When a company is faced with the task of hiring new staff, there is always one big question that comes first – Do we let an in-house team do it, or shall we reach out to a specialist recruitment agency?
But before we can answer this, we must understand the difference between the two.
Firstly, depending on what market your company is in, this can heavily influence your decision. For example, if your company is in a particular niche industry, it would be hugely beneficial to use an expert recruitment agency as their years of experience, and broad knowledge base would prove invaluable throughout the process.
But generally, it whittles down to a few things to consider…
Market Knowledge
As a successful consultant, you must be dedicated to understanding the needs of a client's needs and possess extensive knowledge of the current market, trends, and competition. Being consistently exposed to the market puts recruitment agencies at an advantage when providing market intel and invaluable support – whereas some in-house teams can be myopic as they are only witnessing one aspect. As well as this, most in-house teams can often be HR professionals who double up to see through any recruitment projects. If this professional has additional responsibilities to carry out, they generally will not have the capacity and time to focus on the piece of recruitment at hand and/or carry out further research into their current competitors. However, a caveat to this would be that these HR professionals have an unrivalled insight into the business, meaning they could understand the role and person specification better.
Strong Candidate Database
One of the single most important rules as a consultant is to maintain a healthy talent pool filled with strong candidates. There are approximately 1825 recruitment agencies in Greater London alone; recruitment agencies want to provide clients with the top talent (to stand out from the competition), and to do this, they have to be continuously maintaining and growing their candidate network. Now, let's compare this to in-house recruiters. More often than not, in-house recruiters take a reactive approach when sourcing candidates making the process more time-consuming, which can lead to them missing out on stronger talent.
Flexible approach
With most in-house recruitment teams, the approach to sourcing candidates is very structured, and companies often have specific processes in place. Also, as previously discussed, most in-house recruiters double up as HR professionals meaning they have limited time to focus on candidates because of their additional responsibilities. As a result of this, people are restricted to the methods and strategies they use.
Opposing this, a recruitment agency can focus solely on the task at hand and use more creative methods to find the right candidates. For example, they can use specific job boards to head-hunt candidates that possess the correct, relevant experience rather than just encouraging a broad spectrum of candidates to apply.
CRM systems and Job Boards
Another factor to consider is specialist recruitment technology. Many companies are unable to justify investing large amounts of money in specialist recruitment technology for their in-house teams. In contrast, recruitment agencies will already use these systems and software on a daily basis. Alongside this, recruitment agencies will often invest money in additional job boards so that they can source candidates as well as advertise roles to reach a larger audience.
To conclude...
From the areas I have highlighted, we can clearly see that there are pros and cons to having an in-house acquisition team and working with a specialist recruitment agency.
For optimal results, HR teams should reap the benefits of working closely with recruitment agencies. This partnership allows for fast and effective identification of strong and suitable talent. This joint effort will allow both teams to bring valuable skills, knowledge and experience, making the chances of hiring strong candidates higher.
