan

What is a Business Plan?

A business plan is a document that contains the operational and financial plan of a business, and details how its objectives will be achieved. It serves as a road map for the business and can be used when pitching investors or financial institutions for debt or equity financing .

A business plan should follow a standard format and contain all the important business plan elements. Typically, it should present whatever information an investor or financial institution expects to see before providing financing to a business.

Contents of a Business Plan

A business plan should be structured in a way that it contains all the important information that investors are looking for. Here are the main sections of a business plan:

1. Title Page

The title page captures the legal information of the business, which includes the registered business name, physical address, phone number, email address, date, and the company logo.

2. Executive Summary

The executive summary is the most important section because it is the first section that investors and bankers see when they open the business plan. It provides a summary of the entire business plan. It should be written last to ensure that you don’t leave any details out. It must be short and to the point, and it should capture the reader’s attention. The executive summary should not exceed two pages.

3. Industry Overview

The industry overview section provides information about the specific industry that the business operates in. Some of the information provided in this section includes major competitors, industry trends, and estimated revenues. It also shows the company’s position in the industry and how it will compete in the market against other major players.

4. Market Analysis and Competition

The market analysis section details the target market for the company’s product offerings. This section confirms that the company understands the market and that it has already analyzed the existing market to determine that there is adequate demand to support its proposed business model.

Market analysis includes information about the target market’s demographics , geographical location, consumer behavior, and market needs. The company can present numbers and sources to give an overview of the target market size.

A business can choose to consolidate the market analysis and competition analysis into one section or present them as two separate sections.

5. Sales and Marketing Plan

The sales and marketing plan details how the company plans to sell its products to the target market. It attempts to present the business’s unique selling proposition and the channels it will use to sell its goods and services. It details the company’s advertising and promotion activities, pricing strategy, sales and distribution methods, and after-sales support.

6. Management Plan

The management plan provides an outline of the company’s legal structure, its management team, and internal and external human resource requirements. It should list the number of employees that will be needed and the remuneration to be paid to each of the employees.

Any external professionals, such as lawyers, valuers, architects, and consultants, that the company will need should also be included. If the company intends to use the business plan to source funding from investors, it should list the members of the executive team, as well as the members of the advisory board.

7. Operating Plan

The operating plan provides an overview of the company’s physical requirements, such as office space, machinery, labor, supplies, and inventory . For a business that requires custom warehouses and specialized equipment, the operating plan will be more detailed, as compared to, say, a home-based consulting business. If the business plan is for a manufacturing company, it will include information on raw material requirements and the supply chain.

8. Financial Plan

The financial plan is an important section that will often determine whether the business will obtain required financing from financial institutions, investors, or venture capitalists. It should demonstrate that the proposed business is viable and will return enough revenues to be able to meet its financial obligations. Some of the information contained in the financial plan includes a projected income statement , balance sheet, and cash flow.

9. Appendices and Exhibits

The appendices and exhibits part is the last section of a business plan. It includes any additional information that banks and investors may be interested in or that adds credibility to the business. Some of the information that may be included in the appendices section includes office/building plans, detailed market research , products/services offering information, marketing brochures, and credit histories of the promoters.

Business Plan Template

Here is a basic template that any business can use when developing its business plan:

Section 1: Executive Summary

• Present the company’s mission.
• Describe the company’s product and/or service offerings.
• Give a summary of the target market and its demographics.
• Summarize the industry competition and how the company will capture a share of the available market.
• Give a summary of the operational plan, such as inventory, office and labor, and equipment requirements.

Section 2: Industry Overview

• Describe the company’s position in the industry.
• Describe the existing competition and the major players in the industry.
• Provide information about the industry that the business will operate in, estimated revenues, industry trends, government influences, as well as the demographics of the target market.

Section 3: Market Analysis and Competition

• Define your target market, their needs, and their geographical location.
• Describe the size of the market, the units of the company’s products that potential customers may buy, and the market changes that may occur due to overall economic changes.
• Give an overview of the estimated sales volume vis-à-vis what competitors sell.
• Give a plan on how the company plans to combat the existing competition to gain and retain market share.

