Recruitment is a method by which organizations hire employees who help them accomplish organizational goals and objectives. Implementing the correct recruitment strategy is extremely crucial for a company as only the hired employees of the company work towards its success.
So, if the recruitment strategy is correct and optimal, the recruiters will be able to hire good employees with limited resources at hand. However, if it is not suitable for the company, a wrong recruitment strategy can result in hiring the wrong employees even after using loads of time, money, and effort.
Types of Recruitment
Broadly speaking, there are two types of recruitment sources - Internal and External.
Internal Recruitment
Internal recruitment is a type of recruitment strategy that plans to hire employees for any open job vacancies from within the company. It is a highly efficient technique because it only employs people who are already well aware of the processes of the organization. Through internal recruitment, recruiters always hire people who fit with the organization’s culture and understand all the company policies.
Moreover, when going with the internal recruitment strategy, companies always recruit people who have proven their excellence and expertise through their consistent performance. This results in quick alignment of the employee with his new job responsibilities, expectations, and organizational goals, leading to fast achievements in the new position.
Internal recruitment is also highly efficient for the company because it takes a lot less time, money, and effort for the recruiters to hire people internally.
👉 Read more: How to Assess Employee Skills and Competencies?
There are 4 different sources of internal recruitment.
Transfers
When an employee is sent from one department, location, or project to another department, location, or project without any significant changes in their roles and responsibilities, it is called hiring through internal transfers. Based on the performance and competency levels of employees, they are hired by different teams or departments within the organization.
For example, suppose a company XYZ has 2 big projects running, wherein project A is about to come to an end and project B has just begun. If the software tester of Project A resigns, the company can transfer the software tester of Project B to Project A, for some time until there is no testing work in Project B.
If project A is about to be completed and there is currently no testing work in project B, the company will not need to hire any other tester and both projects can benefit from a single software tester, thereby saving the company’s money and time in hiring a new software tester.
Promotions
Promotions are the most common way of hiring through internal recruitment for a higher position in an organization. It refers to upgrading the position of the employees after assessing their performance and skills.
This is usually done during the review cycles of the company or when there is an urgent requirement for a higher-cadre employee to execute certain tasks. In this process, an employee is shifted from a lower position to a higher position, which means he or she will now have more responsibilities, remuneration, and position.
Most organizations feel promotions are the best way to fill in the higher-level positions in the company because it is always preferable that senior employees are aligned with the company culture, processes, and policies.
Re-employment
Re-employment simply means employing former employees of the company for a specific job requirement. Several employees shift from one organization to another on good terms which makes the recruiters and hiring managers to re-employ them for a role that is fit for them. Re-employment also means calling retired employees for an urgent job role in the organization.
Re-employment, just like other internal recruitment methods, is both time and cost-efficient because there is no requirement to spend time and money on the training and development of these employees.
Internships
Internships are programs that several companies offer to students or fresh graduates who want to learn about corporate culture and gain experience. Many times, when organizations need freshers and find working interns capable enough to work for a specific job role, they hire these interns for a full-time opportunity. This type of internal recruitment needs less training and is apt only for entry-level job roles.
Pros and Cons of Internal Recruitment
Pros of Internal Recruitment:
- It is easy, fast, and inexpensive.
- No need for any training or orientation.
- Helps in increasing employee motivation.
- Helps in enhancing the loyalty of all the employees.
Cons of Internal Recruitment:
- It restricts recruiters from hiring new employees.
- It offers a very limited scope because not all positions can be filled with internal hiring.
- When internal recruitment is done through promotion, it might lead to disharmony within the peer group of the employee involved, leading to a toxic work culture.
- Internal recruitment is usually followed by external hiring because most of the time, the person shifted from one role to another leaves behind a vacant position that has to be filled in through external recruitment.
- The same employees work in the same manner as they have been doing, leading to a saturation of achievements for the organization.
External Recruitment
External recruitment is a type of recruitment strategy that plans to hire employees for any open job vacancies from outside the company. Unlike internal recruitment methods, external recruitment methods are not cost-efficient or time-efficient.
