When should you engage an external recruiter?

A dilemma faced by many HR and hiring managers. I spent years on that side myself, turning down agencies, building internal teams… and now I’m in the “other shoes.” Karma at work.

Internal recruiting brings real value: deep knowledge of the organisation and its culture, fast communication with management, and trust built through daily collaboration. Such teams

have strong experience in filling the most common roles within a company, but they also face challenges.

Hiring managers often spend a significant amount of time on selection, internal teams can become overloaded, which slows down processes, and access to passive candidates through direct search is limited.

So, when is an external recruiter the recommended choice?

• When you are hiring management, especially senior leadership, and want to maintain discretion
• When the internal team lacks capacity, sufficient professional experience, or market insight for highly specialised, expert, leadership, or hard-to-find roles
• When the company is going through rapid growth, reorganisation, or an acquisition, and you need an objective, market-driven view of candidates and conditions, while significantly relieving hiring managers

How to choose the “right” partner?

The keyword here is partner. It’s hard to find one if the approach is: collect several offers and choose the cheapest.

Partnership means collaboration, relationship, chemistry. If you “click” with the recruiter, you will also be able to agree on win-win terms. If you don’t, then that simply isn’t the right partner for you.

In conclusion, there is no “right or wrong” model.

The right one is whatever best serves your business at a given moment.

Sometimes that’s an internal team, sometimes an external expert and most often, a combination of both.