As an international employment agency, one of your business model’s critical elements is finding the right candidates. Smaller and larger companies often face similar challenges in this regard. Ideally, you want to achieve a situation where the right candidates are merely coming to you.
So, should you focus on doing the recruitment process yourself or outsource it? In this article, we’ll talk about the benefits and possible downsides of both.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing vs. DIY
1. In control vs. Not In control
Let’s face it, when you’re passionate about recruiting people and looking for ways to improve all related processes, being in control simply feels good. You have your vision of organizing and shaping every aspect of the workflow.
Often, such passion makes it difficult to put international recruitment in the hands of another agency, even if you are okay with outsourcing different aspects of your work. When you take the DIY route, you can decide:
- Where you want the attention to go in recruitment;
- What information should be provided, and at what time;
- How you train the recruiters;
- How candidates should be attracted;
- What to do abroad and what to do in the Netherlands.
2. Low-risk vs. Higher-risk Payroll WAB
The WAB (only for the Netherlands) defines when a company can use a recruiting firm and when it must use direct payroll. If both criteria are met, it means that you should apply payrolling:
- When you have an exclusive agreement with your customers, meaning you need acceptance from your client to move staff to another client. You don’t perform the recruitment yourself. Without the external agent, the match wouldn’t have taken place.
- If you have an exclusive agreement with your customers and don’t want your customers to work on a payroll model, you simply cannot legally work with external agencies.
In that case, the decision is easy. If you don’t have an exclusive agreement with your customers, you are free to have the recruitment done by an outside firm.
3. Time-consuming vs. Time-efficient
The most valuable asset in business is time. It’s best to put this time in places with the most significant added value for your organization. If the recruitment is the core of your business and it differentiates you in your recruiting process from other agencies, then that’s where you should invest your limited time assets.
If the way you organize everything around international work in the Netherlands, Belgium, or Germany is your core business and your differentiator, then put your energy there. However, this will take up the lion’s share of your time. On the other hand, outsourcing consumes less time, but if you opt to outsource international recruitment, you risk losing what makes you stand out.
And this is exactly the reason why Hire Abroad was created. We wanted to make the international recruitment process time-efficient for employment agencies. Companies can find reliable recruiters on Hire Abroad who will find the right person for the job and care for their hiring needs. Outsourcing your recruiting process through Hire Abroad is not only time-efficient, but it also saves you money and enables you to focus on your core functions and values. You can find the best recruitment agencies here.
4. Added Value vs. Decreased Value
Probably the most crucial reason you would do recruiting in-house is to add value to your business. As a business owner, you are interested in the value of the company. One thing that defines your business’s value is a dependency on specific people and external organizations.
Companies dependent on their business owners or external parties have a lower company value than those not, so having everything in their control shows less dependency.
On the other hand, the business’s value depends on its future perspective and scalability. If you show that you have a lean and scalable business model that works as a robust business engine, there is a higher added value for big investors looking for high-risk and high-return investments.
5. Limits Scalability vs. Scalable
If you’re running a seasonal business, the ability to quickly upscale or downscale is essential, so working with external recruiting experts is a no-brainer. Why? Because creating a recruiting department that can handle high-season requests is a considerable investment alone, and in low seasons, you will be dealing with overcapacity, and that can potentially hurt your bottom line.
When you outsource the recruitment process, this becomes a problem for talent acquisition teams. It’s their task to have the right capacity needed at the right moment and to make sure that there are no sudden jumps throughout the year. These sudden jumps are eliminated by attracting clients who have different seasons throughout the year.
6. Hard-to-add Nations vs. Easy-to-add Nations
iWorking with different nations presents challenges. Although data within our agency has shown that the actual duration of stay between different countries is quite similar to each other, adding a new nationality to your total pool of employees can still add challenges, which are found in communication on the work floor and in accommodation.
If the cultures are too different, sharing a room with one Portuguese person with a group of Polish people, it can be stressful for both..
Still, employers can use this to their benefit:
- For integration into the Dutch multicultural society, mixing the nations is great. People work in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany to get to know new cultures and people from different countries.
- Another reason to add different nations to the pool of employees is to spread the risk. Spreading the recruitment out to more different nations will offer a continuous flow of newly recruited people for a more extended period, independent of one specific nation’s political and economic situation.
