Recruitment:
Definition, Process & Comparison

Recruitment is the process of identifying, sourcing, screening, shortlisting, interviewing, and hiring candidates for jobs (either permanent or temporary) within an organization. It encompasses the entire hiring journey, from the initial identification of a vacancy through to the integration of the new employee into the company. The recruitment definition includes actively seeking out, finding, and attracting qualified candidates for specific positions.

The recruitment process varies widely based on the employer, seniority, type of role, and industry sector. Companies place high value on recruitment because finding and hiring the right talent provides a competitive advantage, as human connections and creativity fuel innovation. Forward-thinking organizations recognize that while an intentional approach to recruitment requires significant time and work upfront, this investment reduces turnover and leads to better performance.

Related terms: Staffing, Talent Acquisition, Talent Attraction, Sourcing, Placement, Executive Search

The recruitment process includes 5 main stages that guide organizations from identifying a need to successfully onboarding a new employee:

1. Planning: The company decides what positions need to be filled and defines the characteristics of ideal candidates, including establishing clearly defined standards and expectations for the job applicant.
2. Sourcing: The organization uses one or more strategies to attract and identify candidates through job portals, social media, employee referrals, recruitment agencies, or other channels using appropriate media such as job boards, newspapers, professional publications, or career fairs.
3. Screening: Applicants and resumes are reviewed to select candidates for interviews, often using applicant tracking systems, psychometric testing, and performance-based assessment tools to filter candidates.
4. Selecting: The company conducts interviews (phone screening and onsite), evaluates candidates against predetermined criteria, and chooses the candidate to hire based on skills, experience, and company fit.
5. Onboarding: The new employee is welcomed and helped to settle into their job through comprehensive integration processes that allow them to become productive members of the organization.

Each stage requires appropriate time and resources to ensure successful recruitment outcomes and reduce the need to repeat the process due to poor hiring decisions.

Sourcing is the use of one or more strategies to attract and identify candidates to fill job vacancies. It focuses primarily on the initial part of the recruitment process, encompassing the search and initial outreach to candidates. Sourcing may involve internal and external recruitment advertising using appropriate media such as job portals, local or national newspapers, social media, business media, specialist recruitment media, professional publications, window advertisements, yard signs, job centers, or career fairs.

Companies may use recruitment consultancies or agencies to find scarce candidates who may be content in their current positions and not actively looking to move. This initial research for candidates, also called name generation, produces contact information for potential candidates whom the recruiter can then discreetly contact and screen. In recent years, recruitment practices have evolved to include more direct engagement between job seekers and hiring managers through networking tools, career platforms, and industry databases.

To increase the number and quality of applicants, organizations can adjust the wage offered for the job, with research estimating the application-wage elasticity at 1. Sourcing is mostly used in the context of finding passive candidates who did not apply to jobs and generally are not actively looking for employment.

An employee referral is a candidate recommended by an existing employee, sometimes referred to as referral recruitment. Employee referral programs allow both outsiders and employees to refer or recommend quality candidates (people they know or are connected to) for filling job openings. Having existing employees in good standing recommend coworkers for a job position is often a preferred method of recruitment because these employees know the values of the organization as well as the work ethic of their coworkers.

Employee referrals deliver 5 key advantages:

• Improved candidate quality: Candidates hired through referrals tend to stay up to 3 times longer than candidates hired through job boards and other sources, lowering staff attrition rates.
• Better cultural fit: The one-to-one direct relationship between the candidate and the referring employee enables knowledge exchange that allows candidates to develop a strong understanding of the company, its business, and the recruitment process, helping them assess their own suitability.
• Reduced recruitment costs: Employee referrals eliminate the considerable cost of third-party recruitment service providers who would have previously conducted screening and selection, avoiding the 20-25% agency finder's fee that can top $25,000 for an employee with $100,000 annual salary.
• Faster hiring process: As candidate quality improves and interview-to-job-offer conversion rates increase, the amount of time spent interviewing decreases, allowing the company's employee headcount to be streamlined and used more efficiently.
• Lower marketing expenditures: Marketing and advertising expenditures decrease as existing employees source potential candidates from existing personal networks of friends, family, colleagues, and professional associates.

The referring employee typically receives a referral bonus, either at the time of the referral (smaller amount) or at the time of placement (larger amount), and this approach is widely acknowledged as being cost-effective. The Global Employee Referral Index 2013 Survey found that 92% of participants reported employee referrals as one of the top recruiting sources. Some managers provide incentives to employees who provide successful referrals.

However, there are risks: An overly homogeneous workforce recruited exclusively through employee referrals may fail to produce novel ideas or innovations and jeopardize the overall diversity of the workforce.

Internal recruitment (also called internal mobility) refers to the process of a candidate being selected from the existing workforce to take up a new job in the same organization, perhaps as a promotion, to provide career development opportunity, or to meet a specific or urgent organizational need. This means that instead of searching for candidates in the general labor market, the company looks at hiring one of their own employees for the position.

External recruitment involves searching for candidates outside the company for potential job candidates. In this case, employers or hiring committees search beyond their own organization to find talent. External recruitment opens up more possibilities for the applicant pool than internal recruitment and often brings fresh ideas and perspectives to the company.

Internal recruitment offers 4 primary advantages:

• Organizational familiarity: The organization has familiarity with the employee and their competencies as revealed in their current job, and willingness to trust that employee.
• Speed and cost efficiency: It can be quicker and have a lower cost to hire someone internally compared to external recruitment.
• Skill development: Internal recruitment can encourage the development of skills and knowledge because employees anticipate longer careers at the company.
• Pre-existing knowledge: Companies have pre-existing knowledge of their own employees' effectiveness in the workplace.

