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According to a Gartner survey of 800+ HR leaders across 60 countries to identify their challenges and priorities for 2023, 46% mentioned they will prioritise recruiting. As businesses face severe competition for talent, persistent high inflation, and global supply constraints, business leaders across the world are focusing on growth instead of opting for simple cost-cutting measures. Their emphasis is on determining which investments will give them a competitive edge in the years ahead.
Though “recruiting” was mentioned as a top priority by 46% of HR leaders in the Gartner survey, 36% said their sourcing strategies were insufficient for finding the skills they needed. If you too belong to this league, perhaps you are torn between internal and external recruitment. Since there are several advantages of external recruitment, it pays to source your candidates using this method.
Advantages of External Recruitment
The process of filling an open position with someone who doesn’t work at your company is called external recruitment. This is different from internal recruitment, where you move or promote people already working at your company to vacant positions.
Though you can use job boards, social media, employee referrals, the company website, networking events, job fairs, advertisements in local newspapers, online ads, and college career centres to find your candidates, partnering with an experienced headhunting company will accelerate the process. By joining hands with experienced headhunters, who can act as your external recruitment source, you would be able to meet your staffing needs quickly and efficiently.
But why should you opt for external recruitment? Let’s examine external recruiting advantages to find the answer.
Saves You Money and Time
The cost of a bad hire is high. Not sure what that means for your business? Let’s check some statistics:
- A bad hire’s average cost is 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.
- Hiring the wrong candidate will mean losing 10% of sales opportunities.
- Bad hires cost 27% of UK companies more than £50,000.
- A bad hire can make productivity drop by 36%.
- Hiring and training a replacement is responsible for 40% of lost time.
- A bad hire can trigger a 32% drop in employee morale by disrupting the team dynamics.
Did you say ENOUGH?
If you have to constantly hire employees, let them go, and hire again, the total cost of hiring, onboarding, and training can add up fast. A bad hire can also cost you money by ruining client relationships.
A candidate who’s not the right fit could even be a safety risk if he or she refuses to follow protocols or has a lack of experience. Not completing their assignments on time or doing them shoddily and adversely impacting the company culture are other risks with bad hires that are worth considering. You can avoid all these risks and save money and time on hiring by recruiting the right people the first time.
An experienced external recruiter can help reduce the risk of a bad hire by investing time to gate and vet candidates properly. Thanks to the rigorous selection process in use, you can rest assured of receiving top talent that does value-addition to your company.
Offers You Access to a Wider Talent Pool
A significant advantage associated with external recruiting is that it lets you access a wider talent pool. Whether you are looking to hire from a foreign country or a candidate with specialised training and experience that are missing in your in-house employees, an external recruiter can cast a wider net to find you top talent.
Even if your internal HR team tries to cast a wide net that’s extremely specific to your business’s skilled labour needs, it will fall short because it lacks the industry connections and networking abilities of a skilled external recruiter. By leveraging these, headhunting companies specializing in trade recruiting can start with a much larger number of potential candidates and trim the list down to a select few that fit your needs. This means you can rely on finding candidates that can fill your open positions fast and start adding value immediately.
Helps Relieve Your HR Team’s Hiring Stress
Finding and hiring quality candidates is often a tiring, long-drawn process. Even when your HR team tries to recruit internally, moving or promoting a present employee means that though the vacancy is filled, a new vacancy is created, which again demands to be filled fast.
The entire process of recruitment involves multiple steps, such as screening the applications, short-listing candidates, interviewing them (often multiple times), giving them the offer letter, and finally, onboarding them if they decide to accept the job offer. Since an external recruiter will handle the entire process, the pressure would no longer be on you or your company’s HR team. You may just need to chip in at the final stages to pick your choice from the top of the lot that the external recruiters present.
Helps You Get New Skills, Ideas, Perspectives, and Experiences into the Fold
External hires can bring in fresh perspectives, new skills and experiences, and innovative ideas and recommendations. Since they are likely to approach the company differently than your existing employees, they can help spot areas of improvement and even trigger positive changes in their department and the company. All these can be especially helpful if your company wants to enter new markets, diversify its product/service lines, or work with new technology.
By embracing such a wide variety of skills, perspectives, and ideas, the path to innovation will be smoother. It will also encourage and support the creation of a diverse workforce in your company by giving a platform to different voices, thus promoting inclusion and empowerment.
Boosts Employee Performance, Competitiveness, and Motivation
Hiring external candidates could foster a feeling of healthy competition, thus motivating existing employees to work harder and accomplish more. An outside hire can also reduce tension among current employees who might be competing for a managerial or supervisory role. Establishing authority is yet another advantage of external recruitment.
Your present employees may find it hard to accept a peer as their leader, who had been working at the same level just a few days ago. Hiring external candidates can make it easier to establish their leadership role compared to internal candidates, which again paves the way for enhanced productivity and performance.
Final Words
If you want to know “what is the biggest advantage of external recruiting?” it’s the increased likelihood of finding the best-fit talent from an extensive talent pool, often spread beyond the geographical boundaries of your business location.
To make the most of your external hires, don’t forget to trust a reliable and experienced headhunting company like InHunt World. Reach us today to discuss your hiring needs.
This article was written by Sonali