What’s The Difference Between Hiring and Recruiting?
The difference between hiring and recruiting is that hiring mainly refers to the reactionary hiring that happens due to immediate and/or unexpected need, such as a sudden resignation, but recruiting refers to the long-term preparation of finding suitable candidates for both unforeseen events and when the team needs expansion.
There is a thin line between the two, and the few firms that see it never go unrewarded. If you’re one of those who struggle to tell the difference or use the two terms interchangeably, you’re not alone. Did you hire or recruit the last employee at your firm? Let’s find out.
What Are the Definitions?
Recruitment and hiring are words that get thrown around with little thought to their actual meaning. When running your firm and keeping up with employment trends, the difference between hiring and recruiting should be obvious and intentional.
Recruitment: Recruitment involves the act of conducting research, analyzing, and searching for potential employees, also known as passive candidates, who may fit your company’s culture and needs. This is often done by specialized recruiters working for a staffing firm, and is performed before hiring needs come up.
Hiring: Hiring, on the other hand, involves engaging the services of a new employee, often in short order and due to immediate needs.
When you spend an afternoon browsing through resumes on LinkedIn that may fit your company culture with no intention to hire, you’re already starting on the path of recruiting and sourcing for passive candidates. You just don’t know it yet.
Here are some of the differences between hiring and recruitment.
Hiring Is Short Term, Recruitment Is Not
Hiring is a short-term process performed to meet the short-term or urgent needs of a firm. Recruitment is a long-term strategy meant to meet the future needs of your firm or company.
If a low-level staff member resigns today and needs to be quickly replaced, your firm will have to hire and move quickly. Subsequently, if there is a chance that your IT specialist may resign in five or ten years, you have to start recruiting. This means creating a pool or pipeline of qualified specialists to contact in case your IT specialist resigns sometime in the future.
Hiring is reactive, but recruitment is proactive.
There are a myriad of circumstances that may force a company to start hiring. They include the resignation of an employee, their promotion, unprecedented growth of a company, or their untimely demise. Whatever the circumstance, a firm should always be prepared to replace their employees within short notice.
There are a myriad of circumstances that may force a company to start hiring.
The Hiring Pool And The Recruitment Pool
We discussed the difference between hiring and recruiting. However, more specifically, there are significant differences between the hiring pool and the recruitment pool that impact your firm.
Hiring Pool: The hiring pool is usually made up of recently jobless or employed prospects that may or may not meet your firm’s needs and culture. To reach out to a hiring pool, a firm announces job vacancies, collects resumes, and eventually conducts interviews.
Recruitment Pool: Your recruitment pool, also referred to as a talent pipeline, is usually made up of a network of exceptionally qualified individuals that may already be employed, but can be open to the right opportunity. A well-built pipeline will consist of qualified employees who meet the requirements and qualifications of your firm.
Level Of Employee Specialization
Most of the time, the choice to hire or recruit for a firm depends on the circumstances and the timelines of the vacancy. One of these circumstances is the type of job vacancy.
Hiring & Low-Level Staff: Hiring is primarily used for low-level staff. Low-level staff vacancies do not require specialized skills making the employees easy to replace and onboard onto the firm. For example, if you’re onboarding a teenager to mow your lawn, you’ll probably hire.
Recruitment & High-Level Staff: Recruitment is mainly used to onboard high-level and specialized staff like in IT staff recruitment. Since these staff are highly specialized, replacing them at a moment’s notice may prove to be an uphill climb. This creates the need for having a ready pipeline of specialized employees and their contacts in case your firm needs to hire on short-term notice. Recruiting goes a long way in onboarding the best staff.
Why You Should Switch To Recruiting
Both recruiting and hiring come with their own set of benefits for a firm or company. However, an extensive comparison reveals that a firm will always be better off recruiting than hiring. Some of the benefits of recruiting include:
- Easier scalability for your workforce
- Continuous access to qualified talent
- Reduced risk and cost in hiring
Recruitment keeps your firm nimble and agile.
Where You Can Start
Recruiting requires building up your pipeline, maintaining it, and nurturing potential candidates. But the process takes time and resources, something not all internal HR teams have. With a recruitment agency like Provato Staffing, the burden of finding and creating talent pipelines is taken off your back. Provato Staffing has spent a significant part of the last few decades connecting companies with highly-specialized prospects. For more information, contact us today and let us be part of your story.