How Digital Certificates and Badges Facilitate Internal Candidate Sourcing

Plenty of companies decide to increase hiring efficiency through internal candidate search.

Internal hiring is quicker, costs less, and lets you retain the high-quality staff members you’ve invested in and developed over the years. The “new” employee is already familiar with the company and some team members, making them quick to onboard and start their new line of work.

So, what’s not to like then?

There are certain risks when attempting to fill in the new role internally:

• Miscalculating how much the employee selected for the position needs to learn for the new role, and spending too much time and resources to do so when an external hire would be a better fit;
• Coming back to square one with hiring: you still need to hire for their old position;
• You (or the employee) misjudging how well they’d do in their new role;
• If several people apply for a new internal position, some may be dissatisfied when rejected and feel it’s unfair that someone else got the job.

However, you shouldn’t let these issues deter you and miss out on internal hiring. Digital certificates and badges are a quick and easy fix that lets you keep all the benefits of internal hiring.

Digital credentials by Virtualbadge.io were developed for companies that want to:

• Pick the perfect employee for the promotion/internal hiring;
• Make internal workforce restructuring faster and easier;
• Improve employee retention and satisfaction with fair hiring practices, transparency, and career growth options;
• Increase employee productivity by creating competent teams and excellent employee education programs;
• Close the career gaps in their workforce, and rise above the competition.

Let’s focus on internal candidate sourcing and accompanying benefits, and how to make it work with digital badges.📛

Finding the Perfect Candidates With Ease

When choosing between several nearly equal internal candidates, all of which are dedicated, hard workers, and familiar with the way your products/services work — the nuances will tip the scale in favor of one candidate.

At this moment, it’s easy to misjudge and make a mistake. 

To be sure you’ve picked the best option, you need to consider both candidates’ personality traits and skillfulness. 

While different tests, techniques, HR tools, and even a hunch let you decide about the ideal personality type, digital certificates, and badges let you assess their skills with razor-sharp precision.

Here’s how it works:

• The company gets to create different badge types for its workforce, signifying relevant skills that help differentiate between team members’ knowledge, experience, and seniority.
• Each employee is awarded a badge that carries information about the specific skills they possess, knowledge level, and abilities. For example, a customer service representative may have badges for specific client types, experience (hours spent on the phone with clients, or number of tickets resolved positively), and language proficiency (C2 in English, B2 in Spanish).
• Badge collections determine employees’ areas of expertise; while one has years of hands-on experience, the other knows several languages spoken in key markets.
• Managers, team leaders, and HRs can filter through employee profiles, review badge collections, and pick an employee whose badges confirm they’re the best choice for the new internal role.

Without badges, the internal hiring process is slow and more expensive. 

Employers may have to spend weeks testing, determining who to hire, mending the faulty hire, or onboarding the employee — when another would take less time to onboard. 

Employee Mobility: Horizontal and Vertical Growth

Horizontal growth moves the employees to entirely new roles, leading to different industries or departments within the company.

Vertical growth describes a traditional movement upward in the related role, starting from an entry-level position to the head of a department.

Internal employee mobility (also called talent/career mobility) signifies company strength: businesses that care about internal mobility are better at adapting to industry shifts, and have a happier workforce. With good employee mobility, it’s easier for companies to restructure, reform, or hire internally.

Digital certificates and badges are one of the important assets you can use to boost internal talent mobility:

• As seen above, finding the right candidate is faster and easier, without the need to seek outside your business;
• When a candidate’s old position becomes vacant, it’s easier to delegate tasks to other team members fairly, so no one’s schedule is overbooked, and everyone gets the task they’re equipped to do. Meanwhile, you can seek the person who can fill the old position with the exact job description in mind;
• Since the Virtualbadge.io platform provides a full look into the skills each employee has, employers can sport who’s eligible for promotion, and who is easier to transition to another department with plenty of transferable skills — facilitating both vertical and horizontal growth.

Shaping the Workforce to Your Company's Needs

What if no one in your team perfectly matches the job description?

Do you give up and hire externally, or pick the closest match and educate them?

Whatever you decide, Virtualbadge.io has your back.

Our online credentials carry important information about employee skills, competencies, and education. The platform provides a holistic view of your workforce, so you can spot which skills your employees lack, and which are abundant.

As a result, you can effectively close the skill gaps:

• Create a thorough onboarding program that teaches the best internal candidate all they need to start working in their new role as soon as possible;
• Think ahead and create an educational program for a larger part of the staff;
• Make an informed decision about internal candidate sourcing, and decide against internal hiring if the opposite makes more sense, and you find someone outside with better expertise.

Internal Hiring and Promotion Transparency

Finally, issuing digital certificates and badges to your workforce helps increase the fairness of the internal hiring process. 

On the Virtualbadge.io platform, each employee has their own credential profile. Once the job description is available for the employees, any interested party can review it and see whether their knowledge levels match the criteria. Team leaders and HRs have access to these skill profiles, and may compare and select the candidates with the skill profiles that match the job profile.

This also applies to promotions: employees’ digital certificates and badges make it easier to see who is eligible for an upgrade in responsibilities and compensation.

Using digital credentials this way facilitates skill-based hiring, and promotes transparency in the workplace. With job requirements known in advance and announced company-wide, everyone can observe the selection process. Higher-ups can pick the most skillful employee instead of letting their bias and interpersonal relationships decide.

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