Hiring An In-House Recruiter May Be The Best Hiring Decision You Make

It's a matter of time.

Hiring and retention are the two biggest needs our clients have. Small and mid-sized businesses are continuing to hire. (Larger companies and businesses in certain industries are letting people go these days).

I don’t need to tell you about the labor shortage that’s everywhere today.

We have 300 clients in the western United States. Not one is at full staff, and each is are singularly focused on recruiting and retention.

It seems as though every manager is becoming a recruiter.

How much time does it take you and your team to hire?

The hiring process is complex. There's recruiting, resume scanning, Zoom screens, interviewing and onboarding.

Hiring an in-house recruiter used to be a luxury for smaller businesses. But we’re now encouraging – our clients to consider hiring a full-time recruiter.

Some business have naturally high turnover regardless of the era. (We're looking at you restaurants, transportation and construction). It’s a matter of numbers. You’re hiring a significant number of employees every month.

Professional services firms have a dual problem: First, locating hard-to-find candidates. Then fighting with competitors to hire them.

Many businesses contract with outside headhunters. (Yes, I know they prefer “Executive Search” but you know what I mean.) That’s a significant cost – upwards of 25% of the employee’s base salary.

So hiring a recruiter isn’t the luxury it used to be. It’s become a business need.

Think it another way. The current way of recruiting isn’t working. That's because most SMBs passively recruit instead of actively recruit.

Here’s the difference:

Passive recruiting is what’s most businesses do now. A job opening is being posted on a website or two (indeed.com) and you wait for resumes to come in. That works if you have one job opening, or you’re in an open labor market. But you can’t successfully recruit for significant number of openings this way.

The allure of ZipRecruiter is that they pre-screen candidates for you. But that concept only works if you don’t care about anything other than experience and education. It’s a lot harder to screen for attitude, aptitude, alignment and agility.

Active recruiting means going after candidates instead of waiting for applications. Usually this means a professional recruiter. This is someone who has experience finding employees. The recruiter aggressively pursues candidates via LinkedIn and their existing network. They call universities, trade schools and other resources looking for candidates. They make contacts with Career Center officials at those institutions. (They might even have those contacts already).

This is what’s needed by many businesses today.

Most SMB's need to take advantage of inexpensive technology as well. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) streamlines hiring processes. They save dozens of hours of clerical work and greatly speed up time-to-hire metrics.

Crunch the numbers, determine how much time your managers are spending trying to hire.

It’s likely you’ll see the benefit of hiring your own recruiter.