Section 4: Sales and Marketing Plan

• Describe the products that the company will offer for sale and its unique selling proposition.
• List the different advertising platforms that the business will use to get its message to customers.
• Describe how the business plans to price its products in a way that allows it to make a profit.
• Give details on how the company’s products will be distributed to the target market and the shipping method.

Section 5: Management Plan

• Describe the organizational structure of the company.
• List the owners of the company and their ownership percentages.
• List the key executives, their roles, and remuneration.
• List any internal and external professionals that the company plans to hire, and how they will be compensated.
• Include a list of the members of the advisory board, if available.

Section 6: Operating Plan

• Describe the location of the business, including office and warehouse requirements.
• Describe the labor requirement of the company. Outline the number of staff that the company needs, their roles, skills training needed, and employee tenures (full-time or part-time).
• Describe the manufacturing process, and the time it will take to produce one unit of a product.
• Describe the equipment and machinery requirements, and if the company will lease or purchase equipment and machinery, and the related costs that the company estimates it will incur.
• Provide a list of raw material requirements, how they will be sourced, and the main suppliers that will supply the required inputs.

Section 7: Financial Plan

• Describe the financial projections of the company, by including the projected income statement, projected cash flow statement, and the balance sheet projection.

Section 8: Appendices and Exhibits

• Quotes of building and machinery leases
• Proposed office and warehouse plan
• Market research and a summary of the target market
• Credit information of the owners
• List of product and/or services

Related Readings

Thank you for reading CFI’s guide to Business Plans. To keep learning and advancing your career, the following CFI resources will be helpful:

• Corporate Structure
• Three Financial Statements
• Business Model Canvas Examples
• See all management & strategy resources
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4 Tips for Successful Internal Promotions

Promoting from within has many benefits. Not only does it help organizations hang on to critical institutional knowledge, but it also boosts employee engagement, builds morale and leads to cross-functional skill-building and career development for staff.

On the flip side, internal promotions can also cause problems when not done correctly. Consider a top performer placed in a managerial role. That employee may have critical job-based expertise but without the appropriate leadership skills they’re being set up for failure. And what about individual contributors? Without an intentional track for promoting these critical team members, they can get left behind and become resentful of the lack of opportunity for advancement. 

While creating a system for employee development is critical, here are four key factors HR professionals must keep in mind to implement them successfully. 

Foster a culture that supports internal growth and movement

A recent report found that nine of the top ten drivers of engagement and turnover relate to organizational factors. This means it’s not just about loving the job you have, working on a great team, or getting along with your manager. What drives employees has more to do with how an organization is run and the leadership that runs it. 

When a company’s culture lacks internal growth and movement, the ability to promote employees or develop career paths becomes much more difficult. Therefore, when it comes to implementing an internal promotion strategy, you’re swimming upstream. According to another recent report , “high internal promotion rates may indicate best-in-class employment practices, while low promotion rates could reflect organizations that are growing rapidly or undergoing change.” It is important that companies foster a culture of upward mobility. Those that don’t will lose them to another organization. 

Proactively identify opportunities for employee growth

To successfully promote from within, you need to regularly think about your current workforce, their skills and aptitudes, and future roles you’ll be opening. There are a couple of ways to approach this: 

• Performance reviews ask business leaders to assess employees across the company on performance and future potential. This information can help you keep a pulse on internal candidates who may be a great fit for future roles.
• Talent mapping is typically conducted by human resources departments. It involves finding the right talent, putting talent in the right roles and coming up with a plan to retain top performers through career pathing. Department leads can also participate by weighing in on the talent strategy you’re working on. This will ensure your plan is optimized to meet business objectives, as well as thinking ahead about ways you can support existing employees with their career growth. 
• Personal development meetings allow employees to share their career development goals. These meetings will help to ensure managers can create a plan to align  where a manager’s employee currently is and where they’d like to end up.
• Leverage workplace behavioral assessments to collect the requisite people data to understand innate drives and needs. These insights can help you match employees with upcoming roles that fit how they like to work and their behavioral strengths. 

By proactively identifying opportunities for existing employees to make lateral career moves, be promoted into more senior positions, or grow into leadership roles, you keep employees engaged and your talent pipeline healthy.

Always be developing leaders

In sales, there’s a mantra: Always be selling. You can apply that concept to employee development: Always be developing leaders.

