Key Takeaways
- When a small Talent Team is working 20 to 30 open roles at once, the hardest and most specialized searches are usually the ones that stall.
- An open role often costs more than the placement fee a company hopes to save, once you count the strain on the people covering the work.
- Outsourcing recruitment for a few specific roles gives your Talent Team time for the rest, with a permanent recruitment partner working alongside them.
- If you run an internal search and an agency search on the same role, keep both active until an offer letter is signed.
Listen: The hidden cost of an open role for a stretched Talent Team.
A payments company that has tripled its headcount in 18 months can still have the same two Recruiters it started with, and each of them may now be carrying 25 open requisitions that every hiring manager considers urgent. Recruiters in that position do what they can with the hours they have, which usually means the straightforward roles move and the specialized ones that need active outreach sit and wait, even though those tend to be the roles the business needs most.
What an open role actually costs
When a company weighs the outsourcing of recruitment, the placement fee usually gets the most attention. The cost of leaving the role open is harder to see because it's spread across the team, but it is often larger. Someone has to cover the work while the seat is empty, projects that depend on the missing person slip, and the longer the search runs, the more likely it is that the people covering the gap start to burn out and leave.
For new roles, the cost looks different but is no less real. Rather than work piling onto existing staff, the work simply hasn't started yet. Initiatives stall, opportunities go unpursued, and the gap between where the business is and where it needs to be quietly widens.
A useful exercise is to ask how long the role has been open, who is doing the work in the meantime, and how much longer the search is likely to take. If the honest answer to that last question is another two or three months, the fee you're trying to avoid may turn out to be the smaller of the two costs.
The hiring manager blind spot
Hiring managers often assume that once a role is approved and handed to Recruiting, someone is working on it every day. On a stretched team, that isn't always the case, and it has nothing to do with how good the Recruiter is, since a Recruiter with 25 open requisitions can't give every search the same attention. Talent leaders can help by telling hiring managers which roles are getting active sourcing and which are waiting, and that conversation usually makes it clear which searches would benefit from talent acquisition outsourcing.
How a permanent recruitment partner works as an extension of your team
Some talent leaders hesitate to bring in an agency because it can feel like competition. A good permanent recruitment partner works alongside your Recruiters: your team keeps ownership of the process, the partner handles sourcing, vetting, and submitting candidates for specific roles, and your coordinators schedule interviews the way they would for any other search.
The best roles to hand off are the ones that would take your team the most time, like positions in fields your Recruiters don't usually hire for. If you have 10 open roles and 9 of them suit your internal team, give the partner the tenth, because putting the same role in front of both your recruiter and an agency adds to your recruiter's workload without freeing up any time.
Direct Hire Consultants at Aquent also work on a limited number of roles at a time, which gives them room to get to know candidates over several conversations. Candidates tell a Recruiter they trust things they won't tell an employer, like the salary they need and where else they're interviewing, so a Consultant can warn you when a finalist is at risk and prepare the candidate for your interviews at the same time.
Running internal and agency searches at the same time
Some companies want their internal team and an agency working the same role, and that can work as long as both searches stay active until someone signs an offer letter. In one recent search, a growing company brought us in to help fill two Lead Product Designer roles. Our consultant held an intake call with the hiring leader and submitted two strong candidates, but the talent team set them aside because three internal candidates were already far along. The company made two offers, and one was accepted, but the other finalist declined about three weeks later, and by then the candidates our Consultant had submitted had been picked up by other companies.
If you run searches in parallel, keep your partner sourcing and in the loop until the offer letter is signed.
Good candidates rarely stay on the market for three weeks, which is why people in recruiting like to say that time kills deals. If you run searches in parallel, keep your partner sourcing and in the loop until the offer letter is signed.
Full RPO versus role-by-role permanent recruitment support
If you've been researching outsourced recruiting services, you've probably come across recruitment process outsourcing, or RPO. With RPO recruitment, a company hands all or a large part of its Recruiting function to an outside provider, usually under a longer-term contract. RPO hiring can make sense for companies with steady, high-volume hiring that want to hand off the entire outsourcing hiring process. Aquent's Permanent Recruitment service is role-by-role support, a lighter commitment where you bring in a partner only for the roles your team can't get to and, because the model is contingent, pay a fee only when you make a successful hire.
Decide which roles to hand off
A good place to start is the role that has been open the longest or the one that needs daily outreach to fill, since those searches use up the most Recruiter hours and do the most damage when they stall. In a free 30-minute consult, a Direct Hire Consultant can look at your open roles with you, suggest which ones make sense to hand off, and share current market and compensation data you can use on the rest of your searches, whether or not you work with Aquent.
About the author
Mary Beth (MB) Schultz is a Direct Hire Consultant with seven years of recruiting experience at Aquent. As a former Aquent client, MB brings a rare, 360-degree perspective to the recruitment process—understanding firsthand what both hiring managers and candidates need to succeed, and how clients like to partner with agency teams. She genuinely loves what she does: building meaningful connections, launching careers, and delivering the talent that teams are genuintely excited about. Known for her honesty and empathy, MB provides clients and candidates alike with grounded, expert advice. Throughout her tenure at Aquent, she has successfully placed top-tier talent across a diverse range of industries, including technology, marketing, creative, sales, human resources, finance, supply chain, and real estate.
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Inclusion & Belonging, Career Advice, Talent Acquisition & Recruitment