Recruiting professionals generally fall into one of three categories: in-house, freelance, and staffing firm pros.
In-house or internal recruiters are employees of the companies they recruit for, rather than being contracted for a limited time to fill some number of roles. They are paid a regular salary, though they may also receive bonuses for landing candidates of quality or in quantity.
Freelance recruiters are independent and they may be hired on an ad-hoc basis to magnify the efforts of the in-house team or take on some of their responsibilities when on a hiring spree. Smaller companies may use freelance recruiters exclusively when they have one or two positions to fill. Some of these freelancers also scour job boards looking for opportunities to connect open roles to engineers even if they aren’t contracted.
Staffing firms are specialist job placement operations, with a large team of professionals of varying backgrounds. They may have technical specialists and career counselors on the team, and seek to understand a business’ personnel strategy at a higher level. They often negotiate contracts with large client companies to handle so much of their recruiting for them, and deal in large volumes. Some of these firms may even operate as handlers for contractors that work directly for the staffing agency, rather than the client. They handle payroll functions and may provide benefits like retirement plans, paid time off, or health coverage for such contractors as well. Examples of this could be Actalent or Populus Group. The engineer contractors in such cases function more like hired-out employees in a consulting role rather than independent contractors. Some engineers may spend their entire careers with such a firm, working for many different companies on various contract agreements while remaining with the same employer. It's not always the case that the engineer is initially recruited to the job and staffing firm by the staffing firm itself. Sometimes the engineering company finds the worker, who is then hired technically by the staffing firm. There are all kinds of ways these relationships operate in the wild.
Freelance and staffing firm recruiters may be called “external”. Small recruiting outfits may fall somewhere in-between the freelance and staffing firm ends of the spectrum. Note that all of these types of external recruiters may charge somewhere around 18-30% of an engineer’s annual salary as a finder’s fee.
As a hiring manager, what type of recruiters and contractors do you work with? What type should you work with? If these questions have barely crossed your mind or if your answer is “any”, then you might want to re-evaluate. You should know how your company likes to operate and which relationships and methods will align best with your goals.
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