Companies are regularly faced with the challenge of finding the ideal personnel to fill vacant management and key positions. A decisive point here is recruiting a healthy mix of people from within and from outside the company. The filling of vacancies from outside the company is necessary in many cases – to expand the company’s know-how, to avoid the effects of “company blinders”, to secure the company’s transformation and innovation capabilities, etc.

In view of the growing aggression in the war for talents, the identification and early binding of in-company high-performance and high-potential personnel are rapidly gaining in importance for many companies. Cost considerations also play a role here: recruiting from within the enterprise is usually less expensive because no “risk surcharge” need be paid for the change of a new employee, the time period required to learn the ropes of the position is substantially shorter, and there are no external recruiting expenses. At the same time, in-house recruiting increases staff loyalty, contributing to a positive internal employer branding – the high performers are kept “on board.”

If one is to recognize and make optimal use of the internal management potential which exists, the establishment of effective instruments for assessment of performance and potential, for talent management, and for successor planning are required – a challenging aspect, above all on the playing field of internationally active firms.

Making decisions about the selection of suitable in-company candidates for management positions is relatively simple for small companies; as a rule, there is high in-house transparency regarding the quality and potential of the staff owing to the personal contact with the management. In contrast, corporations doing business on an international scale, which often employ several thousand managers, require structured methods and processes harmonized globally if they are to achieve transparency regarding the quality and potential of their staffs. This is especially important in the case of foreign subsidiaries which are highly self-sufficient in their operation because their managers at the second and third management tiers outside of the operational units remain largely invisible. When preference is given to employees in the parent company or at corporate headquarters, we frequently find a greater employee fluctuation in the subsidiaries because many of the high performers believe their career opportunities are highly limited.