As your organization grows, your need for leaders will too. It is important to leverage leadership principles and help employees identify areas where they need to bolster their leadership skills at every level. This will help set them up for future growth opportunities whether it be as a subject matter expert, project lead, people manager or executive. 

Keep the candidate experience consistent 

Even though an internal candidate may be a proven performer, companies still need to go through the process of interviewing to ensure fit. Creating a job description that outlines the role’s responsibilities and requirements is a great place to start. 

Make sure the internal candidate matches what you’re looking for. Do they have the leadership skills and competencies to move into a more senior position? Are they wired for this kind of work or will the job be like writing with their non-dominant hand?

If an employee is moving to a new department or team, take a look at how they compare to existing team members. Are they a seamless fit with the team’s current behavioral composition, or would their addition change the team dynamic? This is where a behavioral assessment could come in handy. Insights from the assessment might show while they are not a behavioral fit for one department, they would be great for a department previously not considered. Collecting behavioral data can help leaders align their talent to the specific needs of a team, ultimately setting each employee up for continued success.

The power of promoting comes from within

Sometimes the best candidate for the job is right under your nose. When employees feel that they are in a space that promotes their professional growth and development, they are more likely to be engaged in their work. Having an army of engaged employees will boost the likelihood of your company being able to fill existing open roles from within, cutting down the time and money your company spends during the hiring process significantly. But this all starts with having the right foundation in-place to ensure success.

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50 Candidate Questions for Internal Promotion Interviews

Posted in Organizational Development

When you’ve got a new job opening in your organization, are you getting interest from junior people on your internal team? If you’re doing a good job of employee development and culture building, we hope the answer is yes! But what internal promotion interview questions are you asking them?

It’s no secret, hiring and promoting from within is a huge benefit for most organizations. It is always rewarding when employees raise their hands and ask to move ahead in your organization. When employees see opportunities for advancement, they’re more likely to stay, reducing turnover and increasing organizational affinity. Internal hires are also a known quotient — often requiring shorter onboarding and adapting quicker, enhancing the team’s overall productivity. 

But the process isn’t without its challenges. Concerns such as potential bias or the tendency of some managers to ‘hoard’ and hold back high-performing employees can complicate decisions. But it can also be a challenge to know how to fairly assess these internal candidates and best manage your talent pipeline . 

These are unusual applicants, so it’s important to map the candidate experience to match — right down to the context of the questions you ask.  In this post, we’ll delve into specific questions tailored for internal candidates to help you avoid internal hiring mistakes , and ensure a more fair and effective hiring process and breezy onboarding!

What is the difference between internal and external hiring interviews?

The internal hiring process differs from external hiring in several ways. The employee is already someone you know, so you’ll be less worried about organizational fit or performance ethics.  

That means your interview can skip the ice-breakers, and you can focus on understanding how a candidate has grown within your company, and figure out how ready they are for a new role or team culture. It’s not just about what this candidate can bring anew, but how they have grown and will continue to grow with the company.

Legally, internal interviews might have different compliance requirements, especially in terms of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity, so it’s important to check on and stay in alignment with those local regulations. 

The stakes are also higher in how you handle internal interviews and internal mobility – they’re not just about selecting the best candidate but also about maintaining morale and ensuring every employee feels they have equitable opportunities. Internal candidates also have pre-established relationships and reputations within the company, which can influence the interview process, positively or negatively.

Here are some options to draw from when choosing interview questions for internal promotion:

50 Examples of Interview Questions to Ask During an Internal Promotion Process

Assessing competencies and skills .

It’s important to get a clear understanding of the competencies and skills your internal candidate possesses — along with their personal goals. Ask questions to gauge not just their technical abilities, but also their problem-solving and adaptability. Here are some questions to choose from, depending on your needs:

• Project Execution: Can you describe a complex project you worked on and the specific skills you used to achieve success?
• Problem-Solving: How have you applied your expertise to solve a problem that significantly impacted our company?
• Skill Transferability: What skills have you developed in your current role that you believe are transferable to this new position?
• Rapid Learning: Describe a situation where you had to learn a new skill very quickly. How did you approach it and what was the outcome?
• Knowledge Application: How do you stay updated with the latest industry trends and technologies relevant to our field, and how have you applied this knowledge in your current role?
• Resource and Time Management: Tell us about a time when you had to work with limited resources or under tight deadlines. How did you manage, and what was the result?
• Process Improvement Initiative: Can you provide an example of a time when you identified a potential efficiency improvement in our processes or systems? How did you go about implementing this change?
• Taking the Initiative: Describe a project where you had to take on new responsibilities outside of your usual role. What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
• Balancing Detail and Big Picture: How do you balance attention to detail with the ability to see the bigger picture in your work?
• Complex Data Analysis: Share an instance where you had to analyze complex data or information. How did you ensure accuracy and what insights did you gain?

