BUSI 443 Week 1 Discussion Board Forum 1 Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: Staffing Strategy

BUSI 443 Workforce Planning and Employment, Discussion Board Forum 1 Thread and Reply

Thread by [Student Name]

The forum prompt and the classmate are composites; the textbook and the research cited are real, and the structure follows Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 443.

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Organizations often reach outside to fill important jobs, assuming that an outsider brings fresh skills that current employees lack. I want to argue that firms hire externally more often than the evidence supports, and that developing and promoting their own people should be the default for most roles.

Heneman et al. (2015) present staffing strategy as a series of choices, including whether to acquire talent that is ready to perform or to develop talent over time, and whether to staff from external or internal sources. Each choice has costs and benefits; the question is which better fits a firm's needs.

Research suggests that the costs of external hiring are often underestimated. Bidwell (2011) studied an investment bank and compared workers hired from outside with those promoted into similar jobs. External hires were paid substantially more, yet their performance reviews were weaker for roughly their first two years and their exit rates higher, while they brought more education and experience on paper. The bank paid more for workers who, at least initially, delivered less.

Why would experienced outsiders underperform? Ployhart and Moliterno (2011) explain that human capital becomes a resource for a firm when individual knowledge, skills and abilities combine with the firm's tasks, people and context. Much of what makes an employee valuable is learned inside the organization: its systems, relationships and ways of working. An outsider must rebuild that knowledge, while an internal candidate already has it. Internal promotion also sends a message to everyone else in the organization: good work leads somewhere, which supports both motivation and retention among the employees who were not promoted this time.

None of this means external hiring is wrong. It makes sense when a firm needs skills it truly lacks, such as a new technology, or when it wants to change its culture. But managers should treat external hiring as a deliberate choice for those situations, not as the automatic answer, and they should count onboarding time, higher pay and turnover risk in the cost of every outside hire.

A practical rule follows from the research. Before posting an important job externally, a manager should ask three questions: does anyone inside have most of the needed skills, could the remaining skills be developed within a reasonable time, and does the job depend heavily on knowledge of our own systems and people? If the answers are yes, an internal candidate is likely to perform better sooner, cost less and stay longer. If the job requires capabilities the organization has never had, outside hiring is the better path, but it should come with a structured onboarding plan.

Reply to Morgan

Morgan, I agree with your argument that the retail chain in your example should promote store managers from within, and your point about employees' knowledge of local customers is a strong one. I would add that how internal jobs are filled matters almost as much as filling them internally.

Keller (2018) studied internal hiring at a large company and compared two processes: posting, in which open jobs are advertised and employees apply, and slotting, in which managers choose a candidate without an open process. Hires made through posting performed better than those made through slotting, and the difference reflected the wider and better-matched pool of candidates that posting created. When managers slot people quietly, they tend to choose from those they already know, and strong candidates elsewhere in the organization never get considered.

For the retail chain, this suggests posting every assistant and store manager opening across the region, so that a capable assistant manager in one store can compete for a promotion in another. Heneman et al. (2015) describe internal recruitment as requiring the same planning and communication as external recruitment, including a clear message about the job and the criteria for selection. An open process also signals fairness, which matters to the employees who are not selected. Posting also creates a record of who applied and why they were or were not chosen, which helps the chain plan development for the candidates who were close but not yet ready, and it lets the human resources team see where the next generation of store managers is coming from. Would the chain be willing to share its promotion criteria openly with all assistant managers?

References

Bidwell, M. (2011). Paying more to get less: The effects of external hiring versus internal mobility. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(3), 369-407. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839211433562

Heneman, H. G., III, Judge, T. A., & Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D. (2015). Staffing organizations (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Keller, J. R. (2018). Posting and slotting: How hiring processes shape the quality of hire and compensation in internal labor markets. Administrative Science Quarterly, 63(4), 848-878. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839217736045

Ployhart, R. E., & Moliterno, T. P. (2011). Emergence of the human capital resource: A multilevel model. Academy of Management Review, 36(1), 127-150. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0318