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When deciding if in-house recruitment or a recruitment agency is the most effective model to recruit the best candidates how do you evaluate which works best for you?
Which model suits you will typically depend on your organisation goals and future hiring aspirations. Agency recruiters are tasked with finding the right people for the right roles as are in-house recruiters, who usually have a far wider remit than this spanning across employer brand, referrals, talent management and onboarding.
Same End Game
Both in-house recruiters and recruitment agencies will be working to deadlines and targets such as cost-per-hire, time-to-hire and of course quality of hire and whilst there are differences in the sourcing methods and approach, there are some common themes that both have to demonstrate. After all both are in the hiring business and are working to the same end game despite having different roles:
Build Relationships – they are absolutely key to sourcing and placing high quality candidates
Build Talent Pipelines – know what types of roles might come up, make sure your pipeline is engaged through regular communication so it doesn’t stagnate.
Know how to stand out – large or small, every employer has a unique brand and culture that can work to attract talent
Change agents – the market and industry changes at a pace of knots and recruiters have to be ahead of the game
Data driven – there is an abundance of data and analytics to track every stage of recruitment. If you want to make something better, drill down on the detail and look how you can continually improve.
The Recruitment Landscape
With the recruitment landscape more competitive than ever and the constant reminder of candidate sourcing challenges we face it’s a constant juggle having to deliver in this candidate driven market. Recruiters on both sides of the fence are also expected to work hard to raise awareness to build relationships with passive candidates. This doesn’t stop with email and SMS campaigns but also through providing the ultimate candidate experience.
Where do you start?
We know that in-house recruiters approach candidate sourcing in a different way to agencies from research in the 2018 UK Candidate Attraction Report. Agencies go straight to their ATS/CRM and don’t look at Linked In until way down the workflow. However in-house recruiters advertise the job on their website first and then advertise internally.
There will always be an argument for one model being better than the other whichever way you spin it, for example, can an agency fill hard to fill roles in a shorter time but are more sales focussed than finding the right cultural fit? The first step is to know your business and your recruitment strategy and use the tools available to you to recruit the best candidates.
This whitepaper shares insight into the best sourcing channels by sector and company size and how candidates are typically sourced depending on if you are an agency or in-house recruiter – pre-order now.
Download the Ecotricity case study and learn how they transformed their recruitment strategy.