Exploring Leadership and Management Potential

Leadership potential in internal candidates is often more transparent due to their history within the organization. These questions help uncover their leadership style, how they inspire and motivate teams, and their approach to conflict resolution and delegation.

• Handling Stress: Describe a time when you had to lead a team through a challenging situation. What was your approach and what was the result?
• Motivating a Team: How do you motivate and inspire team members to achieve top performance?
• Conflict Management: Can you give an example of how you have handled conflict across your team?
• Delegation: What is your approach to delegating tasks and how do you ensure they are completed effectively?
• Leadership Style: Describe your leadership style and how you think it fits into our company culture.
• Leadership Decisions: How have you managed to balance team input with making decisive leadership decisions in past projects?
• Feedback and Difficult Conversations: Can you provide an example of a time when you had to give difficult feedback to a team member? How did you approach it and what was the outcome?
• Positivity: Describe how you have fostered a positive work environment and culture in your current or previous roles.
• Managing tasks: How do you prioritize and manage tasks and projects when leading a team under tight deadlines?
• Teamwork : Can you discuss a time when your leadership skills directly contributed to an improvement in team performance or a project’s success?

Understanding the Candidate’s Vision and Goals

This set of questions aims to align the candidate’s personal career aspirations with the role and the future direction of the company.  

• Career Outlook: Where do you see your career in the next five years and how does this promotion align with your professional goals?
• Professional Aspirations: What are your long-term professional aspirations and how do you plan to achieve them?
• Role-Based Growth : How do you think this role will help you grow? What skills do you hope to develop?
• Innovation: What new ideas or innovations do you plan to bring to this position?
• Values and Career Objectives: How does this potential promotion align with your personal values and career objectives?
• Vision: How does this role contribute to the broader vision you have for your career in our industry?
• Goals: Can you discuss a professional milestone you would like to achieve in this role?
• Development: What are your thoughts on continuous learning and professional development in relation to this new position?
• Appetite for Challenge: In what ways do you anticipate this role will challenge you, and how do you plan to meet these challenges?
• Flexibility: Describe a past experience where you had to adjust your goals due to changing circumstances. How would you apply this adaptability in the new role?

Evaluating Internal Growth and Learning

Understanding how a candidate has grown and adapted within the company gives you a good idea of how they will deal with changes and challenges in the future. Choose some of these questions to understand their achievements, goals, and growth style:

• Professional Growth: How have you grown professionally since joining our company?
• Resilience: Can you share an experience where you had to adapt to significant changes within the company?
• Goals and Skills Development: What new responsibilities have you taken on in your current role to expand your skill set?
• Self-directed Learning: How have you contributed to your own professional development while at our company?
• Openness: Can you describe a learning experience that changed your perspective or approach to work?
• Receiving Feedback: In what ways have you sought mentorship or connected with others within the company to enhance your skills?
• Industry Awareness: How do you stay informed and up-to-date with industry trends and how have you applied this knowledge in your current role?
• Process Improvement: Describe a time when you took the initiative to improve a process or system within the company. What motivated you and what was the outcome?
• Learning from Mistakes: Can you discuss a project or task that you considered a failure? What did you learn from it?
• Professional Transformation: Reflecting on your time with the company, what do you consider your most significant professional transformation or milestone?

Probing into Intra-Company Relationships

Understanding how a candidate interacts with others in the company is crucial, especially for a role that requires cross-departmental collaboration.