However, promoting an employee can leave a gap at the promoted employee's previous position that subsequently needs to be filled. Traditionally, internal recruitment is done through internal job postings or employee referrals.

External recruitment provides access to broader talent pools and new perspectives but requires more resources. The conditions of the economy and labor market impact the ability for a company to find and attract viable candidates. Companies advertise job openings through local newspapers, journals, online platforms, professional networking websites like LinkedIn, and job fairs at secondary and post-secondary schools.

Social recruiting is the use of social media for recruiting candidates. As more people use the internet, social networking sites (SNS) have become an increasingly popular tool used by companies to recruit and attract applicants. Research found that 73.5% of Cypriot companies had an account on an SNS, the most common being Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Social recruiting delivers 4 key benefits:

• Reduced hiring time: Social recruiting reduces the time required to hire someone by enabling faster candidate identification and outreach.
• Lower costs: Organizations experience reduced costs compared to traditional recruitment methods.
• Better candidate targeting: Social recruiting attracts more computer literate, educated young individuals who are active on these platforms.
• Enhanced employer brand: Using social media positively impacts the company's brand image by showcasing company culture and values.

Professional networking websites such as LinkedIn offer the ability to go through job seekers' biographical resumes and message them directly even if they are not actively looking for a job. Social network referrals initially slowed the screening process when responses to mass-emailing or organically posting open job announcements to those within employees' social networks were introduced.

However, social recruiting presents disadvantages including increased costs for training HR specialists and installing related software. Legal issues include concerns about the privacy of applicants, discrimination based on information from SNS, and inaccurate or outdated information on applicant profiles.

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing where a company engages a third-party provider to manage all or part of its recruitment process. With RPO, typical recruiting tasks get outsourced to an external recruiter or agency rather than being handled by an in-house recruiting team.

Early-stage startups or small companies may not have the resources to invest in an internal recruiting team, so they choose to work with an agency. In other cases, a company might have an in-house recruiting team, but they need to hire at a high volume, in a short timeframe, or for specialized roles. Many companies work with an agency when they need to hire an executive or other senior leader.

In-house recruitment refers to having a team of recruiters (also known as talent acquisition professionals) who are full-time employees within the company doing the hiring. Generally, an in-house recruiting team handles all recruiting tasks like sourcing, interview scheduling, and interviewing.

Mobile recruiting is a recruitment strategy that uses mobile technology to attract, engage, and convert candidates. This approach recognizes that candidates increasingly use smartphones and mobile devices to search for jobs and interact with potential employers. Mobile recruiting enables candidates to browse job openings, submit applications, and communicate with recruiters directly from their mobile devices.

Some recruiters work by accepting payments from job seekers and in return help them find a job. This is illegal in some countries, such as in the United Kingdom, where recruiters must not charge candidates for their services (although websites such as LinkedIn may charge for ancillary job-search-related services). Such recruiters often refer to themselves as personal marketers and job application services rather than as recruiters.

Safer recruitment refers to procedures intended to promote and exercise a safe culture including the supervision and oversight of those who work with children and vulnerable adults. The NSPCC describes safer recruitment as a set of practices to help make sure your staff and volunteers are suitable to work with children and young people. It is a vital part of creating a safe and positive environment and making a commitment to keep children safe from harm.

In England and Wales, statutory guidance issued by the Department for Education directs how safer recruitment must be undertaken within an educational context. This includes background checks, proper validation of candidate backgrounds, and screening processes designed to protect vulnerable populations.

Recruitment is often compared to 5 related concepts in the hiring and talent management space:

Recruitment vs. Staffing

Recruitment is broadly used to refer to any process related to finding and hiring the right candidates, while staffing is primarily but exclusively used in the context of recruitment by specialized recruitment agencies. These agencies are often referred to as recruitment agencies or staffing agencies. To staff literally means to fill one or multiple positions, reflecting a more transactional approach.

Recruitment vs. Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition is similar to recruitment but represents a newer way of framing recruitment as an ongoing process of acquiring talent strategically as opposed to a more transactional approach to filling vacancies. Talent acquisition is commonly used in job titles of recruitment professionals, such as Talent Acquisition Specialist and Talent Acquisition Manager. Since talent acquisition describes an ongoing process, it is mostly used to refer to internal recruitment processes and positions, though occasionally it also refers to external recruitment activities.

Recruitment vs. Talent Attraction

Talent attraction is similar to recruitment although it is more commonly used in the context of a marketing-driven approach to hiring. Talent attraction strategies usually deploy marketing campaigns to pull candidates in to the employer's brand, mission, and open job positions. This can be accomplished through blogs, videos, and social media strategies to engage candidates before they even apply.

Recruitment vs. Selection

Recruitment refers to the process of actively seeking out, finding, and hiring candidates, encompassing the entire hiring process from inception to integration. Selection refers to the specific process of shortlisting applicants and choosing the best candidates suitable for the job position. Recruitment is considered a positive process that stimulates and attracts a large number of candidates, while selection is considered a negative process that attempts to reject unsuitable candidates. Recruitment proceeds selection (it is the initial process), while selection follows recruitment (it is the final process). Recruitment is simpler and more economical, while selection is more complicated and expensive. After selection, a contractual relationship for service is created, whereas recruitment creates no such contractual relation.

Recruitment vs. Executive Search

Executive search is similar to recruitment although executive search places the emphasis on finding and hiring more senior, executive candidates. Executive search focuses on roles like Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), other positions in the executive suite, Vice Presidents, or directors. This specialized form of recruitment typically involves search consultancies that undertake parts of the process for more senior roles.