Internal or external hiring: what are your options, and when do you choose which?

Internal hiring means filling the role with someone who already works for you: through promotion, a move to another team or an internal vacancy. External hiring means bringing someone in from outside, through a job site, your own careers page, social media, an agency or the public employment service.

In between sits a route that is often confused with internal hiring: recruiting through your own staff. The new colleague comes from outside, but you find them through your team. In the UWV survey it is one of the most used methods. What such a referral scheme delivers and where it stops is covered in does employee referral work.

Note the scope of the UWV figures: the survey ran in the Netherlands in autumn 2022 and employers could name several methods at once. The percentages therefore do not add up to a hundred, and they say nothing about which route actually produced the new hire.

Internal hiring pays off when the role needs a lot of knowledge of your own processes, customers or systems and someone wants to take that step. Onboarding is shorter, you already know the person, and you show your team that growing within is possible. The downside: their old role becomes vacant, so the gap only moves one place along.

External hiring is better when you need a skill that is missing inside, when the team could use a fresh perspective, or when several vacancies are open at once. The downside: it takes longer, costs more and carries a bigger risk of a poor fit. The external routes are set out under find staff.

First, write down what the role must deliver in its first six months, not just which qualifications it needs. Second, look honestly at whether someone inside can do that in the foreseeable future, perhaps with some training. Third, count the follow-on vacancy. If you promote someone, you often have to fill their old role externally. Fourth, set a deadline. If nobody suitable responds to an internal vacancy within two to three weeks, start external hiring rather than waiting longer.

If you have your own recruitment team, it often decides the route already. How an external partner then complements rather than replaces it is explained in RPO versus an internal recruitment team.

Do I have to advertise a vacancy internally first?

Not always by law, but in the Netherlands it is often set out in the collective agreement or in arrangements with the works council. Check those first. Even without an obligation, a short internal round pays off: you avoid missing someone who has long wanted to grow, and colleagues do not see an external hire as a missed chance.

Is recruiting through your own staff internal or external?

External. The new colleague does not work for you yet; you only reach them through your team. That is exactly why it works so well: people know the work and the atmosphere, and usually only pass on someone they think will fit. It does not replace active hiring, because a team's network usually runs dry after a few referrals.

How do I combine an internal recruitment team with an external partner?

Agree in advance who does what: who handles the internal vacancy, who searches outside and who makes the final decision. A partner should adapt to the way you work, not the other way around. What that looks like in the first weeks is described under RPO implementation and in the questions from internal recruitment teams.

SocialFind wrote this article based on the UWV report Wervingsmethoden van werkgevers of 13 June 2023, checked on 21 October 2026. If you would like articles like this in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.