Are recruiters creating their own competition?

Many of the recruitment companies I talk to are finding that they are increasingly being asked to find Talent Managers or In-house Recruiters for their clients. According to Reed, both the number of jobs and the average salary for Internal Recruiters has risen since 2016. What is driving this demand and should recruiters be filling these roles, when it could mean clients are less reliant on their services?

LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2016 report states that the primary obstacle to companies attracting top talent is finding candidates with high demand skills. As a result, 59% of these organisations are investing more in their employer brand compared to last year.

With unemployment at the lowest level for more than a decade, and responses from online job boards declining, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find and attract the best candidates. Potential new employees, particularly those in high demand areas, need to be courted and made to feel they have been specially chosen. Employers need to build talent pools with a focus on the long term, and to do this they increasingly need someone with a dedicated internal role.

Talent Managers are responsible for all the work processes and systems that go into developing and retaining a high performing workforce, from finding candidates, improving the speed and quality of the candidate experience, leading on schemes to improve the employer brand and retention rate, to tracking the metrics that measure the impact of their work. Internal Recruiters tend to be focussed solely on sourcing and attracting new employees to the company.

Both roles need to focus heavily on building pipelines for candidates through regular, long-term contact with potential new employees, whether they are jobseekers with transferrable skills, those currently employed by competitors, or ‘boomerang’ employees who may return to the company.

Some recruitment companies may be wary of supplying their clients with In-house Recruiters, as one of the aims of these roles is often to reduce reliance on external recruitment agencies. However, it’s just not possible to build talent pools with sufficient candidates to cover every role within a company, and even the best Talent Manager will need some external support from time to time.

Placing an Internal Recruiter within a client’s organisation gives a recruitment company a direct contact within the company, and is highly likely to make them the client’s "go-to" recruiter. A good Talent Manager working with a successful recruitment partner is a winning team that can really give a company the edge over their competitors. So really, internal and external recruiters should be seen as partners, rather than rivals, with the common goal of delivering the very best candidates as quickly and cost efficiently as possible.