The fluorescent hum of the conference room felt like a physical weight, pressing in on my chest. My tie, inexplicably, felt a full size too tight, though I’d worn it a thousand and one times. Across the polished oak, Sarah, the hiring manager – my boss, really, the one I’d shared more bad coffee and good laughs with than most family – leaned forward.

“So,” she began, her tone meticulously neutral, “describe a time you demonstrated leadership.”

I blinked. My mind, still replaying the memory of my dinner burning on the stove a mere hour ago because I was trying to juggle a late-night work call, momentarily seized. Leadership? Sarah and I had just navigated the complete overhaul of the Q3 reporting process, a project that had demanded every ounce of strategic thinking and team coordination I possessed. We’d even argued, vehemently and productively, about the implementation details for 41 straight days. She knew. She had been there. So why were we doing this?

It asks seasoned employees, whose capabilities are etched into their daily output and collaborative history, to suddenly don a mask of performative ignorance. We’re compelled to pretend that our interviewer, someone we might have had lunch with just yesterday, is a complete stranger to our professional triumphs and occasional stumbles.

The Frustration of Bureaucracy

It’s deeply frustrating, isn’t it? This bureaucratic rigidity, a relentless adherence to process over common sense, sends a clear, if unintentional, message: your existing track record, your institutional knowledge, the very loyalty you’ve demonstrated over perhaps 11 years, none of it is quite enough. You must re-prove yourself, not through new achievements, but through a regurgitation of past ones, framed precisely for an audience that already has the script.

I remember Pierre B., our old neon sign technician, an artisan who could bend glass and electrical currents into glowing poetry. He used to say, with a wry smile and a hand stained perpetually with a trace of something metallic and blue, “If you gotta keep showing me the light bulb works, you either don’t trust me, or you don’t understand how light works.” Pierre, with his 61 years of craftsmanship, had seen countless cycles of bright, young talent dimmed by processes that prioritized form over function. He saw the flicker in people’s eyes when they realized their dedicated service didn’t automatically mean a smoother path upward, just a different set of hurdles, exactly like the external candidates who knew nothing of the company’s history or quirks.

What Does This Ritual Accomplish?

What does this bizarre ritual accomplish? Does it genuinely unearth hidden talents that weren’t evident in quarterly reviews, 360-degree feedback, or direct project collaboration? More often, it cultivates a sense of performative anxiety. It turns what should be a logical progression into an unnerving audition where the judges are already familiar with the lead actor’s repertoire. It’s not about discovering potential; it’s about validating a checklist for the sake of it, a hollow exercise for everyone involved.

We invest significant emotional and mental capital into preparing for these interviews, rehearsing answers to questions about our strengths and weaknesses that our internal interviewers could likely recite from memory about us. It’s an exercise in redundancy, dressed up as due diligence.

The Disincentive of Distrust

This inherent distrust, baked into the very fabric of internal mobility, creates a disincentive. Why should an employee invest in developing deep, nuanced skills specific to the organization if they’ll be treated like an unknown quantity when they seek advancement? Why bother internalizing complex corporate dynamics, when the path to the next level requires you to articulate them as if explaining them to an outsider who might be working at a competitor’s site 11 miles away? It’s profoundly demoralizing.

People seek growth, not just in their careers, but in their personal lives. When the professional avenues feel like an endless bureaucratic maze, the desire to find validation and progress elsewhere intensifies. For those in the Massachusetts area, finding such a space can be transformative, a place where effort directly translates to visible results and community support, unlike the opaque progression paths at work.

Fitgirl Boston directory might be one such resource for finding that tangible sense of progress and belonging.

And I’ll admit, this isn’t an easy problem to solve. I’ve even caught myself, in moments of extreme workload or perhaps a lapse in judgment, falling into the trap of using a boilerplate question or two for an internal applicant, thinking it’s the ‘right thing to do’ or ‘the process.’ It’s a self-propagating cycle. My burnt dinner, the one that ended up an unidentifiable char on the pan, wasn’t just a result of a work call; it was a symptom of mental exhaustion from navigating these precise systems, from constantly having to shift between my authentic, effective self and the ‘interview candidate’ persona. It’s a distraction, a tax on our cognitive load that serves little real purpose. It’s a mistake to think this is harmless.

The Underlying Assumption of Distrust

The real problem isn’t the interview itself, but the underlying assumption that an internal candidate, with a proven track record, needs the exact same vetting as someone plucked from the external job market. It signals a fundamental lack of adaptability in the system, an inability to leverage the intimate knowledge already possessed about an individual’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential. We have 31 data points, 11 project reviews, and 1 year of direct observation; yet we still ask for anecdotal evidence of ‘collaboration’ or ‘problem-solving’ as if none of that historical context exists.

It’s like owning a fully functional, high-performance vehicle and then insisting the driver still needs to demonstrate how to start a standard engine on a written test before being allowed to drive it. It reduces complex human beings and their contributions to a series of easily digestible, often reductive, bullet points.

The genuine value of an internal transfer should be recognized not just as a cost-saving measure in recruitment but as an investment in existing human capital, a reward for loyalty, and a strategic move to retain institutional wisdom. Instead, the process often acts as a friction point, discouraging precisely the kind of mobility that invigorates careers and disseminates knowledge throughout an organization.

We need to acknowledge that a ‘yes, and’ approach to internal talent means streamlining the process, not replicating external hurdles. Yes, evaluate; and trust what you already know. That’s the real opportunity cost that organizations are missing: the potential for a frictionless, validating internal progression system that truly understands and values its people, rather than forcing them into an unnecessary theatrical performance.

The Dehumanizing Cost

The internal hiring process, in its most absurd form, isn’t just inefficient; it’s dehumanizing. It asks us to suppress our authentic working relationships, to act as if our shared history is irrelevant. It’s a powerful disincentive for internal mobility and loyalty, breeding cynicism where engagement should thrive.

What kind of future are we building when our processes prioritize paperwork over people, and performative acting over genuine competence? What happens when the spotlight on these absurdities gets too bright for us all to ignore, for even 1 single moment longer?