Partner with a talent specialist or recruit in-house?

Company culture has become increasingly valuable to leaders

According to Gartner’s 2022 CEO survey, culture is considered by leaders to be as important a priority as growth, digital technology transformation and inflation. Executives have realised the high value of company culture is a direct result of the tight labour market. In order to retain and attract new employees, a company should strive to be open, welcoming and innovative.

Inevitably as companies and employees adapted during the pandemic, they were less likely to incur the cost and effort of posting jobs outside their organisations. As a result, requirements were generally filled with internal candidates. In spite of this, PwC’s annual Saratoga workforce benchmarking report 2022, which surveyed over 400 companies across more than 15 industries, shows that the majority of organisations ramped up their talent acquisition last year. Their findings showed a significant rise in external recruitment rates (76% up on 2021). Promotion (54%) and employee mobility (17%) rates were also up year on year.

Although many companies continue to utilise internal resources to fill vacant positions, 73% of respondents in the in-house recruitment landscape interviewed in a recent survey by Eploy were found to use talent pools, and while 43% use them to manage both internal and external candidates, the findings showed that they are not being used successfully. Most of those surveyed believe that they “lack the necessary resources to use talent pools effectively”, citing the shortfalls of people (80%), time (69%) and technology (60%). A surprising 91% of respondents were not measuring return on investment of their talent management activities.

Outsourcing talent acquisition increases flexibility. An external specialist can improve the quality and efficiency of hiring. In contrast to an HR department which is often preoccupied with other tasks such as training and development and employee payroll, a talent partner is completely dedicated to recruitment requirements and finding the best candidates. It is often more cost effective to partner with an external provider as the process is optimised through quick and thorough research, identification and tailored selection to meet the right criteria for a particular role.