• Building Interdepartmental Relationships: How do you build and maintain effective working relationships with colleagues in other departments?
• Cross-Departmental Project Success: Can you provide an example of a successful cross-departmental project you were involved in?
• Collaboration and Empathy: Describe how you collaborate with other teams and manage differences of opinion or work styles.
• Interpersonal Communications: How do you navigate the different communication styles and dynamics within our company?
• Communication Strategies and Style: What strategies do you use to ensure clear and effective communication with team members across the company?
• Feedback Incorporation: How have you incorporated feedback from colleagues in other departments to improve your work or the work of your team?
• Conflict Resolution across Silos: Describe a time when you encountered a significant disagreement with a colleague from a different department. How did you resolve it?
• Managing External Stakeholders: Can you give an example of a time when you had to persuade or gain buy-in from a department or team other than your own?
• Leveraging Diverse Strengths: How do you identify and leverage the strengths of colleagues in different departments for project success?
• Navigating Organizational Silos: What steps do you take to build and maintain trust with individuals and teams from different parts of the organization?

Best Practices for Conducting Internal Promotion Interviews

• Ensuring Fairness and Transparency : It’s vital to create an environment where all candidates feel they are given an equal opportunity to showcase their skills and potential. This includes using standardized questions, as provided earlier, and having a diverse panel of interviewers to mitigate unconscious bias. Also, document the interviews thoroughly to ensure decisions are made based on merit and aligned with company values and goals.
• Preparing the Candidate : To help internal candidates present themselves in the best possible light, provide them with adequate resources and guidance on what to expect during the interview. This could include outlining the interview format, the competencies that will be assessed, and any project or presentation requirements.  Providing this guidance not only helps the candidates prepare but also leads to more meaningful and insightful discussions during the interview.
• Providing Constructive Feedback : Regardless of the outcome, offering constructive feedback is crucial and may help to prevent bitterness if an internal applicant is not chosen to advance. For successful candidates, this can also guide their professional development in their new role.   Feedback should be specific, focusing on both strengths and areas for improvement relative to the role they applied for. See here for some interview feedback examples.
• Enhancing Career Pathways Through Thoughtful Internal Promotion Interviews : Thoughtfully conducted internal promotion interviews are also an opportunity to better understand employees’ career aspirations, strengths, and areas for growth, contributing to a culture of continuous learning and development. This approach not only benefits the individual employees but also strengthens the organization by aligning employee growth with organizational goals.

We hope this list of interview questions for promotion within the company was helpful. 

By investing time and effort into refining the internal promotion process, organizations can create a robust framework for nurturing and advancing talent from within. This not only boosts morale and retention but also ensures that the organization is equipped with leaders who are thoroughly aligned with its values and vision.

Ready to learn more about nurturing talent across your organization? Don’t miss out on Enboarder’s on-demand webinar: Nurturing Talent from Within: The Power of Internal Mobility to discover the keys to unlocking your employees’ potential and learn how to create a culture that fosters growth and opportunity from within.

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7 Business Plan Examples to Inspire Your Own (2024)

Need support creating your business plan? Check out these business plan examples for inspiration.

Any aspiring entrepreneur researching how to start a business will likely be advised to write a business plan. But few resources provide business plan examples to really guide you through writing one of your own.

Here are some real-world and illustrative business plan examples to help you craft your business plan .

7 business plan examples: section by section

The business plan examples in this article follow this template:

• Executive summary.  An introductory overview of your business.
• Company description.  A more in-depth and detailed description of your business and why it exists.
• Market analysis.  Research-based information about the industry and your target market.
• Products and services.  What you plan to offer in exchange for money.
• Marketing plan.   The promotional strategy to introduce your business to the world and drive sales.
• Logistics and operations plan.  Everything that happens in the background to make your business function properly.
• Financial plan.  A breakdown of your numbers to show what you need to get started as well as to prove viability of profitability.
• Executive summary

Your  executive summary  is a page that gives a high-level overview of the rest of your business plan. It’s easiest to save this section for last.

In this  free business plan template , the executive summary is four paragraphs and takes a little over half a page:

• Company description

You might repurpose your company description elsewhere, like on your About page, social media profile pages, or other properties that require a boilerplate description of your small business.

Soap brand ORRIS  has a blurb on its About page that could easily be repurposed for the company description section of its business plan.

