The Difference Between Hiring and Recruiting: Everything You Need to Know

What is the difference between hiring and recruiting? 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 who may fit your company’s culture and needs. This is often done by specialized recruiters working for a staffing firm.

Hiring: Hiring, on the other hand, involves engaging the services of a new employee－either on a temporary or permanent contract.

When you spend an afternoon browsing through resumes on LinkedIn that may fit your company culture with no intention to hire, you’re recruiting. You just don’t know it yet.

Here are some of the differences between hiring and recruitment that can help you navigate the possibility and cost of onboarding a new employee:

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 of qualified specialists to contact in case your IT specialist resigns sometime in the future.

Hiring Is Reactive. Recruitment Is Proactive

If you ever find yourself hiring at your firm, it’s probably a reactionary measure to some unforeseen circumstance. For recruitment, it’s quite the opposite. If you ever find yourself recruiting employees at your firm, it’s probably a precautionary measure for an unforeseen circumstance that may happen sometime in the future.

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.

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 is usually made up of a network of exceptionally qualified individuals that are primarily employed or sometimes unemployed. Most of your recruitment pool consists 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 And 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 And 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 pool 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. An excellent place to begin for a firm unfamiliar with recruitment is Provato’s Proven Step Zero recruiting process. Some of the benefits of recruiting include:

Recruiting Keeps You In Touch With Talent

Unlike hiring, recruiting always keeps you in touch with a pool of qualified staff. Neglecting talented prospects decreases the chances of them working at your firm. Recruitment keeps them at the fingertips of your firm.

Recruitment Is A Contingency Plan

Unlike hiring, recruitment keeps your firm prepared. With recruitment, your firm can afford an unprecedented loss of a high-level employee without a significant impact on operations.

Recruitment Enables Scalability

Recruitment keeps your firm nimble and agile. Suppose your firm needs to upscale and grow within a short time, it always has a network of specialized prospects at its fingertips. That’s the huge difference between hiring and recruiting. Recruitment will always have your firm prepared at the time of opportunity.

Where You Can Start

With the right team, recruitment is way easier than it sounds. With a recruitment agency, the burden of finding and creating pools is taken off your back. That’s where The Provato Group comes in. We have 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.