A New Hire vs. Promoting from Within

Founder's Journal

Morning Brew

Careers, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you know whether to invest in a new hire or give a current employee a promotion? I breakdown how to think about one of the toughest decisions you can make in a business. Check out the full transcript at https://foundersjournal.morningbrew.com to learn more, and if you have any ideas for our show, email me at [email protected] or my DMs are open @businessbarista. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.
0:05.6	Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,
0:11.3	the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,
0:16.2	a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about one of the toughest decisions that you can make
0:22.8	in a business. Let's hop into it.
0:28.7	I'm going to paint a picture for you. You are a leader at a company and you have the very
0:34.3	difficult responsibility of hiring a new director in your division. You write up a job description
0:41.7	and then you ask yourself an even more difficult question, hire or promote.
0:48.3	Do you hire someone from outside of the company to fill the director role, or do you promote someone
0:59.3	internally from within the company, someone that you think can step up to the challenge?
1:04.8	It is an age-old business and leadership question, but I've never seen someone give a really
1:10.8	good answer. So that's what I'm going to try to do for you in this episode. And so let's start with
1:16.0	my general rule of thumb. If you have an internal employee who is an absolute all-star in their job,
1:24.0	meaning they have great work ethic, they are a great cultural fit, and they are great at adapting
1:30.0	because of their ability to think critically, I would try as hard as possible to promote them.
1:37.1	If they have, let's call it 70% of the experience or skills that they need for this director level
1:44.0	job that you want them in, I would say don't even think about it, promote them. If they have less
1:50.3	than 70% of the necessary skills and experience, then I think it becomes a very serious discussion
1:57.0	about the risks of them not ramping up the curve fast enough versus the risks that come with hiring
2:02.7	someone externally. But let's just say we're talking about the scenario where the internal employee
2:08.3	has less than 70% of the right experience or skills that is needed for this elevated role.
2:14.4	Here is the mental process that I would run through if I was going through this decision.
	...

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