We keep seeing the same pattern: a team needs a skill urgently, hiring takes longer than planned, and existing employees feel stuck watching opportunities go elsewhere. At the same time, not every role can be filled internally, and some teams genuinely need senior expertise quickly.
This proposal is about how we want to balance internal mobility and external hiring in 2026. The best answer is rarely “always promote” or “always hire”. We need a policy that makes it easier to move talented people into the right roles, while still letting teams hire when the business would otherwise stall.
We are choosing one operating model for the year. Each model includes a practical set of commitments: how managers plan headcount, how employees access opportunities, and how we handle backfilling so mobility does not become a hidden tax on the teams that develop talent.
Comments should focus on where our process currently breaks, for example approval bottlenecks, lack of visibility into openings, or fear of losing talent without replacement.
Open roles are posted internally first for a set period. External hiring is allowed when the role is urgent, specialist, or the internal pipeline is demonstrably thin.
We formalize expectations: career conversations, mobility timelines, and consistent criteria for exceptions.
Set a realistic internal-fill target for eligible roles and review mobility outcomes quarterly. Allow external hiring freely, but require teams to explain patterns when targets are missed.
Mobility becomes measurable, without turning it into a rigid rule.
Prioritize external hiring for most roles, while investing internal mobility resources only on a small set of critical pathways (for example engineering leads, product managers, support leaders).
We reduce process overhead but accept that most growth happens through hiring.
