Organizations spend the majority of their hiring resources on finding and screening external candidates. But when you need to fill a position, the most cost-effective and practical thing you can do is hire someone from within. In fact, most hiring in companies is done internally. Still, the internal interview is often thought of as something to check off on a hiring to-do list rather than a source of real information. If you already know the person, what else is there to learn, right? Wrong. When conducted well, internal interviews can provide valuable new insight into a known candidate.

What the Experts Say

Whether you worked with a candidate closely or you just "know of" her, don't skimp on the internal interview process. "Just because you know someone well doesn't mean you will know if they will be able to perform well in a new job," says Susan Cantrell, senior research fellow at Accenture's Institute for High Performance and co-author of Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management through Customization. Assuming you know all the candidate's skills, capabilities, and potential is dangerous. "Most hiring managers find out little additional information about a candidate during the interview; they don't get to the right level of detail to make their questions meaningful, and they rely too much on subjective, non-criteria based judgment," says Cantrell.

Instead, be disciplined about how you conduct the interview. "There's no point in asking questions that will reveal information you already know, so the focus should be on new information," says Peter Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and the director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the author of Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in the Age of Uncertainty.

To conduct internal interviews that are worth your time and provide new and useful insight into the candidate, consider the following(...)

> Suite de l'article: Harvard Business Review