In fact, it takes a lot of time, money, and effort for recruiters to hire, onboard, and train the externally hired new employees of the organization. Moreover, these employees are also new to the company culture, processes, and policies, making it even more difficult for them to adjust.
That said, external recruitment is an excellent way of introducing new people to the company. It brings in new ideologies, new energy, and new methods of executing the work and accomplishing the organizational objectives. Without any external recruitment, a company will never be able to expand its workforce and hence, the success of the company will get saturated.
There are 6 different sources of external recruitment.
Advertisements
Companies post advertisements for job vacancies on various platforms such as newspaper, social media, their websites, or job portals. These ads gain the attention of those seeking jobs who in turn apply for the jobs.
Once the recruiters of the company have the desired number of job applications, they screen them, test them on their skills, interview them, and finally select a desirable candidate to appoint him or her for the vacancy.
However, the process doesn’t end here. They also need to on-board them, which basically means that they need to be told about the company policies and processes. Further, depending on the past experience of the new employee, he or she might also need to be trained on certain skills or expertise.
Employment Exchanges
Most countries have a government department, usually called an employment exchange, meant to connect job seekers with employers. In certain countries, it is mandatory for every company to provide details of any job vacancies to these exchanges. These exchanges have information about all the job seekers and hence help by connecting them to companies with relevant job vacancies. Usually, these employment exchanges are meant to hire unskilled workers.
Employment Agencies
Employment agencies are private agencies that have large databases of candidates seeking jobs in different profiles. When a company approaches them to fill up a job vacancy, they provide information about these candidates.
After that, the company tests these candidates on various grounds and finally selects candidates to fill up the vacancies.
Campus Recruitment
When companies visit colleges to hire fresh graduates to fill their entry-level positions, it is called campus recruitment. Although most campus recruitment drives do not last for more than a week, it is generally a very engaging process.
Organizations need to engage with these Gen Z college students regularly through social media, campus activities, job fairs, internships, etc. All these activities take up a lot more than just conducting a campus drive.
Employee Referrals
When there is a vacancy within a company, recruiters always try to fill up the vacancies internally first. If there are no good alternatives available, then the next possibility to fill in these open vacancies is through employee referral schemes.
Employee referral programs or schemes are methods that the recruitment team of an organization uses to hire people known to the current employees either personally or professionally.
Compared to other external recruitment methods, employee referral programs are cost and time-efficient.
Talent Pool Databases
As a rule, almost every organization keeps a record of all the applicants who apply for jobs at the company. Over a period, this record builds up and takes the form of a database of a talent pool for different departments and job levels.
Therefore, most organizations often look up to these databases whenever there is a job opening in the company. Recruiters contact these applicants and check if they are still looking for the job actively and if they are still interested in getting employed by the company.
Pros and Cons of External Recruitment
Pros of External Recruitment:
- It brings new faces, ideologies, motivation, and energy to the organization.
- External hiring leads to organizational branding.
- The culture of the company isn’t harmed when new people are hired at higher positions.
- A larger talent pool is available to fill job positions.
Cons of External Recruitment:
- It takes up a lot of time and effort for recruiters of the company as the process is very lengthy.
- The cost involved in external recruitment is very high as compared to that with internal recruitment.
- Most external hires demand higher salaries, leading to an increase in the overall cost for the company.
Conclusion
Both internal and external recruitment strategies are beneficial depending on the requirements of the company and the vacant job positions. However, no matter which strategy you choose, one thing that remains constant is the need to test a candidate’s skills and competency for the job position.
WeCP offers an excellent solution for assessing the skills of the candidates, irrespective of whether you hire them through internal or external recruitment. The skill assessment tool creates quizzes for all the candidates for any IT-related skills or coding languages and helps you evaluate them on their expertise. It also lets you rank them according to their performance, helping you through your recruitment process seamlessly.
Want to know more on how WeCP can help you in increasing the quality of hire? Try WeCP for free or Schedule a Call with WeCP Team.
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