What is the difference between hiring and recruiting? Hiring is the act of bringing someone new on to your team. Recruiting is an active search to find the right person to hire.
If your team is not recruiting, then your hiring process is passive. This is how many companies find new employees, and for some companies and some positions it works. If the company is big enough and has enough name brand recognition, then there’s a good chance that they will have enough interested applicants that they can have their pick of qualified candidates.
However, even at big companies if the position is specialized enough, recruiting is the best approach. This is the difference between being proactive vs reactive. When you wait for candidates to come to you, you are taking a reactive approach to filling a position. Many positions do eventually get filled this way, but it can take much longer, and your pool of candidates will either be much too small or much too big (and often full of the wrong skillsets). This leaves you either settling for a candidate who might not be the best fit, wasting time sifting through countless applications, or waiting even longer for the right person to come along with no guarantee that they will.
If the position is a high priority, or requires a very specific set of skills, you need to be proactive in your search. This is where recruiting factors in. Depending on the size of your company, you may have dedicated recruiters on your staff, but many companies make the mistake of placing recruiting on the shoulders of their existing HR staff. HR staff members already have many responsibilities on their plate, and do not have the time or resources to dedicate to filling a priority role.
This is the benefit of using an external recruiting firm. We have a vast network that has been built by our team over many years. We also have additional resources and connections that allow us to find and source candidates, and when you work with a recruiter, you gain access to this network and these resources. This opens your list of potential candidates exponentially. If you only look at people who apply to your job listing, you miss out on an endless number of qualified candidates who may not be actively job searching but are still open to new opportunities. Our job is to find those people and introduce them to your team.
We know that some companies believe they do not have a budget for working with external recruiters, but sometimes the cost of not working with a recruiter is higher than it would be to work with one. Working with a recruiter can cut down your time to hire, save your HR staff from burnout, and save you the time and cost of replacing a bad hire. Hiring the right candidate the first time can also both save and make your company money in the long run because the right person will help boost morale and productivity.
