Internal Candidates

At Pythia Cyber we combine behavioral science with classic cybersecurity because bad behavior so often beats good technology.

As part of our behavioral science toolkit we have three different talent assessments: one for Cybersecurity Engineers, one for Cybersecurity Managers and one for Cybersecurity Leaders.

A common misconception is that these three assessments are beginner, intermediate and advanced assessments. This misconception is rooted in the widely embraced fantasy of promotion as a reward for performance. In this fantasy all careers have the same trajectory: get a job, work hard, move up the ladder until you cannot rise any further. This fantasy is based on the fallacy that the core talents underlying success are the same at each stage of one's career, or that most people happen to have all three sets of talents. Both of these are fallacies: it is a rare person indeed who can succeed at all levels of the organization. Such a person is a unicorn. Don't count on unicorns. Reward performance with money and perks. Promote based on talent.

I am often asked what is wrong with the way that things are and the answer is simple: promoting someone to a new kind of job based on their performance in a different kind of job leads to a couple of problems. You certainly lose them as a star performer and you likely gain them as a mediocre manager. Over time this makes your entire organization mediocre, unless you exclusively hire unicorns. Even that doesn't really work: having everyone capable of doing everything rarely leads to focus and clean boundaries.

Your hiring needs to do two things: primarily your hiring needs to make the present viable. We all live in the present. Without the present there is no future. Secondarily your hiring needs to support the future. We all hope to live in the future someday. Building the future takes foresight and planning. So you must always choose the talents required for the present but you would be a fool to ignore other talents you might need in the future.

This is why while our assessments are not intended as stepping stones they are interconnected. Our engineer assessment includes a section which predicts whether or not the candidate should take the manager assessment and our manager assessment can be used to predict whether or not the candidate should take the leadership assessment. This information will not help you make the decision about the present but once you have made the decision about the present then you have a jump on the future.

Note that we are not arguing against internal candidates. If done properly, promoting from within is efficient, effective and retains precious institutional memory. We are arguing against two common mistakes and for a better idea. We are arguing against having one process for external candidates and another for internal candidates. Do the best thing in every case.

We understand the temptation to cut corners when looking to fill an important role. Hiring is often hasty. People's lives can change quickly and then even the best of them can leave you without much warning. It is a rare job posting that you can really take your time filling. (It feels like job postings either need immediate filling or can languish forever while those duties fall on innocent shoulders, but that is another post.)

A song lyric I particularly dislike is fitting here: if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. This is the first common mistake people make with internal candidates: you settle for the devil you know. Is this candidate ideal? No. Is this candidate minimally competent for the new role? Well, maybe. Probably. And they are right there. And they were at least OK in their current job--perhaps even really good it. If you squint, the internal candidate is a fine choice.

The second common mistake is having a perfect internal candidate for promotion already picked out because when you hired them into their current job, that is what you intended. In this case the person you want to promote is likely doing not very good at their current job because that is not why you hired them. A variation of this scenario is promoting someone you like or feel is loyal to you, without regard to their talents.

In the first case you are weakening your organization's talent culture by putting someone into the wrong job just because that someone is available and known to you. This degrades the future. In the second case you previously hired someone inappropriate as some kind of investment. This degrades the present.

What we recommend instead is using our assessments for both external and internal candidates in order to get beyond performance and into potential. Don't weigh the present against the future so much as ensure present targeted talent and catalog future potential talent. The goal isn't filling seats for a year. The goal is the right people in the right jobs doing the right things. This is hard. We can help. Ask us how