Interview employees for a promotion

For an employer, promoting within the company has been an effective strategy for years. Internal promotion can boost motivation, morale, and fulfill employee's needs for increasing their status within the company. Selecting the right candidate for the job can be a stressful experience for a manager. Here are a few tips to help you interview employees for a promotion:

Conduct performance evaluations on each employee. Sits down with an employee every six months and discusses their performance. You can discuss goals with the employee for a period of time until their next performance evaluation. How well the employee measures up to these goals can help you determine if they are eligible for a promotion.

Provide employees a chance to declare their interest in a job promotion. Let everyone know there is a new opening for a position and everyone that would like to apply should talk to you about it.

Always give employees a chance to improve if they are not performing to the company standards. You may find an employee who is worthy of a promotion may be one that had some problems a few years ago. By maintaining records from past performance evaluations, you will be able to identify how the employee overcame their challenges and proved to be worthy of a promotion.

Of course it is always hard to select between two qualified candidates. In this case, many companies choose seniority.

Be aware of a few things you should avoid when you are interviewing employees for a promotion. You should never:
 Base a promotion on supervisor's visual observations only.
 Decide on a promotion without interviewing many employee's who may have interest. This is a good time to evaluate if those employees should be considered for a different promotion later on down the road.
 Use educational levels as criteria for a promotion unless a specific job requires a certain educational level. There is a lot to be said for "learned experience".
 Evaluate on subjective measures such as attitude
 Allow one person to make a promotion decision. Having a group of people to discuss employee promotions with is the best option for a thorough, unbiased decision.
 Discriminate based on gender, race, or any other reason.

Take the time to properly evaluate each employee so you don't promote the wrong employee. Let your employees know what type of person you are looking for and the skills that will help them achieve a promotion.
You should create scenarios and have each interviewee answer them with the way they would handle the situation. For example, if you promote within the company, many times, the person who was promoted can't stop doing their old job and managing their former same-level co-workers. It is difficult for many people to move from being a friend to being a boss. This obviously can cause a lot of problems for an organization as there is a lack of leadership with that person if they become a manager.

Another good thing to keep in mind is to allow an employee to turn down a promotion. We have seen this time a time again, a person accepts a job they are unqualified for and fails miserably. It damages their self-esteem and reputation and wastes company time and money. By giving the employee a "grace period" they can try the new job to see if they can do it.

The best thing you can do it observe and listen to your employees. Allow them to come to you and discuss their future with the company and why the feel they are the best candidate for a promotion.

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