Cruising in the inside lane
How does Enterprise Rent-A-Car fill 95% of vacancies internally?Back in 1957, an ex-fighter pilot called Jack C. Taylor started a car leasing business in St Louis, Missouri. It was a modest affair: his fleet consisted of just eight vehicles. Taylor took a fifty per cent pay cut just to get the business, originally called Executive Leasing, off the ground.
Ultimately, the business has done pretty well. Enterprise Holdings, which operates Enterprise Rent-A-Car, employs over 93,000 people and hires out more than 1.7 million shiny vehicles from about 9000 locations.
So: Enterprise by name, enterprising by nature. But what drives – no pun intended – the success? Well, Jack Taylor had a philosophy. ‘Take care of your customers and employees first,’ he once declared, ‘and profits will follow.’
If looking after employees means encouraging their career development, then Enterprise still has Taylor’s philosophy front of mind. Currently the number of vacancies they fill internally is, incredibly, just a handful of points shy of 100%.
Taylor-made strategy
This commitment to internal promotion is a big part of the Enterprise culture. ‘It actually comes from Jack Taylor himself,’ says Ashley Hever, Enterprise’s Talent Acquisition Manager for the UK and Ireland.
‘As Jack recognised, it’s important that our people understand the values and culture of our organisation, and there’s no better way to ensure this than by hiring internally.’
Put succinctly, the resourcing ethos is ‘Culture first, skills follow.’ Generally, the pattern is that people start in the core of the business – Operations, where they learn the crux of the business in a customer-facing role – and are then fielded to wherever is a good move for all concerned.
These might be upwards moves. But they’re just as likely to be horizontal or diagonal. Some specialist roles – such as those in Legal and certain Marketing positions – are the minority that are likely to be sourced externally.
The strategy has led to Enterprise being credited by Business Week as one of the ‘Best Places To Launch A Career.’ ‘We’ve always been about careers, rather than short term jobs.’ Says Hever. ‘Internal promotion fits in with our culture of entrepreneurialism: it’s about people developing both themselves and their businesses.’
Enterprise’s people seem to love it, too. Last year Enterprise orchestrated 15,000 internal promotions and 400 global relocations. Consequently, according to Hever, EOS engagement scores are ‘really strong’. There’s certainly no lack of consistency with the organisation’s leadership: the average length of tenure at ‘Officer’ level (that’s C-Suite, to the rest of us) is an eye-popping 25 years.
The strategy isn’t just navel-gazing. A number of business analysts have written about the superior ROI to be had by promoting from within. This from an article written about US-based fast-food outfit Chipotle by Business Insider magazine:
Chipotle’s insight into the benefits of promoting from within has been corroborated by organizational psychologists, who find that the outside hires — who often have more prestigious résumés — aren’t nearly as reliable as the inside promotions… In a 2012 study of 5,300 financial services employees, Wharton assistant professor Matthew Bidwell found that while external hires are paid about 20% more than internal employees for the same position, they do worse on performance reviews for their first two years.
So assuming you want to take a leaf out of the Enterprise book, what do you do? And what – should they exist – are the pitfalls you should be watching out for?
Serious hiring
First of all, you need to take graduate recruitment very seriously indeed, given that’s pretty well your one and only opportunity to get talent into the business. Enterprise takes to the field, according to Hever, thinking that ‘everyone we recruit could conceivably be a leader of the business in five, ten, fifteen years.’
And it’s not just quality that occupies Enterprise: it’s quantity, too. It’s a UK Top 10 graduate recruiter in terms of volume, easily surpassing the likes of Tesco, the Army and The Metropolitan Police.
The assistance of Learning & Development is critical to many moves, of course: onboarding into roles is, adds Hever, ‘a massive responsibility’.
Enterprise also offers an online portal called My Career Site, which is used by both line management and employees. My Career Site explains relocation policies, gives hints on writing internal CVs and provides a number of personal career assessment tools. (‘Self-reflection is big here,’ says Hever.)
But of course, it’s not all plain sailing: on the windscreen of large-scale internal promotion, one has to be prepared to wipe off quite a few flies.
Trash talk
Not least, employees can be pressured by their external peers. ‘I’ve been here for fifteen years, and my friends think it’s odd that I’ve been with the same company after all this time,’ admits Hever.
Geographic mobility can be an issue too. ‘Moving someone from Leeds to Southampton, say, can be a big challenge, particularly if there’s family to consider.’ This is largely remedied by excellent relocation arrangements: Enterprise has dedicated relo teams in the US and in Germany.
Enterprise used employees themselves to help determine the contents of relocation packages. And the systems appear to work well – Hever himself relocated from Ipswich to Surrey ‘and hardly had to lift a finger’.
Naturally, when you’re delivering an international relocation, there are often spouses to consider. Thus, Enterprise even has a ‘spouse mentor programme’ for people moving over, especially those coming to the UK from the US.
‘It’s good to have someone explain that, for instance, ‘trash’ should be ‘rubbish’ and ‘pants’ should be ‘trousers’, and show someone how British supermarkets work,’ says Hever. ‘Essentially, we can make lives easier with plenty of small but important interventions.’
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