HR Needs to Also Recruit

There’s been a long-standing debate about whether or not Recruiting should be part of HR or not. Depending on who you ask you’ll likely receive many different answers. Personally, I strongly believe that Recruiting is a component of HR, and HR Practitioners should also be Recruiters.

Why?

HR is a strategic business function. Full stop. True HR business partners know business inside-out. They need to understand every aspect of the business where they work – operations, finances, marketing, sales, customer service, logistics, etc… If you don’t, please take out the word “business” from your title. We all know that HR is fully interconnected in every single aspect of any organization. For this reason, HR practitioners needs to understand business. How in the world can you effectively work with a CFO, or Head of Marketing, if you have no clue what they do, what their challenges are, what their plans and strategies are and what the external pressures are? You can’t.

What does this have to do with Recruiting?

My first boss in my first HR job with the Government of Alberta told me that the best way to learn about an organization is to recruit. I had no idea what he was talking about, but surely over time, it became clear.

Within this context, here are the immediate top 5 benefits of Recruiting:

  1. Quickly build relationships with hiring managers – hiring managers are your customer and you get to learn about them really quickly. Helping them build their team helps you establish credibility, add value and ultimately start the build of a great working relationship.
  2. Gain deep insights into the organizational structure – sure you can look at an org chart on the shared drive, or the HRIS, but this view is static. You don’t gain insights into how things really work on a day-to-day basis. Who communicates with who? Where are the pockets in the organization that are truly responsible for making things happen? When you’re recruiting you will appreciate, understand and feel how things really work.
  3. Learn and understand what the core business challenges are – the reason why organizations recruit is that there’s a gap in the organization. The existing workforce does not have the capacity to do the work, or they don’t possess the required skills. Whatever the case, hiring is to alleviate the challenges hiring managers are facing. They come out loud and clear when you’re recruiting.
  4. Play a big role in organizational growth – personally, it’s an amazing feeling when the hiring manager has found someone that they want to hire. Their faces light up with joy, and as a customer-service centric individual, experiencing this is awesome. Recruiting the right people is hard work, and when your hard work pays off you know you’ve helped the organization in a big way.
  5. Enables you to be strategic in HR – the only way you can be strategic in HR is if you understand the business; its challenges, strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and so forth. This is what being strategic is all about, and from an HR perspective, being strategic means helping the organization successfully get to where they want to go in the future, through its people.

These are the 5 benefits that immediately come to mind, but it’s not an exhaustive list. The point is that Recruiting is such an invaluable part of any business today. Within the SMB space senior leaders are spending more of their time on Recruiting because it’s the most important thing in any business to ensure sustainable and scalable growth, optimal workplace culture and it’s getting harder and harder to recruit top talent.

At the end of the day, if you work in HR and you want to get to know your organization inside-out spend your time Recruiting.

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