External Recruitment: Examples, Benefits and Opportunities

Often, small and medium-sized businesses try to fill vacancies or new vacancies with existing staff - through redistribution or further training.

Depending on requirements and rate of growth, this may not be enough: There's quickly a lack of internal expertise or capacity. Therefore, it is important that companies also look for new team members outside their own ranks.

In this article by guest author Lars Vogler, you will learn what options are available for external recruitment, what advantages they offer, and how you can successfully find new employees.

External Recruitment: Definition

External recruitment refers to the search for new team members outside your own company. This includes all Recruiting measures, to make potential applicants aware of the company and encourage them to apply.

If you want to utilise all options, it is often beneficial to open new roles for the current team as well. Because internal recruitment brings some advantages: The recruitment process is less extensive, training time is shorter, and since you already know the person, you also know if you fit together in the long term.

Of course, there are situations where existing employees are consciously not considered - for example, if the necessary skills are not available internally or simply more capacity is needed.

Benefits and Downsides of External Recruitment

External recruitment offers both benefits and downsides. On the one hand, you can flexibly react to the changing requirements of the company and gain new expertise and capacities. On the other hand, it also brings challenges - such as higher costs and the effort of training new employees. We have summarised the most important advantages and disadvantages for you here.

Benefits of External Recruitment

• Larger applicant pool: You can reach considerably more potential applicants externally than internally. While this increases the screening effort, it also increases your chances of finding the right person for the role.
• New skills: New employees often bring skills and qualifications that the company would otherwise lack. This expands the skills in the team and creates the chance for the company to evolve.
• New Ideas: With new team members, new experiences also come into your company - sometimes straight from direct competitors. You can use these insights constructively to drive your company forward.
• Long-term Capacity: Internal recruitment only shifts capacities - it's usually lacking elsewhere or there's a heavier workload for the affected employees, which leads to dissatisfaction and turnover in the long run. With new team members, you cover your personnel needs long-term. Your employees are more satisfied and productive.
• No / Low Training Costs: If you're looking externally for personnel, you can specifically select applicant profiles that meet the necessary qualifications and requirements. Existing employees may need training or further education upfront and usually have little or no professional experience in the new area.
• Authority: Sometimes employees have difficulty respecting former colleagues who have become their boss. New team members from outside often have it easier in such positions, as they're seen as having more authority from the get-go.

Downsides of External Recruitment

• Cost: Job ads, job platforms, headhunters, career fairs - compared to searching within the company, external recruitment is associated with higher costs. This is compounded by higher opportunity costs, as roles tend to be vacant longer and more resources are tied up in organising the application process.
• Time investment: The external recruitment takes longer - from the requirement profile to the job ad to the first applications, it can take several days to weeks. This is time that can be saved through effective talent management. This is added to by the time spent on onboarding.
• Risk of Misplacing: The risk that it's not the right fit is higher when recruiting externally. That's because with existing employees, you already know their way of working and how they interact within the team. If the new team member doesn't match the job, the team, or the values, you may have to start the search again from scratch. This makes the cost and time factors weigh heavier.
• Frustration among Employees: Often there are employees who have their eye on a vacant or newly created role. If you solely rely on external recruitment and in a sense bypass them, you might snub them.

Measures of External Recruitment

There are numerous options for external recruitment. Sometimes passive and active external recruitment pathways are differentiated.

Active External Recruitment

With active external recruitment, you advertise open positions using various formats and channels - both online and offline. Always keep the requirement profile and therefore your target group in mind, as not every format and not every channel is suitable for every target audience.

Active measures include:

• Job ads: The job ad is usually the basis of external recruitment and supports all other measures: It is shared across job portals and social media, sent with active sourcing, and published on your own careers page. On one hand, it should clearly define the requirement profile, detailing the skills and qualifications applicants need to bring. On the other hand, it needs to paint a clear picture to applicants of what to expect, for example by introducing the company and describing the benefits.
• Active Sourcing: This method couldn't be more active. You approach candidates directly who meet the requirement profile. Especially for roles that are difficult to fill due to a shortage of skilled workers, you can save time and therefore high opportunity costs.
• Job portals: Job portals give your job ad more reach and thus increase the chance of reaching suitable candidates. For this, it's important to have clearly defined your target group to identify suitable job boards and prevent wastage.
• Career site: Of course, you should also publish the job ad on your own careers page. On one hand, you can reach candidates who already know your company and are specifically looking for job opportunities. On the other hand, you provide a direct point of contact for interested candidates, which you can easily share as a link.
• Social Media:Social media likewise provides helpful ways to draw more candidates' attention to your job offers. Through your corporate profile, you can reach individuals who already follow the company. Additionally, you can activate your own network and either directly write to suitable profiles or ask your contacts to share the job in their network. You can learn more about this in our article on social media recruitment.
• Career fairs: Job fairs and other career events are the perfect opportunity to introduce your company and get to know professionals. The direct conversation allows you to respond to individual questions and needs and thereby highlight the uniqueness of your company.
• Headhunters / Recruitment Consultancies: Recruitment services can help you fill roles faster and therefore at a lower cost. Particularly with roles that have special requirements or are otherwise hard to fill (keyword: skills shortage), you benefit from their expert knowledge and extensive network.
• Employee Referral Programs: Employee recommendations increase the reach and quality of applications. Because: Your employees know the corporate culture and possibly even the specific requirements of the job. The recommendations are therefore already pre-selected.
• Performance Job Advertising: With job performance advertising, job offers on job boards, social media and search engines are specifically promoted to reach the right target group. You always keep an eye on the performance of individual job offers or channels, looking at metrics like clicks, conversions and cost per application. This way, you can optimise your campaigns in the long term to get high-quality - yet inexpensive - applications.

