A client called me last week about a Director role he needed to fill. Growing company, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. He had two paths in front of him: promote a manager who’d been with him for four years or run an external search for someone with more experience.
He wanted my read. What he really wanted was permission to go external, because that felt safer to him.
This comes up almost every time a client is filling a senior role. And the honest answer is more nuanced than “always promote from within” or “you need fresh blood.” It depends on what the role needs and what you have in front of you.
The instinct most people get wrong
Most owners lean toward outside hires when the stakes feel high. There’s a logic to it. Someone who’s done it before somewhere else feels like the safer bet.
The problem is what you’re comparing. When a candidate walks in for an interview, you see their best self. The resume is polished, and the answers are rehearsed. They’ve had time to think about how they want to come across. You haven’t lived with them yet, so you don’t know what’s going to drive you crazy in six months.
The internal candidate is the opposite. You’ve watched them for years. You’ve seen them have bad weeks and fumble meetings. You know exactly what their weaknesses are because you’ve been working alongside them.
It’s a lot like dating. The outside hire is the person you’re enamored with because they say and do all the right things on your dates. You haven’t moved in with them yet, so you don’t know they leave their dirty laundry on the floor instead of putting it in the hamper. The employee you’ve been working with for years is like the roommate who never washes dishes, and that’s all you can focus on. You take for granted that they always pay the rent on time and water your plants for you when you go on vacation.
We ignore the good and focus on the bad because the good things don’t cause us problems. Most owners don’t realize they’re doing it.
What boredom and morale cost
There’s another piece of this that gets missed. When you keep going external, your strongest internal people notice.
Hire someone with the exact skills for the role and yes, they can do the job on Monday. But if they can do the job on Monday, what are they doing on Wednesday? People who are good at what they do get bored quickly when there’s no stretch. And bored people look at job boards.
Same thing on the other side. Not every employee expects to be promoted, but your motivated people do. The ones working their tails off and actually getting results. If they watch you bring in outside talent every time a senior role opens up, they don’t say anything. They just quietly start doing less. Or they leave for the company that does promote them.
Either way, you paid for the external hire and lost the internal one. That’s an expensive trade.
Skills are the easy part
This is where I push back on a lot of hiring decisions. People over-index on skills because skills are easy to evaluate. They show up on a resume. You can ask about them in an interview.
I like to say, “I can teach you to add one plus one, but I can’t teach you to want to add one plus one.”
The thing I’m actually looking for in any role is closer to mindset. Is this person driven? Do they have common sense? Can they work across different personalities and functions without getting tangled up in politics? Do they want to get better at what they do, or are they coasting? Those qualities don’t show up on a resume and you can’t teach them on the job.
An internal candidate who has those qualities and is missing some of the technical skills will figure the job out. An external candidate with all the technical skills and none of the mindset will look great for three months and then fall apart.
When external is the right call
There are exceptions. If you’re moving into a new market or building out a function you’ve never had before, you may genuinely need someone who has done it elsewhere. Promoting your best operator into a role that requires experience you don’t have in-house is setting them up to fail.
Same thing if your internal bench is thin. If the qualities you need for the role aren’t present in your team, no amount of grooming is going to get you there in the time you have.
The work is figuring out which situation you’re in. That requires being honest about both the role and the people, which is harder than it sounds when you’ve been heads-down running the business.
How to actually decide
The right way to think about this is to start with the role. What does this position actually need from the person sitting in it? Not just skills, but how they think and what they do when no one is watching.
Then look at your team with fresh eyes. Strip away the bad weeks and the small frustrations and ask who has the qualities the role needs. Sometimes the answer is obvious once you’ve separated performance noise from real capability.
If you find that person, give them the shot and the support to grow into it. If you don’t, run a real external search.
The mistake is doing it the other way around. Most owners pick the candidate first and then build the role around what that person can do. That’s how you end up with the wrong person in a key seat.
If you’re filling a role and can’t tell which way to go on this, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I have with clients every week. Happy to be a second set of eyes.
