Before you look outside: why internal mobility gains value when candidates arrive with AI
Before you look outside: why internal mobility gains value when candidates arrive with AI
When the cost of an application approaches zero, the CV loses its power to separate people. The only verified performance evidence an organisation holds is about its own staff.
Openings are not multiplying. In Greece the job vacancy rate was 2.1% in the first quarter of 2026, against 2.2% in the same quarter of 2025, on Eurostat’s non seasonally adjusted figures. Demand is roughly where it was. What changed sits on the other side: the effort needed to send a well written, well targeted application has collapsed. The result is more applications per role, written more and more alike.
This is not a problem of ethics. It is a problem of measurement. The CV was always a proxy. It never measured ability; it measured someone’s ability to describe themselves convincingly across two pages. While that skill was unevenly spread, the proxy told you something. Now that it is evenly spread, it tells you much less. The stack of applications grows and flattens at the same time.
The asymmetry you already hold
For an external candidate you hold a document and an impression from two interviews. For your own people you hold something different in kind: appraisals over several years, projects delivered or missed, behaviour under pressure, how they work with colleagues, what they know about your customers. It is the only verified performance evidence in the building, and it cost nothing.
Even so, the internal process is usually worse. Slower, less designed, without a firm deadline, and often dependent on whether a manager will release someone. We pay to acquire information we already have, and then leave it unread.
What can change tomorrow
First, measure time to fill separately for internal and external candidates. If the internal route is slower, that is a design choice rather than a law of nature.
Second, open the role internally first, with a real deadline instead of a symbolic one.
Third, give every internal candidate a reasoned answer. A refusal with no explanation teaches your strongest people that the easier next move is outside.
AI has degraded a measuring instrument we had leaned on too heavily. Our best data is already inside the organisation. The question is whether our process reads it.