It goes without saying that whether you are recruiting or hiring, you need a new employee. It is crucial to get both processes right as there are significant costs associated with losing a staff member.

To ensure that your company is maximising the potential of every candidate, we need to understand the difference between recruiting and hiring. Not only this, but it is also worth considering the variations in hiring pools and the differing viewpoints involved.

Defining ‘hiring’ and ‘recruitment’

In essence, hiring is a quick fix. There is an opening within a firm, a job advert is posted, and candidates send their CVs for you to start the interview process.

In contrast, recruitment is a long-term solution to filling positions. It’s about ensuring you have a continuous pool of talent. More often than not, this talent is already employed so it’s necessary for you to make your job more appealing than their current position.

You may look at hiring as candidates coming to you, whereas recruitment is when you approach the candidate/s. Neither one is superior to the other. It very much depends on the needs of a company.

What do the two talent pools look like

As you can imagine, those who are hired and those who are recruited are going to be quite distinct in situation.

a) The talent pool for hiring

Once the job posting has been published, HR or the hiring manager will start to collect CVs and narrow down the best candidates to invite them for an interview. This is an ideal solution for junior or entry-level positions. Typically, expert skills are not required so you can focus more on cultural fit and trainability.

The interview process is normally straightforward. You should receive multiple applications, as more people will meet the requirements of your vacancy and, for this reason, it’s generally a quick process.

Hiring talent has less risk associated with it. While there are plenty of candidates applying for the job, there is no great loss if one doesn’t work out. You may already still have candidates on file, and simply re-posting the job may allow you to replace the unsuitable candidate in a short period of time.

b) The talent pool for recruiting

In this instance, many companies prefer to use the services of a professional recruiter. The main reason for this is that an agency will already have access to a large talent pool, often with candidates ready for management or senior roles. They will also have contact with candidates who have specialised skills, including those skills that are more difficult to find.

By recruiting, you are keeping your company open to talent from active and passive job seekers, whether that’s your in-house recruitment team or in cooperation with a recruitment agency.

Another great advantage of recruiting is that your talent pool has already been screened. The talent that you are provided with meets all of your requirements from skill to culture fit.

The differing viewpoints

As we mentioned before, the viewpoint mainly boils down to how a company looks at finding the right candidate. When a person leaves a job, it’s not common practice to have a line of potential replacements. To avoid the costs incurred with a vacant position, a company will hire someone.  XXXXX

On the contrary, recruiting is similar to planning for the worst-case scenario. Rather than waiting for an employee to leave and then begin the search, recruiting allows for a range of potential candidates to be ready and waiting.

The long-term recruitment solution

To recruit, you will have to be more hands-on. The key to successful recruiting is sparking the interest of the candidate: in some cases, you need to spark enough of an interest to encourage them to leave their current employment.

From your internal hiring function, you will have a list of potential candidates and it’s your role to reach out to them at the time they’re likely to be needed. It’s also valuable to use the services of a specialist provider, whose sole role is to source and screen candidates who are likely to be of interest to your firm. Such an agency will allow you to spread your net much wider and deeper than you are likely to be able to do alone.

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