Internal HR Vs Staffing Agency - Who Is Best Suited To Find New Talent?

Who are the best people to find your people? There is a conundrum at the heart of modern recruitment, that of who takes ultimate responsibility for putting structures and strategies in place to draw talent to your enterprise in our post-COVID world.

Effective recruitment in any disrupted market needs to address how the method and means of recruitment have changed. As we face a post-pandemic new normal and continued, pressured, (and expensive) candidate churn, those professionals who are ultimately responsible for bringing on the best in class talent have to battle against incredible odds, changing expectations and evolving recruitment channels.

But recruitment is a continual process, one that benefits from iterative learning and a constant search for better processes and channels to attract talent, negotiate with talent, and onboard talent. This takes a great amount of investment, trust, and foresight to get right, and a quick mind and agile services to redirect budget and labor when it goes wrong. 

Faced with a hyper-competitive recruitment market and the daunting task of dipping the corporate toe into the candidate pool in a much-changed world, many hiring managers have had to face up to the fact their candidate outreach may not be enough. Or, that the enormous amount of labor that needs to be directed at hiring, managing the interview process and onboarding a new hire is too time-consuming. 

Often, the decision on who hires who comes down to one question - do we engage a recruitment agency, or do we hire through internal HR?

Ultimately, recruitment resource allocation is the deal-breaker: do you have the resources, time, inclination, energy, and information needed to be an effective recruiter in today’s recruitment market? 

In our efforts to aid business leaders and HR managers we like to break this most foundational recruitment question down to three critical considerations:

• What are your priorities? 

• How much time do you have? 

• What is your budget and how is it allocated?

What are your hiring priorities?

Building an effective recruitment strategy has to start with priorities. This means taking a holistic view of your needs and analyzing exactly what sort of talent you need in the long term. 

This means even if you’re looking for a temporary worker to shore up your team, take stock of your entire recruitment process - what can you afford to do? What do you not know how to do? Do you need interim staff? Is this succession planning? Is this a highly technical role? Is this seasonal work? Do you require contractors or permanent staff? 

What can you manage?

Then consider your internal context - your payroll structures, your diligence, your onboarding and your sourcing apparatus - how much of this is internal, or can be provided by third parties? Does your recruitment outreach match your existing outsourcing structures? What does this cost to you?

Hiring priorities are more than simply highlighting your immediate needs - it’s about building a framework of effective talent magnetism, about building an employer brand that is aware of what they can achieve, and objectively highlighting where you need help. This is especially important in highly competitive markets like tech, or healthcare, and in industries that have borne the brunt of COVID-19 the worst, like hospitality, tourism and leisure. 

Time

Recruitment is too slow. It needs to be faster, and candidates are not afraid of telling employers. One of the main elements fuelling the great resignation is the time between inquiry and hire. This of course is down to assurity in employment: people have bills to pay, kids to raise and rapidity in hiring helps settle any doubts in a month to month cash flow. 

Time is a critical decision in whether you reach into the agency market and seek external help for your hiring needs. Agencies augment the time you spend looking for staff tenfold. They bring man-hours of sourcing, vetting, and outreach you otherwise wouldn’t be able to commit to, and help spread your employer net and brand wider. 

But this comes at a cost, literally and metaphorically: agencies’ time costs money, and choosing a generalist agency or one that doesn’t understand your market can blunt any wider recruitment efforts, draw the wrong people to you, and (worst case scenario) can damage your employer brand. 

Money 

At the business end of recruitment lies the cost to hire people. 

Hiring staff takes money. Hiring the wrong talent costs more money, and retention in the age of the Great Resignation is expensive and exhausting. Recruitment is not simply managing hiring channels and funneling talent to your hiring manager - it’s holistic HR management, sales, marketing, employer branding, and consistent and reflective feedback. It’s hard work. But it has to be valuable. 

Analyzing your spending and knowing what a recruitment service is worth to your company will make an enormous amount of difference to your hiring strategies and the decision to hire internally or via a recruiter.

The bottom line

Time Vs Money Vs Priorities. These are the three critical inputs you need to balance in your recruitment matrix.

Striking the right balance takes creating customized systems of outreach into the agency environment while having the confidence that what you retain internally will do the job.

Target your spending in the right way by taking advantage of both schools of recruitment. For example by highlighting key recruitment stages that could be done by a recruiter (such as CV vetting, reference checking, and pre-screening). The third-party cost to manage those processes saves your company time. 

That money invested in third-party ownership of those touchpoints in the recruitment journey saves you hours of work you can now put into interviewing, onboarding and development. 

Now you can ask yourself - what can you manage?