- National holidays are another reason to hire people from different countries. In societies where people are very religious, it’s hard to motivate people to work during religious holidays.
- Flexibility towards your (potential) clients. Organizations have their favorite nationality of people, either because of past experiences or the current staff working at the company. So, by working with different nations, you widen the number of potential clients.
If you do all the recruitment activities yourself, expanding your services to another country is tough.
You have to figure out:
- The local laws for recruiting. Most European countries have licenses for hiring people requiring a representative office and experienced recruitment staff. Another obligation could be sending reports of your new hire to the national ministries.
- What is the best location to recruit people? Where do you want to establish your office? Where could the most motivated people be found in this specific country?
- How to start a company. Each state has its own rules for starting a new business.
- How to find local recruiters and teach them everything about working abroad through your agency. It takes up to two years to find hiring managers and people familiar with recruiting processes and teach them about your values and working abroad.
- How to maintain staff motivation and your working processes. Keeping everybody motivated within the team can be hard, but it is much harder when part of the team works in another country. We realized that running different offices at the same time requires many resources across the whole organization to run smoothly.
It is much easier to use a partner who already understands your company’s recruitment process to add more nations to your talent pool. However, they must also figure out how to deal with the challenges mentioned above.
7. Move Part of a Process to Cost-efficient Labor vs. Keeping The Process In-house
Maintaining smooth processes across offices in different countries is less of a challenge with good management. In the long run, such a business layout can give significant added value and cost savings.
For example, administrative tasks could be carried out by colleagues working in a different country, where finding the right talent is easier and the hourly wages are more competitive than in your own country (think about IT specialists, for example)
8. Less Price-sensitive vs. More Price-sensitive
Most international recruitment firms use a price model in which they get paid for a specific period. For example, a maximum of 1040 hours per year that each recruited person works at the client.
The danger of this model is that the external recruiter is more focused on the short-term compared to employers and aims for quick profits. This can turn the entire market into a very competitive place, which can lead to the exploitation of low prices.
Here’s an example of how you, as an employer, may take advantage of that. Let’s say you’ve agreed on a higher price with the agent during the busy summer period. Once the fee runs out, six months from then, ask to reduce costs in the low season. Chances are, they will have to lower the price because they will have too many great candidates but so few vacancies.
Another way to get more people from the international recruitment agency in the short term is to give bonuses in busy periods to attract more people to your agency instead of competitors.
If you play the internal recruiter role, you’re not dependent on the market’s price sensitivity. Of course, you have to figure out a way to recruit the people yourself more cost-effectively, on average over the year, than the external recruitment firms.
Otherwise, you don’t have a competitive advantage of doing the recruitment yourself over outsourcing it to foreign agents.
9. Satisfy Egos vs. Doesn’t Satisfy Egos
Most entrepreneurs and business owners love talking big – how many people are working through them, and how many offices they have in which countries.
It’s good for your ego to know you have offices spread all over Europe. Maybe it sounds funny, but many agencies have their own recruitment offices in other countries just because of this.
Outsourcing recruiting to external parties to have a clean and agile business doesn’t sound as good as having many companies abroad that work under your business’s name. This is one of the reasons some business owners look down on recruitment outsourcing, even though this could bring many benefits to their company.
10. Wasting of Resources vs. Using Resources
All registrations that drop in are costs that you incur. Only using part of these registrations means wasting your resources—unplaced motivated candidates and processes that are in place but not used.
Most job seekers who apply for a job and are motivated are useful to other organizations. Either work with other agencies and make sure you use your resources to achieve your full potential, or you will have too much waste in your operations: service capacity you won’t incur when you outsource your recruitment to external parties.
It becomes the responsibility of the agent abroad to take care of using their resources efficiently.
Fill In Your Vacancies Through Hire Abroad
There are benefits to both approaches, but the best way to do international recruitment is through Hire Abroad.
Our platform connects employment and recruitment agencies. They can each focus on their line of work. The recruiters on Hire Abroad follow top-industry practices, and as an employer, you can rest assured that they will find you the right candidate through our platform.
We ensure that the process goes smoothly and that you get the candidate for your vacancy without having to participate in recruitment, reducing your recruiting costs significantly.
Hire Abroad can do much more for your employment agency, so check it out and get the best talent on time and without effort.