You can also go more in-depth with your company overview and include the following sections, like in the example for Paw Print Post:

• Business structure.  This section outlines how you  registered your business —as an  LLC , sole proprietorship, corporation, or other  business type . “Paw Print Post will operate as a sole proprietorship run by the owner, Jane Matthews.”
• Nature of the business.  “Paw Print Post sells unique, one-of-a-kind digitally printed cards that are customized with a pet’s unique paw prints.”
• Industry.  “Paw Print Post operates primarily in the pet industry and sells goods that could also be categorized as part of the greeting card industry.”
• Background information.  “Jane Matthews, the founder of Paw Print Post, has a long history in the pet industry and working with animals, and was recently trained as a graphic designer. She’s combining those two loves to capture a niche in the market: unique greeting cards customized with a pet’s paw prints, without needing to resort to the traditional (and messy) options of casting your pet’s prints in plaster or using pet-safe ink to have them stamp their ‘signature.’”
• Business objectives.  “Jane will have Paw Print Post ready to launch at the Big Important Pet Expo in Toronto to get the word out among industry players and consumers alike. After two years in business, Jane aims to drive $150,000 in annual revenue from the sale of Paw Print Post’s signature greeting cards and have expanded into two new product categories.”
• Team.  “Jane Matthews is the sole full-time employee of Paw Print Post but hires contractors as needed to support her workflow and fill gaps in her skill set. Notably, Paw Print Post has a standing contract for five hours a week of virtual assistant support with Virtual Assistants Pro.”

Your  mission statement  may also make an appearance here.  Passionfruit  shares its mission statement on its company website, and it would also work well in its example business plan.

• Market analysis

The market analysis consists of research about supply and demand, your target demographics, industry trends, and the competitive landscape. You might run a SWOT analysis and include that in your business plan. 

Here’s an example  SWOT analysis  for an online tailored-shirt business:

You’ll also want to do a  competitive analysis  as part of the market research component of your business plan. This will tell you who you’re up against and give you ideas on how to differentiate your brand. A broad competitive analysis might include:

• Target customers
• Unique value add  or what sets their products apart
• Sales pitch
• Price points  for products
• Shipping  policy
• Products and services

This section of your business plan describes your offerings—which products and services do you sell to your customers? Here’s an example for Paw Print Post:

• Marketing plan

It’s always a good idea to develop a marketing plan  before you launch your business. Your marketing plan shows how you’ll get the word out about your business, and it’s an essential component of your business plan as well.

The Paw Print Post focuses on four Ps: price, product, promotion, and place. However, you can take a different approach with your marketing plan. Maybe you can pull from your existing  marketing strategy , or maybe you break it down by the different marketing channels. Whatever approach you take, your marketing plan should describe how you intend to promote your business and offerings to potential customers.

• Logistics and operations plan

The Paw Print Post example considered suppliers, production, facilities, equipment, shipping and fulfillment, and inventory.

Financial plan

The financial plan provides a breakdown of sales, revenue, profit, expenses, and other relevant financial metrics related to funding and profiting from your business.

Ecommerce brand  Nature’s Candy’s financial plan  breaks down predicted revenue, expenses, and net profit in graphs.

It then dives deeper into the financials to include:

• Funding needs
• Projected profit-and-loss statement
• Projected balance sheet
• Projected cash-flow statement

You can use this financial plan spreadsheet to build your own financial statements, including income statement, balance sheet, and cash-flow statement.

Types of business plans, and what to include for each

A one-page business plan is meant to be high level and easy to understand at a glance. You’ll want to include all of the sections, but make sure they’re truncated and summarized:

• Executive summary: truncated
• Market analysis: summarized
• Products and services: summarized
• Marketing plan: summarized
• Logistics and operations plan: summarized
• Financials: summarized

A startup business plan is for a new business. Typically, these plans are developed and shared to secure  outside funding . As such, there’s a bigger focus on the financials, as well as on other sections that determine viability of your business idea—market research, for example.

• Market analysis: in-depth
• Financials: in-depth

Your internal business plan is meant to keep your team on the same page and aligned toward the same goal.

A strategic, or growth, business plan is a bigger picture, more-long-term look at your business. As such, the forecasts tend to look further into the future, and growth and revenue goals may be higher. Essentially, you want to use all the sections you would in a normal business plan and build upon each.

