How To Manage Internal And External Recruitment For Hiring Managers

It’s every hiring manager’s dream — and worst nightmare. 

Your company is so sought after that you have a mountain of CVs to sift through to find the candidates you’d like to interview.

So, what happens when these CVs are from both your internal recruitment team and external teams you work with and the candidates are not as specialised as you need them to be?

Both of your teams are racing against each other to get you the candidates they feel will be perfect for the role.

But, the stack of CVs on your desk doesn’t contain the highly qualified candidates you need and it’s causing you more grief than gain.

Instead of sorting through this ever-growing pile every time you’re recruiting a new employee at your company, the solution might be found in your recruitment process. Namely, how it’s been structured and who you’re choosing to work with.

Defining the typical steps in the recruitment process    

While the recruitment process varies from company to company, most teams build their recruitment process around four stages:

1. Planning — During this stage, hiring managers usually need to get approval before posting the job ad. This discussion would include the recruiting budget, writing the job description (using their EVP), and putting together a hiring team.
2. Attracting candidates — Any action by the hiring team to attract qualified candidates to the role through candidate sourcing, job advertising, asking for referrals, or engaging a recruiter.
   • Here are 11 Questions You Should Be Asking Your Recruitment Partner.
3. Selecting candidates — This includes reviewing cover letters and CVs, screening calls, pre-employment tests, and interviews.
4. Job offer

However, when you have two recruitment teams — your internal team and external recruiters — you’ll often end up with a stack of resumes to go through during the selection stage.

So, instead of having your process go Step 1-2-3-4, you’re having two separate pipelines go Step 1-2 before they converge in Step 3.

Outline your ideal hiring process flowchart

As you can see above, mapping out your hiring process visually enables you to see where any roadblocks may be. (Cough, cough Step 3!) 

To work around the above example where there’s a traffic jam with CVs, it could be helpful to implement another step where all CVs from both your internal and external recruitment teams must be vetted by a Hiring Coordinator before moving through to the Hiring Manager.

As your internal and external recruitment teams are both working to KPIs when it comes to sending CVs across, having an impartial Hiring Coordinator go through the CVs allows for a quality check before moving them through to the Hiring Manager.

That’s one way to deal with this roadblock in the pipeline!

How to manage the hiring process workflow?

To manage the workflow for the above solution, try using a collaborative platform like Trello, which allows you to assign tasks to your hiring team and view the hiring workflow in steps.

However, if your team is hiring consistently, consider investing an Applicant Tracking System to minimise the volume of CVs coming through your internal and external pipelines. An ATS gives you a full overview of each step in the process and tracks your team’s actions and feedback.

It also gives you filtering options and the ability to search by keyword, so you only see the CVs that are relevant to the key requirements of the role you’re hiring for.

In other words, an excellent option number two to deal with the aforementioned roadblock!

Downsides

While adding an impartial Hiring Coordinator to your recruitment process or investing in an ATS are both great solutions, they’re also costly.

On average, an HR Coordinator’s annual salary is about $60,000. That’s not including the time it takes to source and onboard your new hire. They also won’t be as technically minded or specialised as a recruitment partner who works in your highly qualified candidate’s market on a daily basis.

As for an ATS, it can set you back from $3,000 (for a company of fewer than 10 employees) to $140,000 (for a company of over 5,000 employees) per year. Plus, you’ll have to train your current employees on a new system.

So, instead of using your time and resources trying to reinvent the wheel, let’s solve the root of your problem — Communicating your expectations.

Our Solution

At the heart of this issue is a communication break down about expectations. As a Hiring Manager, you’re expecting quality as CVs come across your desk. 

But — as mentioned above — your recruitment team (both internally and externally) are often working to hit their own KPIs rather than focusing on the quality of candidates they’re sending over.

Take the time to communicate to your internal team what calibre of candidates you’re looking for, and be sure to run your external recruiters through our 11 things you need to ask before engaging a recruitment partner.

We recommend engaging a specialist recruitment partner, who works in the space you’re hiring in on a daily basis, to give you access to the top active and passive candidates in the market.

This will ensure that although you will still be receiving CVs from your internal and external recruitment teams, you will be gaining access to top talent and making your pile of CVs less like a mountain and more of a molehill.

So, when you bring in external recruiters to help you find and hire a new employee, make sure to ask about their specialisation, unique service offerings and how they will get to know your business. 

We’ve compiled some questions to ask your recruitment partner before engaging them to ensure that you’re receiving high-quality CVs that make the merging pipeline process easier for you.

Take a peek at what you should clarify before engaging a new recruitment partner now!