External recruitment: advantages and opportunities

External recruitment is defined as the search for new candidates through external job advertisements. The opposite is internal recruitment, in which a suitable person is sought within the company as a successor or for a new position. But which form of recruitment is better, what are the advantages of external recruitment and what options can be used? This article reveals more.

What are the advantages of external recruitment?

Let’s start directly with the advantages of an external job advertisement.

A breath of fresh air and new ideas

One of the biggest advantages of hiring applicants as part of external recruitment is that they always bring a breath of fresh air into the company. They have a different perspective on things, can bring in new ideas and break up fossilized company structures. This can often have a positive effect on the company’s goals or even on its growth in the long term. Furthermore, outsiders usually have relevant specialist knowledge and diverse experience from other areas of the company or business, which can enrich the company and the team.

Large selection and focus on professional qualities

Another advantage of external recruitment is the large pool of candidates from which you can select your ideal candidate. This means that you are more likely to hit the mark in terms of your defined job profile than if you were to look for a successor to a vacant position from within your own ranks. Especially in small companies, the choice is limited. This approach also has the advantage of focusing primarily on professional qualities and less on the personal popularity status of the person in the company or team.

Existing know-how

If your company is currently undergoing a transformation anyway, for example with regard to digitalization, you can do yourself an additional favour with external recruitment. After all, what you may first have to teach your internal staff through extensive training, external people who join the company may have already learned. They can then often pass on their knowledge to colleagues on an ongoing basis, making certain training costs superfluous.

Faster acceptance

If internal employees are promoted, it is often more difficult for them to take on an authoritarian character than if a new team member joins from outside. Inconsistencies between colleagues can also occur, but the workforce does not have to wonder why that person was promoted and they were not. Situations like this, brought about by internal recruitment, could potentially reduce the overall performance of the team for a period of time and make it less productive.

What are the disadvantages of external recruitment?

Where there are advantages, there are of course also disadvantages. In external recruitment, these include the fact that the acquisition of external personnel costs a lot of money and is also very time-consuming. The issue of high costs arises in particular when external recruiters are brought in to save time and resources in the company’s own HR department.

Another aspect is the short amount of time in which external employees can form an impression of the skills and character. If the person does not deliver what they promise, there is double the effort in terms of financial and time aspects. There is a higher risk that the candidate and team will not be a good fit. The last point to mention is the long waiting and training period for an external person, which must be taken into account.

What options do companies have for external recruitment?

As the saying goes? Many roads lead to the goal. This also applies to external recruitment, for which we have put together a few examples below:

Active vs. passive

With the active search, for example

• Job advertisements placed in daily newspapers and trade journals,
• Advertising via digital job boards,
• Advertisements on other job boards such as the employment agency and
• Making personal contact at career fairs, seminars, conferences

meant.

The passive search deals with

• Unsolicited applications
• Job advertisements in newspapers
• Job searches on job boards on the Internet and social media

When actively recruiting externally, it is particularly important to ensure that the company’s external image is impeccable in the long term – this is known as employer branding. It is also advisable in any case to distribute the advertisement widely across various channels.

When is external recruitment particularly suitable?

Hiring external employees mainly makes sense if you run a small or medium-sized company, as the choice of internal staff is limited. In addition, you certainly don’t want to transfer good employees to other departments. Even if you want to expand your business, external recruitment is the only true means to an end.

How can software be an advantage in external recruitment?

In order to ensure an efficient recruitment process, it is important to collect and evaluate all incoming data quickly and to be able to maintain an overview of personnel in the long term. This can be a major challenge, especially for personnel-intensive companies such as trade fair companies, catering and personnel companies.

Teamhero provides valuable support at this point and saves a lot of time. As a customized and intuitive HR software solution for comprehensive personnel planning and personnel support, it enables the digital management of extensive HR work processes in just a few steps.

• Tailored recruitment of applicants
• Direct transfer of personnel data to the employee database
• Applicant portal for internal employees
• Appointment management, direct contact and inviting candidates easily via the same tool

Conclusion: External recruitment and its advantages

Internal or external recruitment: both approaches have their raison d’être. The decision as to which is better ultimately always depends on the current company situation and the position to be filled.

If a position needs to be filled at short notice, you are better off recruiting internally. When recruiting a manager for a newly created vacancy, an external person could possibly provide more new ideas and allow the team to think outside the box. This means that both internal and external recruitment have their advantages.

In both cases, innovative HR software offers you the basis for an effective and smooth recruiting process. Would you like to test Teamhero free of charge? Then we look forward to hearing from you! You can find more information about the functions and areas of application of Teamhero on our website.