• Market analysis: comprehensive outlook
• Products and services: for launch and expansion
• Marketing plan: comprehensive outlook
• Logistics and operations plan: comprehensive outlook
• Financials: comprehensive outlook

Feasibility

Your feasibility business plan is sort of a pre-business plan—many refer to it as simply a feasibility study. This plan essentially lays the groundwork and validates that it’s worth the effort to make a full business plan for your idea. As such, it’s mostly centered around research.

Set yourself up for success as a business owner

Building a good business plan serves as a roadmap you can use for your ecommerce business at launch and as you reach each of your business goals. Business plans create accountability for entrepreneurs and synergy among teams, regardless of your  business model .

Kickstart your ecommerce business and set yourself up for success with an intentional business planning process—and with the sample business plans above to guide your own path.

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Business plan examples FAQ

How do i write a simple business plan, what is the best format to write a business plan, what are the 4 key elements of a business plan.

• Executive summary: A concise overview of the company's mission, goals, target audience, and financial objectives.
• Business description: A description of the company's purpose, operations, products and services, target markets, and competitive landscape.
• Market analysis: An analysis of the industry, market trends, potential customers, and competitors.
• Financial plan: A detailed description of the company's financial forecasts and strategies.

What are the 3 main points of a business plan?

• Concept: Your concept should explain the purpose of your business and provide an overall summary of what you intend to accomplish.
• Contents: Your content should include details about the products and services you provide, your target market, and your competition.
• Cashflow: Your cash flow section should include information about your expected cash inflows and outflows, such as capital investments, operating costs, and revenue projections.

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How to create a proposal for a promotion.

Creating a proposal for a promotion isn't as difficult as you may think. Most employers are willing to discuss the possibility of promoting you, as long as they have the resources necessary for compensation and agree that you deserve to take on more responsibilities. A proposal for your own promotion doesn't have to follow a particular format, although it should be professional looking and typed. It's usually best to present the proposal to your boss or superiors in person, although it might be appropriate to e-mail a copy of the proposal to them as well.

Write the Intro

Write an introductory paragraph that clearly defines what position you have now and what position you would like to have. If the position you want does not exist at your company, define what new role you could fulfill and offer a suggested title for the position. For example, if you see there is a need for a public relations coordinator at your company, state this in simple terms.

List Your Qualifications

List the accomplishments and reasons that qualify you for the promotion. These can be in bullet-point form or paragraph form. Explain how you are not only meeting the requirements of your current job title, but how you are exceeding expectations and would like the opportunity to take on more responsibilities. Include noteworthy achievements such as a big sale or winning an important client. In this section, remind your boss how long you have been doing your current job and how you have grown in the position since you started. Cite any company policies about promotions, as well. For example, your contract might state that you're qualified for a promotion after a certain number of years in a position.

Explain Your Reasons

List reasons why you think you can handle the responsibilities of the promotion. For example, if the promotion would require more face time with clients, remind your boss how well you are currently performing in client meetings or how competent you are at giving company presentations.

Acknowledge that you want to become a better asset for the company. Although you may want the promotion for reasons like money or status, it's important to convey that you also want the promotion because you're invested in the welfare of the company. Convey your dedication and commitment to the company's goals and explain how the promotion could help you assist with furthering them.

Do the Math

Numbers carry weight for any business decision. If you have figures to show that promoting you will benefit the company financially, put them in your proposal. For example, if you want a sales management position, showing how much sales will probably increase as a result will help your argument.

Close With an Opening

Include a closing paragraph that indicates your desire to discuss the subject further in person. This allows you to omit certain questions about salary or the date you might receive the promotion, since these types of details should be discussed in person with your boss.

Related Articles

How to write a letter of intent for a promotion →.

How to Negotiate Promotion With Your Manager →

How to Write a Recommendation for a Promotion →

How to Write a Job Promotion Letter →

How to Write a Letter of Interest for a Promotion →

An Objectives & Goals Clarification Meeting With a Manager →

• Quint Careers; Moving Up the Ladder: 10 Strategies for Getting Yourself Promoted; Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.

Mara Tyler is a writer and public relations consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. With more than eight years of experience, she specializes in health, nutrition, women's lifestyle and marketing. Tyler holds a Bachelor of Science in public relations.

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