You’ve decided to hire an Internal Talent Acquisition Team (or person)

So, you’ve decided to hire an internal recruiter. Congratulations! This is a significant milestone for most businesses - it shows you’re growing and commercially, it can make sense. However, there are a number of factors to consider for this person to meet expectations and be successful in the role and your organisation.

The numbers

More often than not, this hire comes about due to a CEO/Founder/MD looking at the P&L and thinking, “if we bring this function in house, we’ll save $$$ on recruitment fees”. The cost for an internal recruiter is generally around $80,000+ super, plus potentially a few quarterly bonuses on top.

What often gets overlooked is the cost of necessary tech to do the job well. Recruiters need a LinkedIn Recruiter license, CRM (if you don’t have one), project management software, the list can go on. That $80k+ can soon increase by another $12k-$15k per year with tech costs.?

Areas of recruitment?

Creative Natives has eleven consultants recruiting across digital, marketing, creative, design, tech, executive, commercial and sales. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you dig deeper, there are probably 30+ different sub categories that we are across.

Now imagine your internal recruiter has to cover marketing, finance, operations, warehousing (and more!) and all of the sub categories that come with them. It is a massive workload and requires a lot of knowledge building, especially if they’re not familiar with some areas.

Stakeholder support

If your hiring managers are not supporting your talent acquisition function, it isn’t going to work.??

When we say support, we mean:

• Are hiring managers making themselves available to provide a proper brief to the TA on what they’re looking for in this new hire?
• Are hiring managers reviewing job descriptions before roles go live?
• Are hiring managers making themselves available to interview??
• Are hiring managers moving candidates through the hiring process at a nice pace?
• Are hiring managers providing feedback after interviews?

Stakeholder support is essential when searching for a new hire. When that support is lacking, does your internal talent function have approval to have a tough conversation with the hiring manager, the leadership or whoever is holding up the hiring process? If not, they’re not going to get anywhere.?

Learning and development

As with most staff, your new internal recruiter is going to need ongoing training and development. They’ll need guidance on how to use tech and on data analysis, continued suggestions on the right questions to ask across the different job titles and in-depth training on how to sell your business as it grows and evolves (plus more!). It’s important to consider whether you or someone else on your team has capacity to support your internal recruiter with this.?

Talent attraction and retention strategy

Getting talent to join your team is only half the battle. The other half is keeping them around and happy in the long term, and this is where some businesses struggle. Some of these questions will help you start about your strategy for attraction and retention:?

• Do you have an Employee Value Proposition??
• How are you going to attract talent - videos, images, job ads etc??
• Does this new hire know how to craft the copy and content to attract talent?
• Are the leadership team happy to work with the talent acquisition function to attract talent? (Leadership buy-in is vital!)
• Once you have someone starting, are you creating a positive onboarding experience?
• What’s the workplace culture like? Is it an environment where people want to stay?

This is one of the biggest parts of the job, so if your internal recruiter doesn’t have this down pat, it can lead to difficulty in both attracting and retaining great talent - and will cost your business more in the long run.?

If you’re considering setting up your internal talent acquisition function, we can provide consultation and guidance on how to set up your team. Alternatively, if you’ve read this and have decided that using a recruiter is going to work best for your business, we’re here to help. Whatever your needs, reach out at [email protected] today.