As one of the few recruiting industry professionals who has spent significant time in executive search and managing a corporate talent acquisition function, I am often asked about the differences between internal and external recruiting models.
I have been in the medical device search business for 17 years. I spent the first 7 years in 2 medical device search firms and then a little over 10 years working for one of the fastest growing device companies of the past decade. During my tenure as the lead recruiting agent for Edwards Lifesciences, I contributed to doubling the size of the company from 5,000 to 10,000 employees and tripling the revenue from $800 million to $2.4 billion.
During those same 10 years, all of the big players in the industry and many of the small to mid-sized players built internal recruitment functions. The majority of the feedback on these internal programs is that they have not lived up to the expectations placed on recruiting companies. Here are 4 areas to explore:
Internal recruitment overly focused on cost savings
• The promise of creating an internal recruitment function is often cost savings. The problem with this strategy is that in an operational function like recruitment, cost, quality, and speed are interlocked as our three variables. Reduce cost and speed, or quality suffers. Pick your poison.
• Making cost savings work requires internal recruiters to carry anywhere from 25-50 open jobs at one time. Contrast this to search firms where a busy recruiter may only be working on 7 to 10 searches.
Focus on process rather than recruiting
• Internal recruiting is often overly focused on process. In a very simplistic view once expressed by a previous boss and 35-year recruitment industry veteran, “Recruiters recruit.” That means they pick up the phone and convince people who are working to explore something new.
• Internal recruiters do very little of this. An “aggressive” internal recruiter may send some messages on LinkedIn, but I challenge you to find an internal team that measures the number of outgoing calls and gets off the internet to actually build relationships. Recruiting is a live contact sport, and most internal recruiters practice this important aspect very little.
• Internal process recruiters spend quite a bit of time managing applicants, internal transfers, and attending internal meetings.
• Some people will call me “old school” for strongly believing in communication through phones or live conversation. They will say that LinkedIn and e-mail are the new way. This is similar to the sales person who sits in their office, never visits clients, and tells you about their great marketing strategy. The important question is whether or not they hitting their quota. Only you can judge.
Lack of market / industry expertise
• Effective recruiters are industry experts, and despite what Talent Acquisition generalists say, this expertise takes years to develop. Unfortunately, the recruiting leaders and recruiters brought in to build many of these internal functions bring little to no experience from the medical device industry.
• Lack of knowledge impacts all aspects of the process. Good candidates are turned off by recruiters who don’t know the market or what they do, and hiring mangers lack confidence in recruiters who were recruiting in another industry a year ago.
Alienate and offend search firms
• Internal recruiters often view search firms as competition. They stonewall, ignore, or implement contracts that are one sided.
• This turns off the good recruiters and leaves them working with the worst newbie search firms.
As you look at your own program, it’s important to determine your end game. Is the goal cost savings, quality of hire, or speed? It’s up to you to determine the makeup of your internal team and if and how you integrate vendors. From my perspective, best of breed programs hire leaders who have years of direct experience in the industry, use external search partners for critical roles, and work to minimize the common problem areas in the recruitment industry outlined above.
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