Identifying the right candidates for your company is one of the most critical aspects of recruiting. In July, the unemployment rate matched its lowest level in 50 years, so finding the right candidates won’t be easy. Luckily, external recruiting can help you recruit the best people for your organization.
In this post, we’ll define external recruiting, how it differs from internal recruiting, and how you can approach external recruiting in a way that helps you make the best hires.
What is external recruiting?
External recruiting is the practice of identifying candidates outside your organization as potential hires. They can come from just about anywhere – all that matters is that they aren’t currently employed within your organization.
External recruiting involves having your recruiting staff (or an expert outsourced recruiting agency you’ve tapped to help you) collect candidates from a variety of sources, vet them, and move them through the interviewing and hiring stages. It requires coordination between your recruiting team, hiring managers, and human resources.
Companies use external recruiting to find new candidates that can bring in-demand skills or experience to the organization, and it’s a critical aspect of any company’s recruiting strategy. Unless you’ve already hired all of the top talent in your chosen field (and this isn’t true of any company), then you’ll always have room to improve your organization with external recruiting.
Internal vs. external recruitment
External recruiting involves finding candidates outside your organization, and internal recruiting involves you looking inward at current employees for candidates. But there are other nuances to both strategies which you must understand to get the most out of either one.
The primary way in which external recruiting differs from internal recruiting is your approach and messaging. Job postings for external candidates have to be written with your audience in mind. With internal candidates, you’re asking them to transition within the company. While that can still be a big change for the individual, it’s usually less complicated than joining a new company.
With external candidates, you’re asking them to take an entirely new step in their career, which involves selling them on the role and the organization. You’ll have to discuss the benefits package, salary, and other components of working at your company that you may not have to address with an internal candidate.
The channels where you find external candidates is also a big difference (more on those specifics below). With internal candidates, you’re often looking on company intranet sites or networking with managers within your company to find people. External recruiting involves looking at job boards and other places to find the right person.
What are some external sources you can use to fill your recruiting pipeline?
Your ability to proactively identify candidates outside your organization will define how successful your external recruiting efforts are, and using job boards is one of the best ways you can do that. You can leverage sites like Indeed, Career Builder, and Monster, and professional social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, to find candidates.
How to get the most out of your external recruiting efforts
Here are a few best practices you can use to successfully find candidates:
Be transparent
Don’t sugarcoat or hide responsibilities about the position you’re looking to fill. Candidates value honesty and transparency. The truth is going to come out at some point, so it’s better to establish reasonable expectations at the outset of the relationship. That will help you identify candidates who are in line with what you’re looking for in terms of skills and experience.
Extoll your company’s virtues
As noted above, external candidates may not know much about your company. They also have other options available to them. No matter what kind of field you’re in, and no matter what the demand is like in your industry, always look to create a great employee experience before you’ve even hired the individual. Establish yourself as the best place to work, and outline exactly why that’s true.
Target the right locations
You won’t be able to establish a presence on every site, so pick the ones that will work the best for you. Some, like Indeed, Glassdoor, or LinkedIn, are a great fit for pretty much any company.
Stay organized and place an emphasis on candidate experience
You may have multiple candidates you’re considering for a role, but remember to treat every candidate as if they’re the one you plan to hire. Track each candidate’s journey so that when you contact them, you know where they are in the process. Stay in touch with them, keeping them updated on how the hiring process is going. You might not hire every candidate, but you can treat them with respect so that they may want to apply for a different position in the future.
How can external recruiting help your business?
External recruiting opens your organization up to a world of possibilities and candidates that exist outside your company. It helps expose you to a new collection of talented individuals who can bring new ideas and fresh perspectives to your business.
If you’re looking for a partner to help guide you through this process to identify the best candidates, while creating the best possible candidate experience, look no further than Comeet and its full range of recruiting services.
At Comeet, we understand that external recruiting requires careful consideration, follow-through, and recruiting expertise. We have a proven track record for helping companies get the most out of their external recruiting efforts.
Comeet offers external recruiting support as part of our Elastic Recruiting program. For more on how Comeet can help you cultivate your recruiting pipeline, contact us today.
