When it comes to hiring, there are three common complaints you are likely to hear if you spend any time with management teams in small and medium-sized businesses:
- Hiring the right people is one of the most difficult challenges we face,
- It is hard to find people with the right set of skills to accomplish our goals, and
- We do not have the budget to hire all of the people we need.
But often, there is a solution to these problems hidden in plain sight. And that is your current workforce.
Many smaller businesses do not have the same hierarchical structure that most large companies have put in place. This is a good thing when it comes to managing a team, but it can create functional boundaries that make hiring and professional development more difficult.
Because there is no clear upward path to new roles within the organization, your people often reach a plateau, wherein they can either look for new challenges outside of the organization or they can stagnate right where they are.
But new project, new priorities, and new strategies bring with them an opportunity for you as a manager to rediscover the talent on your current roster. Rather than immediately planning for an external hire to fill the new role in your plans, think about who you can tap internally.
Chances are, there is underutilized talent in your organization just sitting there, waiting to be discovered.
The following are some ways you can tap into that talent:
1. Cultivate it over time.
In order to encourage the talent that you already have to continue to grow and develop professionally, you should make that a regular part of working for your organization. Give people access to professional development opportunities throughout their tenure and follow up with those that take advantage to find out what they learned and how they enjoyed it.
2. Be transparent about future plans.
In order to give people the best chance of future success, it is important to be open and clear about where the company is going. When people know the types of roles and positions that are likely to be necessary in the future, they can begin to prepare and adapt to those roles today. This kind of thinking can guide their professional development, ensuring that they end up with the right types of skills the company will need tomorrow.
3. Incentivize internal moves.
Don’t sit by and assume that people will on your team will raise their hand and volunteer to take on new tasks. But incentivize them to do so. If your company does not have a traditional path to promotion, you need to motivate people to think outside the box. Encourage moves within and across departments with financial and non-financial incentives.
4. Establish cross-training norms.
To ensure that you don’t lose institutional knowledge when someone moves to a new position, it should be a regular practice within your company to make sure at least two people know how to do any one task. This also creates a sense of shared responsibility which can help teams grow closer. When each person is responsible to making sure that others are knowledgeable about their roles and assignments, we can eliminate some of the boundaries that make hiring and training so difficult.