If you’ve ever managed an interview process, you won’t be surprised to learn that hiring the right person for a position is quite challenging. In fact, it’s the place we see more lack of confidence in our clients than anywhere else — especially founders that have become CEOs in relatively small growth stage companies.

They (and maybe you) have made a few hiring mistakes, and now they’re pretty shy about the whole thing.

As it turns out, determining whether someone will be a good fit for your organization is hard.

Getting help with your hiring process, or outsourcing it, is a smart choice for many organizations. And good news: you have a variety of options for getting it done, including internal hiring managers, recruiting firms, and trusted advisors working as consultants.

Who can benefit from outsourcing recruiting?

Whether to manage your own recruiting process is usually a cost-benefit question. If you’re growing from 50 employees to 100 over the next six months, then it probably makes financial sense to build your own recruiting function internally.

If you’re a smaller organization hiring one or two people, outsourcing your recruiting allows you to benefit from the network and expertise of others. And the cost is likely less than you’d spend hiring an internal recruiter and less than you’d lose on mistakes trying to do it yourself. A bad hire is very expensive and every unfilled role has an opportunity cost.

Some small companies task their human resources manager with recruiting, and it’s often a bad move. Recruiting involves a particular skill set, and many HR staff haven’t been trained in it.

There are advantages to running your recruiting process internally. The hiring manager is integrated into your organization, and they know your team. Presumably, they’ll be better able to make fit determinations.

Even if you are in a position to hire an in-house recruiter, there are downsides. You’re presuming a one-size-fits-all situation. Your one recruiter is trying to source everything and from within your own network. You may still need to work with outside recruiters if you have more specific needs, like finding software developers or product managers. It may reduce some of your outside recruiting costs. It likely won’t reduce all of them.

So, when you’re deciding whether to outsource, you’re weighing the value of someone who knows your team and is on salary in your organization against the value of someone with a large network and expertise who costs more per hire.

What are your outsourcing options?

You have several options when you’re outsourcing recruiting. You can outsource to a professional recruiter — someone whose sole or primary task is recruiting. You can also outsource to a consultant.

Let’s talk about how recruiters work. There are two types of recruiting. You can contract with a recruiting firm on a retained basis or a contingency basis. Retained recruiters, who are paid upfront, will guarantee finding the right candidate for the role. They’re also pricier, so they’re most often used for filling high-level positions that justify the cost.

Contingency recruiters get paid a portion of the position’s salary only if they find the right applicant and that applicant takes the offered position. Often companies retain several contingency recruiters at the same time, so there’s a race to the finish, so to speak. Because there’s a chance they’ll get nothing for their efforts, contingency recruiters may temper their efforts.

Working with a recruiting consultant also has two variations. You can engage an RPO — a recruitment process outsource. Basically, it’s a contracted hiring team. You can also ask an existing consultant or trusted advisor to act as a surrogate for you in the hiring process. They aim for a successful outcome and are paid for their time. We do this kind of work for clients, and our approach is one of partnership. We want to boost your confidence so that you can eventually do the hiring yourself.

What does a recruiter do?

There are essentially three stages to a recruiter’s assistance.

In stage one, a good recruiter will help you develop the job description and bring their market knowledge to the requirements or the work environment. For example, one of our clients worked with a recruiter who shared that the hiring market expected software engineers to be able to work from home at least two days a week (pre-pandemic). In order to get high-quality engineers, the company would need to create a work-from-home policy.

The recruiter gives advice on the role, on the work environment, and on the compensation level. Imagine the way a real estate broker comes into a home and helps the owners make it more sellable — that’s what the recruiter does for a job that needs to be filled.

Next, the recruiter moves on to sourcing. That’s stage two. They’ll use their networks, their database, perhaps public sources like job boards. They’ll use LinkedIn. A good recruiter may also target specific candidates employed in similar companies and reach out to those people.

Finally, they screen the candidates in stage three. They’ll have an initial conversation to confirm they’re a fit for the role, they’re interested, and they’re in the salary range.

Then they’ll make an introduction to the company, and the company takes it from there with the interview process and hiring decision.

Some recruiters will step in and help negotiate or facilitate the offer process as well.

Of course, those are the basic steps. Recruiters also help in ways that aren’t quite as tangible.

For instance, they reduce the noise of working through dozens (or hundreds) of applicants since they’re just sharing the most appropriate candidates. They help maintain your brand during the hiring process. Applicants share details of their experience on social media and on sites like GlassDoor. A recruiter can make sure everyone has a positive experience, even if they’re not right for the role.

Recruiters generally have a much larger network and can generate outbound inquiries much more effectively than you can.

And finally, they have the experience of having screened hundreds (maybe thousands) of candidates. They’re experts at weeding out candidates that won’t be a good fit. Some are also experts at negotiating and closing the deal in the final stages of the process.

How is using a consultant different from using a recruiter?

A consultant can offer many of the same benefits that come from outsourcing to a recruiter. For instance, if you’re working with a coach that’s a seasoned executive (ahem), they have a large network, lots of expertise hiring people, and are likely good negotiators.

Working with a consultant can be a better option for some companies because consultants may offer a more holistic approach.

Engaging a trusted advisor to do a search for you means the person searching for and screening candidates knows you and your company better than anyone else. When we (Trajectify) do recruiting for clients, it’s after we’ve assessed their cultures and identified their opportunities and their challenges. Sometimes we understand what would make a good fit even better than they do because we have both an intimate knowledge of the company and an outside-in perspective.

Working with a coach or advisor can also mean sealing the deal on a new hire. What do I mean by that?

Let me give an example.

We worked with a client who’d had a bit too much turnover in a product manager position and was looking to fill it again. The organization’s leader asked that we help hire the next one. We had a three phase approach. First, we saw that the company wasn’t aligned around a healthy product manager process. Hence, the new product manager wouldn’t have been set up to succeed.

So we helped them do that alignment. Our first phase involved not only creating the job. We helped them adapt their processes so the new hire would be successful.

Then we moved on to the second phase, sourcing and hiring the right person.

And in stage three, we helped with onboarding. We coached the company and the new hire for several months. We knew the founder felt like they were in a two-strikes scenario. The situation had some risk, and we tried to reduce that risk by doing more than hiring the right person. We set up that new hire — and with them, the business — so they had the greatest chance of success.

We also work with a great deal of transparency. When you’re using an outside recruiter, there’s often some secrecy. They don’t want you to see their network, to see how they do what they do.

We do our recruiting from the inside of the company, partnering with you. We want to boost your confidence so that you can do the hiring yourself. We’re not a recruiting firm, and we don’t want to be.

Our goal isn’t only to get the position filled. It’s to make you better able to hire people on your own without us, to build your skills and confidence.

Final thoughts

Unless you’re doing a high volume of hiring, I think most organizations would find value in using a recruiting firm, or a coach or trusted advisor. The advantage to working with your coach is that they can utilize all the tools they typically use within an organization — like our BestWork DATA assessments — in the hiring process. At Trajectify, we can help in working through obstacles, both within the organization and from a potential candidate.

Our motivation is focused on getting the best result rather than being the first one to close the deal. We have less bias because we don’t have skin in the game.

If you don’t have a relationship with an advisor, now might be the time to find one — not just to help you with a hiring process but to bring that outside-in perspective to your organization as a whole. As you know, the impact of a hiring decision doesn’t stop the moment they accept that offer. On the contrary, it extends far beyond. Whether you’re set up to help that person succeed will play a significant part in their satisfaction, and yours.

We use BestWork DATA assessments and other tools to help our clients develop better processes, including hiring, throughout their organizations. Contact us to learn more.