Recruitment is so much more than just hiring new people - but not many people realise the full potential that recruitment can have. As a business, it’s important to recruit people for their skills, but perhaps even more so, for their personality, their strengths and weaknesses, and their cultural fit. You can find the person with perfect skills and experience, but if they lack the right attitude, your whole team dynamic gets skewed.
Understanding the types of recruitment and how to use them can give your business a great position to be hiring from when the time is right. Knowing how you want to approach and position your recruitment is a critical step in creating the right kind of environment where people and the business can thrive.
Different types of recruitment
Internal Recruitment
As the name suggests, this is where staff are recruited from inside an organisation to fill positions. Usually best suited for SMEs on the larger side (50+ employees) or big businesses, this method can greatly cut down on recruitment time as candidates are already on hand. Interviews can be scheduled easily and you have all your referees on the doorstep.
Internal recruitment might involve filling positions by:
Transfer - bringing staff across from other departments or sites
Promotion - promoting staff to fill vacancies (this could create a whole chain of upward promotions in some cases)
Redeployment - moving staff from one department to another (potentially due to closure of certain areas of a business or a need for more resource than is currently available)
The downside of internal recruitment is it doesn’t bring any new talent into a business, so you may be missing out on the opportunity for new ideas and ways to grow. In strategic positions that perhaps need a fresh take or outlook on how to drive the business forward, this could be something to consider.
External Recruitment
This is the type of recruitment most of us are more familiar with, external recruitment involves hiring in new people who are not part of the business currently. Any business of any size can utilise external recruitment, and that could be via:
Advertising on jobs sites and portals
Social media sites (LinkedIn)
Graduate schemes
Recruitment agencies
Word of mouth and referrals
External recruitment brings in people with new skills and experiences, often with new ways of working and a fresh take on approaches. Mixing new blood into your business is a great way to keep learning and expanding. The difficulty is finding someone with the right skills, experience, personal and cultural fit within a business based on a few interviews, calls and skills tests. This is where using a recruitment agency that knows your business needs inside out can really make a difference to the talent you bring in.
One of the best ways external recruitment can help in the longer term is by creating a candidate pool or pipeline. If you use a recruiter or recruitment agency, this is where their experience and in-depth knowledge of your business really comes in handy.
Not only can they source reliable freelancers and contractors if you ever need short term/short notice support, but they can also line up candidates for future roles. Having already had the initial chats and got a feel for their experience, recruiters can confidently recommend people for interview quickly, speeding up the process and getting you the perfect candidate. Using recruitment like this to build a candidate pool ready is a really effective way of using recruiters that goes beyond just filling a position, and shows the value that recruitment can have all year round.
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