In roughly one in six of Fornell Human Capital’s assignments, an internal candidate takes part. In the others, the organisation has already decided that the successor must come from outside, often for good reason: nobody inside is ready for the role.
That last point looks like a given, but it rarely is. Whether someone is ready depends largely on what they have been allowed to do in the years before. People who have never had to carry a result of their own cannot show it in a selection interview either. Succession is therefore not a training issue. It is a board decision about who gets responsibility, and when.
Training is not the same as playing
From the stands at Telstar, this is easy to see. The club was promoted to the Eredivisie in 2025 with a squad that included players who had been playing amateur football shortly before, under a head coach who had himself played fifteen seasons for Telstar. They got minutes at the highest level, even when that was a risk. A club that trains players but never fields them ends up handing its talent to others.
The IJmond trains at the base
A great deal of training happens in the IJmond region. The Tata Steel Academy trains around three hundred vocational students a year in a work-and-learn programme, together with Nova College, and delivers more than 22,000 training courses a year for employees. That the route to the top exists within the same company is shown at the very top: Hans van den Berg started in 1990 at what was then Koninklijke Hoogovens and now chairs the Board of Management of Tata Steel Nederland.
What concerns me about employers in the region, large or small, is what happens between those two points. Today’s skilled professionals are there. The director of ten years from now may already work in the company. The difficult part is the layer in between: the team leader who could run a department, the department head who is ready for an entire business unit. That middle layer often lives and works in the region and is less likely than the top to move for a new job. That is precisely why employers here need to develop and promote this talent themselves.
What an external appointment costs
Research offers a reason to take the internal route seriously. A widely cited American study compared employees hired from outside with colleagues who moved up internally into similar roles. The external hires were paid around 18 percent more at the start, received lower performance ratings in their first two years and left more often. The study was carried out within a single organisation and not specifically at executive level. So it does not say that external hiring is wrong. It does say that someone from outside needs time to learn the organisation, and that this time has a price.
The pattern is visible in the Netherlands as well. In 2025, thirty-five new executives took office at Dutch housing associations, four of whom came from within their own organisation. In the same year, almost a third of departing executives left during their first term, compared with almost a fifth a year earlier. The analysis itself draws no link between those two figures, and neither do I. They do fit the same picture: few people grow internally into the top role, and relatively many new executives stay for less time than intended.
From the candidate’s side
Someone who has been ready for years and keeps seeing an outside name appointed above them will draw a conclusion at some point. That person leaves, and at the next employer becomes precisely the external candidate being searched for. One organisation thus pays for talent that another let go.
External candidates would also do well to ask about this. How much time will you get to learn the organisation before you are judged? And is there someone inside who hoped for the same role and with whom you will be working? Knowing this in advance gives you a more realistic start.
What to ask before a search
A supervisory board or executive team preparing an appointment can start with a question that has little to do with the vacancy: who here will be ready within two years, and what is still missing? Then comes the trade-off of what waiting costs, compared with the onboarding time and risk of an appointment from outside.
Sometimes, after weighing this up, searching outside the organisation still turns out to be the best choice. In that case an internal candidate should not be left out, but assessed against the same standard as the external candidates. That is fairer to the candidate and gives the organisation a cleaner comparison.
In closing
Succession takes patience, and patience is as scarce in an organisation as it is in the stands. Those who train talent must also let it play, especially in the years when it is not yet finished.
Would you as an executive or supervisory director like to explore whether someone in your organisation is nearly ready? Or are you in that layer yourself and would you like to know what you still need? Please feel free to contact me. I am glad to have either conversation.