What is better: in-house recruitment vs outsourcing recruitment

In-house recruiting: advantages and disadvantages

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In-house recruitment means your company deals with a team of recruiters on your company’s payroll and is focused on finding candidates exclusively for your enterprise.

The pros of in-house recruiting:

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• In-house recruiters work only for your company and its benefit, which saves you from having to turn to the help of recruitment agencies. Instead, you can completely control the work of every in-house recruiter, trust them and prioritize the hiring process.
• In-house hiring assumes that the recruiters are intimately familiar with the specifics of your business, your organization’s culture and policies, and other company departments, including their employees. This means that they better understand the needs of the company in terms of hiring new workers and can better find precisely those candidates who fully meet your company’s requirements.
• Your in-house recruiters, being in constant cooperation with your company, will be able to continue to hire ideal candidates for the company whenever needed and in the shortest possible time.

The cons of in-house recruitment:

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• Having a few recruiters or even an entire recruiting department is expensive. Such a department requires the regular salary paid to its employees and the provision of necessary equipment and maintenance.
• Having a team of in-house recruiters on your balance sheet is advisable when your company is scaling and new employees are needed more or less regularly. But the staff is formed, your recruiting department stands idle and becomes unprofitable.
• Every time your enterprise’s in-house recruitment team is looking for a new candidate, they use the same candidate base and methods, ending up missing out on unusual talents that could bring fresh air to the company.

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Outsourcing recruitment: advantages and drawbacks

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RPO, or Recruitment Process Outsourcing, is the transfer to an external service provider, in our case, a recruitment agency, the entire recruiting process or part of it.

The outsourcing recruiting advantages:

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• Turning to professional recruiting agency services, you free up the time and resources of your team to perform more essential business tasks. An experienced agency also operates a more extensive candidate base and variable recruitment methods.
• Outsource recruitment will save your company a large share of its budget since you will hire an agency to find new employees at a certain point and not maintain the unprofitable recruiting team that is idle most of the time.
• You can contact a recruitment agency with an excellent reputation and performance and get the best specialists for your company in the shortest time.
• If your company needs a rare specialist with an unusual set of professional skills and competencies, only a specialized recruiting agency can reliably and on time find the right candidate for you. The in-house recruiting team has neither a sufficiently extensive candidate base nor recruiting methods sufficiently effective in this case.

The drawbacks of outsourcing recruitment:

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• When using outside recruiting services, you should be aware that, firstly, you may not be the only company for which the agency is currently working, and, secondly, you will have less control over the recruiting process.
• Cooperating with an external agency, you always run the risk of encountering miscommunication since, as external temporary employees, the outsourcing agency’s recruiters may not know all the nuances of your company’s culture and policies.
• Working with RPO often involves the risk of important inner information leakage. To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to choose a recruiting company very carefully, based on its reputation, customer reviews, results, and work experience.

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Then which method is best?

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Neither In-house hiring nor Recruitment process outsourcing cannot be the size that fits everyone. There is no universal remedy for anything. That is why choosing based on your goals and business capabilities is the best way.

In-house recruiting is suitable if your company has a long-term expansion perspective and will need regular staff replenishment. Then it is cost-effective and reasonable.

At the same time, if your company constantly expands or urgently requires new specialists, or regularly works on various projects wanting various qualifications from their performers, it is better to turn to a recruiting agency.  It will not only provide you with any wanted specialists but also save your expenses and free up your current employees to perform primary tasks.

After all, if your faucet leaks, you will not turn to your house designer. You will call a plumber. Surely on the recommendation, probably the best, who will fix your problem as quickly and professionally as possible. So, I would also recommend not to waste time and money on experiments because they may be unsuccessful. It would be better to turn to professionals.

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