Blake D.-S. gripped the edge of the laminate table so hard her knuckles turned the color of the skim milk sitting in the breakroom. She was forty-six minutes into her fourth round of interviews for a Senior Product Lead role. The catch? Blake had been with the company for six years. She wasn’t a stranger; she was the person who designed the onboarding flow for the very department she was now trying to join. Yet, here she sat, being grilled by a hiring manager who had started sixteen months ago, answering questions about her ‘long-term vision’ and providing a detailed 90-day plan that felt more like a ransom note than a strategic document. This is the peculiar, often infuriating reality of the internal transfer-a process designed with so much friction that it practically begs high performers to update their LinkedIn profiles and walk out the front door.

We often talk about the ‘war for talent’ as if the battlefield is strictly external. Companies spend hundreds of thousands-sometimes $256,000 or more-on recruitment marketing, headhunters, and sign-on bonuses to lure fresh blood into the ecosystem. But the moment an internal employee, someone like Blake with six years of deep-tissue knowledge, raises their hand to move from Marketing to Product, or from Sales to Operations, the machinery grinds to a halt. It is a strange corporate paradox: we trust you to handle our biggest clients for seventy-six hours a week, but we don’t trust you to transition into a new role without a gauntlet that would make a Navy SEAL flinch.

The Illusion of Order and Bureaucracy

I spent three hours yesterday alphabetizing my spice rack. It was a compulsion born of a need for order in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. I put the Aleppo pepper before the Basil, even though they are different grinds. Order provides a sense of progress. But in the corporate world, order often disguises itself as bureaucracy. We create these elaborate internal hiring processes under the guise of ‘fairness’ and ‘rigor,’ but what we are actually doing is signaling to our best people that their history with us means nothing. We treat them like strangers because it’s easier to follow a standardized HR checklist than it is to acknowledge the nuanced complexity of a human being’s growth.

Blake’s 90-day plan was particularly insulting. She had already solved eighty-six of the problems listed in the job description during her time in her current role. She knew where the bodies were buried in the codebase. She knew that the CTO liked his reports delivered in a specific font on Tuesday mornings. And yet, she was forced to perform a digital dance, proving her worth to people who should have been her biggest advocates. The friction isn’t just a byproduct of the system; it is the system. Managers often act like feudal lords, hoarding talent as if their headcount is a measure of their worth. If Blake leaves for another department, her current manager loses a key asset. It is easier for that manager to sabotage the transfer with a lukewarm performance review-perhaps giving her a 6 out of 10 on a vague metric-than it is to support her growth and face the vacancy her departure creates.

The Cost of Territorialism

This territorialism is a silent killer of innovation. When we make it harder to move internally than to leave entirely, we are essentially training our employees to look outward the moment they feel a spark of curiosity or a desire for a new challenge.

Data suggests that 66 percent of employees would stay longer at a company if they could change roles easily. Instead, we give them a 46-page manual on internal mobility that reads like a legal disclaimer. We ask for multiple letters of recommendation from people they’ve worked with for 2,556 days. We subject them to the same personality tests they took during their initial hire, as if their personality might have fundamentally morphed into something unrecognizable over the last six years.

There is a profound lack of efficiency here that mirrors the very problems companies try to solve for their customers. We want our customer journeys to be seamless, yet our employee journeys are riddled with potholes and roadblocks. This is where the concept of reducing friction becomes more than just a business buzzword; it becomes a survival strategy. Just as companies use tools like

Aissist

to smooth out the jagged edges of customer interactions, HR departments need to realize that every unnecessary hurdle in an internal transfer is a moment of friction that pushes a top performer closer to the exit. We are so focused on the external ‘user experience’ that we have completely ignored the internal ‘contributor experience.’

Enthusiasm Curdled by Process

I recall a time when I mistakenly thought that adding more steps to a process made it more professional. I was wrong. It just made it more exhausting. I see this same mistake in Blake’s story. By the time she reached the sixth round of interviews, her enthusiasm for the new role had curdled into a quiet resentment. She wasn’t thinking about the product roadmap anymore; she was thinking about the recruiter from a rival firm who had reached out to her twenty-six days ago. That recruiter didn’t ask for a 90-day plan before the first interview. That recruiter didn’t care about her current manager’s ego. They just saw a talented professional and wanted to hire her.

The Competitive Edge of Internal Hires

Internal mobility should be the ultimate competitive advantage. An internal hire already understands the culture, the jargon, and the political landmines. They have a built-in network of 156 colleagues they can call upon to get things done. Their ‘ramp-up’ time is measured in days, not months. Yet, we treat them as if they are a risky bet. We worry about ‘setting a precedent’ or ‘upsetting the balance’ of a team. We forget that the balance is already upset the moment an employee feels stuck.

The Price of Lost Trust

Blake eventually got the job, but it cost the company more than they realized. It cost them her trust. She started the new role not with a sense of excitement, but with a sense of exhaustion. She had spent forty-six hours of her own time preparing for interviews for a company she already worked for. It’s like when I finally finished that spice rack; yes, it was organized, but my back ached and I realized I’d wasted an entire afternoon on something that didn’t actually make the food taste any better.

Metrics of Systemic Failure

Corporate leaders need to take a hard look at their internal transfer metrics. How many people apply for internal roles vs. how many are actually placed? If the success rate is lower than 26 percent, there is a systemic failure. If the process takes longer than forty-six days, you are losing money. If your managers are not incentivized to promote their best people out of their own departments, you are encouraging talent hoarding. We must dismantle the idea that an internal hire needs to be ‘vetted’ with the same cold detachment as an external candidate. Loyalty should buy you a fast track, not a more difficult obstacle course.

We often ignore the emotional toll of these processes. Blake felt like she was being forced to re-earn a seat she had already paid for with six years of hard labor. It felt like a betrayal. When we talk about ‘frictionless’ environments, we usually mean software. But the most important frictionless environment is the one where people feel they can grow without being treated like a flight risk. We need to stop acting like we are doing our employees a favor by letting them apply for a different job within the same four walls.

The Final Call to Action

In the end, Blake’s story isn’t unique. It is happening in six out of ten large organizations right now. We are so afraid of making a mistake that we make the biggest mistake of all: we make it too hard to stay. We build these beautiful glass towers and then wonder why people are jumping out the windows. Maybe if the doors between the rooms weren’t locked from the inside, they wouldn’t have to.

Because if you don’t, someone else-somewhere sixteen miles away or sixteen time zones away-certainly will.