Internal Recruiting

The decision on whether to do internal recruiting or outsource the function can be difficult and complicated for growing businesses. There are trade offs to doing it yourself vs hiring someone else to do it for your. Here we will examine some of the trade offs and benefits doing it in house vs. outsourced.

Benefits of Internal Recruiting

The single most important benefit of do it yourself recruiting is control over the process. You do not need to train an external person or company about your job requirements and company culture.

There are other benefits of course. There is expense. If you have sunk cost in an HR department, then so long as the recruiting does not take away too much time from the other important functions of HR in your company, it may be an unnecessary cost.

The last benefit of doing your recruiting in house is a shorter time to hire. All things being equal, when using an outside resource, there is an interchange between the company, the 3rd party recruiter and the candidate that takes time. If time is of the essence, it may be better to do it yourself. An example when this may be important is to replace a high level executive who has suddenly decided to leave the company. Having the position vacant for an extended period of time could impact the operation. In this case it would be important to do the recruitment in house.

Internal Recruiting Trade Offs

There are some trade offs to consider when selecting to do internal recruiting at your company. These range from efficiency of operation, burden on HR and added outside expertise.

For companies with enough size that they are continually recruiting, having the function outsourced can make sense. Recruiting can take a great deal of effort to keep up with market forces and knowing who is doing what type of work. To get the "A" candidates you need to know what is going on in the market.

Another factor to consider is if there is a significant amount of recruiting, that effort to handle the function will take away from other important functions in an HR department. For example, if a company is continually hiring, there are times of the year when important functions must take place in an HR department such as annual reviews and open enrollment for benefits. Distracting your HR department from handling these functions can have heavy consequences if they are busy recruiting.

Finally, when outsourcing you can sometimes tap into an expertise that is impossible to acquire and keep in house. An example of this might be that your company needs an optics specialist who understand interferometers, this is generally outside of the expertise of you company but you need a person like this for a new product line. You can't expect your HR department to understand how to find a person like this. It is much easier to hire an executive search firm that specializes in finding optics engineers.

Other Considerations

It may be that a total in house recruiting solution will not work for your company. There are other options for instance you could hire a contract recruiter or a recruiting researcher to offload some or all of the recruiting task. It may be that you offload part of the recruiting load to an outside agency.

Either way, there are benefits and trade offs to internal recruiting. Do what is best for your organization and the size of your company.

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