Choose door #3

There’s 2 traditional solutions and they’re both garbage

Want to see how much of a failure traditional recruitment “solutions” are? Just look at your typical small-becoming-a-mid-sized business.

The ones that crushed it with referral hiring. Then hit the point where it no longer scales. And find themselves stuck with a poo poo platter of bad solutions.

The 2 traditional ways of doing this. Opposite sides of the spectrum. And why they suck:

1. Build an internal recruiting team to meet peak demand.

Insource. Build the competency. Get your own people on it.

Sounds great. But completely misses the fact that hiring is an ebb and flow process. Demand is variable. Overhiring when things are hot leaves you with excess staff (and spend) when things cool (like right now.)

Even if you take the pragmatic (soulless?) approach of “meh, we’ll just lay them off, no biggie” (sound familiar?) you miss the point:

👉All that domain, process and institutional knowledge you built just walked out the door. And it ain’t coming back.

The same goes for contract recruiters. When they move on, they move on (rightfully so.) Then you’re back to square 1. Retraining someone else in the next boom.

2. High cost per hire recruitment agency support.

It’s expensive. (That’s it. That’s the tweet.)

Cutting to the chase:

👉Recruiting services should account for the variable nature of hiring. So should a company’s hiring strategy. 

Hiring and firing recruiters, or paying for substantial one off transactions, is not an efficient use of time or capital.

If you’re in this niche and trying to choose between these options:  How are you recruiting now? How much time does it take from your management team? 

Do you want that time back to focus on the business initiatives that only you can do?

True recruiting solutions split the difference between the extremes and provide:

👉Dedicated, soup to nuts internal recruiting support. All your inhouse processes accounted for.

👉Turn it on and turn it off as needed. Retain the institutional knowledge next time hiring demand kicks in.

👉Specialization in recruiting knowledge across skill sets. So there’s no need for additional high one off fees.

👉A cost that isn’t much more than building internally would have been.

It exists. We do it. Our clients love it.

If you need it, hit me up.

James Hornick

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.