The base for all these measures is always relevant: the employer brand. Only if your company is perceived as attractive can you convince potential applicants. At the same time, a good employer brand simplifies and makes all the above-mentioned measures cheaper, as you invest less time and resources in the acquisition of candidates.

Passive External Recruitment

With passive measures, there are only unsolicited applications - candidates apply on their own to your company and you don't have to do anything at all. Though it isn't that simple. A prerequisite for unsolicited applications is also your employer brand. The better it is, the more numerous and higher quality the applications. Moreover, they can only be controlled to a limited extent (aside from a notice on your website that unsolicited applications are basically possible). But whether you receive applications when you're also currently looking, you can't control. Therefore, it's sensible to allow unsolicited applications to flow into your talent pool so you can approach these people when in need.

As you can see: it's not quite as passive as that, because both employer brand and talent pool need taking care of.

How to Lead a Successful External Recruitment

To successfully find external employees, it's important to develop effective recruitment processes and take the right measures. Here you'll find a step-by-step guide to support you in the external search for new employees.

1. Create job profile and define your target group: You should work together with the relevant departments to get a precise understanding of the skills and competencies that ideal candidates need to bring. Consider also future requirements to ensure that candidates can provide value for the company in the long term. Here you should take into account the ways the sector and business will develop and what skills and know-how will gain relevance in the future.
2. Create the job ad: To appeal to suitable candidates, the ad should be clearly and precisely formulated. Only mention real, necessary requirements to avoid deterring potential candidates. Also describe the specific challenge of the role - is it, for example, about building a new area or restructuring? Images and videos give a better idea to candidates of the company, team, and job, and should therefore be definitely included.
3. Select suitable channels: To achieve the widest and most targeted reach possible, it's important to select fitting channels to display the job ad. You should use niche portals to target professionals. It's recommended to check the media data of job portals to ensure your target group is truly present there. Active sourcing could also be an option as quick successes are possible here. You should also use social networks and personal contacts to find suitable candidates.
4. Review and assess the applications: Provide a clear and quick response to applications, ideally within 24 hours, to maintain the interest of the applicants. Keep in mind that individuals who actively apply usually do not only apply at one company.
5. Conduct interviews and make a decision: Make sure to keep processes and decision-making pathways as short as possible. It's important to involve relevant people who are involved in the decision from the beginning to avoid delays. For junior positions, it may be sufficient for HR to conduct the first interview as it won't go into technical depth.
6. Make a decision and make an offer: To avoid a long back-and-forth, you can summarise a rough offer for candidates in a few sentences, focussing particularly on salary, benefits and other important conditions like the notice period. Once this has been confirmed, you'll send the concrete contract after. 
7. Incorporate new employees: To ensure the new team member becomes quickly productive and feels welcomed, you should prepare well for the first day at work. This includes having the necessary hardware, software, and access data ready. Technical contact persons and mentors help the new team member to quickly find their feet. During the probation period, you should regularly review the work performance and integration of the new team member in order to identify and solve any potential problems early.

For extensive processes or high recruiting goals, it can quickly make sense to let HR management tools support you in individual steps or in the entire process. Therefore you should realistically assess your needs and possibly check out various tools. Here you will find a small selection:

• Applicant Management (e.g. talentstorm, softgarden, onlyfy one Bewerbungsmanager, Greenhouse, Recruitee)
• Onboarding & Personnel Development (e.g. elearnio, reteach)
• Personnel Administration (e.g. SAP Success Factors, HRworks)
• All-in-one Software (e.g. Personio, rexx systems, BambooHR)
• Applicant Communication via WhatsApp (e.g. Superchat)