Rebuilding your Recruiting Function: A cost-effective approach

During the recent Great Recession, many companies significantly scaled back their recruiting teams. As these businesses rebound, many are looking to rebuild their teams with an eye toward becoming as cost effective and flexible as possible. These organizations typically have three options:

1. Ask current staff to work longer hours, or simply work harder
2. Better utilize currently owned technology, or adopt new technology
3. Utilize outsourced recruiting support to augment their internal team

Most of us know where option #1 will get us: it can work in the short-term, and employees who take on extra responsibilities and larger workloads sometimes feel more invested in their employment and enjoy a bump in pay. But over the long-term this solution often times causes burnout, low morale, and high attrition.

Option #2, technology, can be used in two ways to help your team work more effectively and efficiently:

1. Get more out of your current technology: Almost all recruiting operations have some sort of technology they’ve invested in, even if it’s simply an applicant tracking system. And almost all recruiting operations aren’t getting all they can out of those tools. Most of the leading ATS providers are adding new features every year, and many of those features are included in the fees you already pay. A simple call to your rep might go a long way towards getting more out of what you already own.

2. Adopt new technology: Between new offerings from established recruiting technology companies and new entrants who are continually pushing the envelope, there are plenty of ways new technology investment can help you get more out of your current team. An example of the former is Monster’s 6Sense product line, and an example of the latter is BranchOut. Both are worth a look.

The 3rd option, outsourcing, has become more and more viable with the “flattening” of our world.

Outsourced recruiters can never replace your internal team, but they can help you significantly increase the productivity of your team, and the profitability of your business.

Most likely there are parts of your recruiting process that require a skillset that you can only find with an experienced internal recruiter. In all likelihood there are also parts of your process that aren’t as complex, and those are tasks that you can complete at about half the cost of doing it internally.


Take the example of a mid-sized IT company located on the East Coast. Prior to the recession this company had an internal research team that provided its recruiters a steady pipeline of candidates (which allowed its recruiters to spend more of their time speaking with, and placing, candidates). With the recession’s reduced hiring demand and intense cost pressures, the firm greatly scaled back the team at the beginning of 2009. As demand began to pick up again in 2010, the company decided to bring back the role, but with the pain of the recession still a fresh memory, they wanted to find an alternative to hiring fulltime internal resources, and decided to use PSG Global Solutions to staff the team.

This allowed the company to again enjoy the increased recruiter productivity the researcher role had previously brought, but with two distinct additional benefits:

• Cost Savings: Once the company added in payroll taxes, benefits, bonuses, etc., PSG resources were 50% of the cost of hiring someone internally (not including additional savings from technology costs, office space, etc.)
• Ease of Management: As company managers no longer have to recruit, on board, train and manage internal staff for the role, they can devote more management time to growing their business.

While most of us have at one time or another stretched our teams to grow capacity without growing headcount, for more and more companies technology and outsourcing are proving to be smarter alternatives.

Brian Cotter is co-founder and president of PSG Global Solutions, the world’s largest and fastest growing provider of outsourced recruiting support to the US staffing industry.