What’s the Best Hiring Strategy for Your Business?

As you begin to grow as an organisation it is inevitable that openings are going to appear as new jobs are created. You may be looking to add to your already successful team, or you might be thinking of building a new team to take you in another direction and explore new possibilities for your future business. As jobs are created do you recruit for them from within your company, or do you look for fresh talent to join you? In this article we discuss the pros and cons for each.

Internal Recruitment

Pros:

Hiring from within has its benefits. To begin with you already know them; you know their personality and that they are a good fit with the rest of your staff. You know their skills and how willing they are to put them to use, you know what they are capable of achieving and where their strengths and weaknesses lie.

Just as importantly as you knowing them, they know your company. It won’t take them the time to settle in, get used to their working environment and get to know the working practises of their team mates or, indeed, the working practises of the company as a whole. They will already be familiar with the culture of the business because they have intimate knowledge of the company. This alone will cut training time down to a minimum as all they will have to learn is the job itself.

It is possible that their duties already partially overlap the ones they will be taking on in their new role so, again, you know they are capable of fulfilling their new set of tasks and it will take less time to get them up to speed.

Cons:

All of us are human and all of us suffer the same weaknesses to varying extents. One of our major weaknesses is jealousy. If you run an internal recruitment drive, like any competition there will be winners and losers. This can create bad feeling where there was none before. People are going to feel passed over and ignored; this is especially difficult if the new vacancy involves promotion and all of a sudden the unsuccessful candidate finds them having to answer to, and take orders from, the successful candidate!

Such friction and bad feeling can easily spread and the morale of the department can take a hit which may result in lower productivity.

The second minus point for recruiting internally is that you are choosing from a limited talent pool. Yes, you’ve got good people who have the necessary skills and experience to take the job on but they are of your company and from your company and do the things the company has always done to get the job done. This leads us nicely into the argument for hiring outside the organisation…

External Recruitment

Pros:

As the last point above infers, the people in your company will have a set way of doing things that they may not be comfortable deviating from because after all it works, right? Bringing in fresh faces can freshen up your working practises because they have been exposed to new ideas and ways of getting the job done that your current staff may not have even considered. These new ideas could, therefore, rejuvenate your entire team and raise productivity to levels hitherto unheard of.

New recruits could bring with them new skills and knowledge learned elsewhere that they could share with the rest of the team and improve the whole department. This can only be of benefit to the company as a whole.

Another bonus is that by bringing on board these talented new individuals you are depriving your competition of their skills and knowledge. This ensures you are staying one step ahead in your industry.

Cons:

Recruitment is expensive and time consuming. You have to attract the right sort of candidate, so where do you advertise? How can you make your job advertisement stand out so you attract the best people? You don’t want just warm bodies, you want the most qualified, skilled and experienced people available in your industry and you want them to choose you over your competitors.

For every vacancy you advertise there could be hundreds of applicants, how do you sift through them all?  How do you keep track of everyone? How do you communicate effectively, not just with the candidates but with interested parties within your organisation?

You could just leave it all to a recruitment agency but then they are interested in numbers, not the welfare of your business. Nobody cares about your business but you, so why not do all of your recruitment yourself with help from Recruitive? We offer answers to every recruitment question you may have.

With a fast, secure, easily managed and responsive bespoke recruitment website designed and built specifically for your requirements, industry leading Applicant Tracking Software seamlessly integrating with an unbeatable Onboarding system, Recruitive provides you with the tools necessary to make the right recruitment decisions and find the people your company needs.

Contact us for a detailed discussion of your current recruitment processes and see how we can help you out.