Internal and external recruitment - CCEA

Key facts about internal and external recruitment

Internal recruitment: Hiring from within the business; quick and cost-effective but limited in fresh ideas and applicant pool.

External recruitment: Hiring from outside; brings new skills but is more time-consuming and costly.

Social media: Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are used to reach more job applicants.

Recruitment methods: Choice depends on the business's current needs and circumstances.

Businesses recruit for new roles from both existing employees (inside the business) and potential employees (outside the business). These methods are referred to as internal recruitment and external recruitment. Internal recruitment usually occurs when an existing employee is seeking a promotion or wishes to work in a different role in the business.

Internal and external recruitment may use interviews, application forms, aptitude tests, group tasks, presentations and role-playing tasks to help select the best candidates for the job.

Internal recruitment is often carried out through internal job adverts published via internal emails, notice boards, business websites and internal company memos or newsletters.

Advantages of internal recruitment include:

• a quick process
• applicants will already be known to the business
• applicants may have previous experience in the role
• cheaper to recruit and advertise roles internally

Disadvantages of internal recruitment include:

• usually a small pool of applicants
• applicants may not be experienced in the role
• a lack of fresh ideas in the business

External recruitment is often carried out through external job adverts published via external emails, job websites, recruitment agencies, the business’s own website, newspapers and trade magazines.

The media

(1) Local newspapers

(2) National newspapers

(3) Specialist magazines

(4) Local radio advertising

(5) Local television advertising

The Internet

Company websites often have job opportunities listed on a web page called “Join Us” or “Careers”.

AND

Social Media platforms

Job centres

These are like job ‘shops’, they are run by the government to help match employees with employers. It is a way for the government to help reduce the number of people who are unemployed.

Private recruitment agencies

These are private sector businesses which make money by charging the employer a fee for finding suitable employees and, in some cases, they also take a percentage of the new employee’s wages in return for finding that person a job.

Advantages of external recruitment include:

• may bring new ideas into the business
• fresh enthusiasm and skills
• larger pool of potential applicants

Disadvantages of external recruitment include:

• may take the new employee time to settle into the business
• expensive to recruit
• new employee not previously known to the business
• can take more time than internal recruitment

Try the recruitment quiz

Traditionally, as they were the main place to look for jobs, newspapers (local, regional and national) were used by employers to find new staff.

Nowadays, as increased use of the internet to find news has vastly reduced the readership of almost all hard copy newspapers, employers have had to evolve and change their means of attracting applicants for vacancies.

Online newspapers (such as the Belfast Telegraph / NIJobfinder) still carry large numbers of advertisements for local jobs, but increasingly they try to maximise the potential number of applicants for that job by promoting the job on social media, including:

• Facebook

• Instagram

• X

• LinkedIn (like Facebook, but more of an employer-employee networking site rather than purely social)

• Snapchat

• TikTok

Recruiting using social media

There is never any ‘perfect’ way of recruiting staff, internally or externally, it will always depend on the circumstances which the firm is facing at the time.

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