External recruiting: when it works, when it doesn’t, and how to make it work for you

External recruiting means hiring new employees from outside your organisation. But for growing organisations, the question isn’t what external recruitment is – it’s whether it actually delivers value. In this guide, we’ll explore that question. 

External recruiting is often treated as the default answer for hiring. Need new skills? Expanding your team? Someone’s left? Recruit externally.

But as organisations face tighter budgets, shifting skill needs, and rising expectations for speed and fairness, a tougher question’s emerging: Does external recruiting really deliver the value we assume it does?

Sometimes, absolutely. But other times, it’s a costly reflex that solves the wrong problem.

Let’s unpack when external recruiting works, when it doesn’t, and how to make it work for you. 

What is external recruiting?

External recruiting refers to recruiting new employees from outside your organisation. The alternative is promoting or transferring someone who already works for you: internal recruitment.

Read more: When to use internal vs external recruiting

The external recruitment process typically involves:

1. Identify the hiring need
2. Formulate a hiring plan
3. Write a job description
4. Create a job advert
5. Create an application journey
6. Advertise the role
7. Source talent
8. Screen talent
9. Review applications
10. Conduct live interviews
11. Make your decision
12. Run compliance checks
13. Make a job offer
14. Onboard
15. Learn and refine

Read more: how to optimise each step of the hiring process

In practice, external recruiting can mean anything from filling a short-term gap to reshaping your entire organisation. (While we’re talking terms, this relates to whether your organisation takes a recruitment or talent acquisition approach to hiring). 

There’s no straightforward answer to whether external recruitment drives value or not. It depends on why and how you’re recruiting. Let’s look at when recruiting externally works well.

The advantages of external recruiting: why organisations do it

When it works, external recruiting is a powerful growth engine. It’s how organisations evolve, scale, and adapt to change. Let’s look at the main drivers.

Strategic drivers for external recruitment

These are long-term, growth-oriented reasons for the organisation to hire externally, tied to stuff like business transformation, innovation or market competitiveness. 

• Access new skills and capabilities: If your organisation’s expanding into new markets, adopting new technology, or evolving its strategy, you’ll often need capabilities you don’t yet have internally. Like AI expertise, digital transformation skills or sustainability leadership, say. Hiring externally brings in this specialist knowledge quickly; much faster than internal upskilling.
• Inject fresh perspectives: External hires are better placed than internal hires to challenge established thinking, bringing best practices from other industries and helping avoid “this is what we’ve always done” groupthink. In this context, external recruitment is an antidote to an organisation becoming stagnant or insular. (A great example is Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, whose Chief People Officer’s many years of private sector expertise has proved invaluable to public sector recruitment.)
• Build diversity: External recruitment is one of the fastest levers to diversify teams and organisations – demographically, yes, but cognitively too. If you want to increase representation across your organisation, you won’t do so without hiring more diverse people from outside. 
• Navigate change: When leadership wants to restructure, modernise or embed a new culture, external hires can model and reinforce the new direction. Key people you bring into the business often act as catalysts, inspiring more dramatic change than if you’d hired internally. 
• Enhance your employer brand: Hiring respected external talent – for example, from competitors or people with impressive track records – can be a big credibility booster, both internally and externally. Everyone likes to work alongside the best.

Operational drivers for external recruiting

These relate to business performance, workforce planning, and delivery needs. 

• Widen supply: Sometimes, there simply aren’t enough qualified internal candidates to fill roles. That’s often the case in smaller or flatter organisations, for example, where fewer growth opportunities mean internal employees might not be ready to step into senior or specialist roles.
• Scale fast: During periods of rapid growth, project launches, or geographic expansion, hiring externally means you can scale faster than relying on organic internal development.
• Recruit at volume: Some roles, especially in sectors like retail and hospitality recruitment, or care recruitment, naturally experience higher turnover. In these environments your internal pipelines alone won’t keep up with the volume and speed you need. External recruitment becomes a constant operational engine, focused on building and maintaining strong candidate pipelines rather than filling isolated vacancies.
• Reduce disruption to internal operations: Internal mobility is healthy, but too much of it, too fast, can destabilise teams. Every internal move leaves a gap, disrupts established rhythms, and risks draining institutional knowledge. Bringing in external hires helps maintain business continuity, protect client relationships, and avoid change fatigue while still meeting your resource needs.
• Pulse-check against the market: External recruitment allows you to compare your internal calibre of talent with the broader market, helping set compensation benchmarks and performance expectations. It’s about ensuring you don’t operate in an echo chamber.
• Build leadership pipelines: When there’s no ready successor internally for a critical leadership role, external recruitment protects continuity and avoids “key person risk”. 
• Accommodate your organisational lifecycle: At the extreme end, startups rely on external recruiting to build from zero while mature enterprises use it selectively to refresh and rebalance (for all the reasons we’ve explored so far). Different lifecycle stages need different external-internal talent mixes.

Cultural drivers for hiring externally 

These relate to the human side of hiring – how people dynamics, culture, and morale influence whether organisations look outward or inward to fill roles.

• Refresh your culture: External recruits can reinvigorate teams, inspire creativity and strengthen engagement, especially if there’s a feeling your culture has become complacent.
• Balance internal dynamics: Internal competition can be politically sensitive. Recruiting externally can introduce neutrality, especially for leadership roles where internal rivalry might harm cultural cohesion. Hiring externally, essentially, stops you “having to choose”. And everything that comes with that. 

Environmental drivers for recruiting externally

These are broader market or macroeconomic factors that can influence the decision to recruit externally or not. 

• Combat talent shortages: In tight talent markets, internal pipelines are often insufficient. External recruitment helps tap wider or more flexible talent pools, like gig workers, returners and international talent. (Or course, attracting those people becomes a whole new challenge when everyone’s competing for the same…)
• Adapt to technological change: New technologies continuously redefine what “skilled” means. External recruitment allows faster adaptation without the lag of retraining entire workforces. AI is the obvious example right now.

But good external recruiting isn’t, of course, as simple as just deciding who you need and waving a magic wand. (Although we’re gonna put it out there that having the right recruitment software can bring you a whole heap closer 👀)

Let’s talk about some of the challenges organisations typically face with external recruitment. 

Disadvantages of external recruiting: risks and challenges 

External recruiting opens doors to new skills, fresh ideas and untapped potential but it’s not without hurdles. It’s more hurdle than racetrack, in many cases. 

Getting external recruitment right can transform your organisation. But it also introduces costs, complexities, and risks. 

• High cost-per-hire

External recruitment is more expensive than internal hiring, often to the tune of many thousands. There are obvious expenses – like advertising, job-board spend, agency fees, background checks, onboarding time – but also hidden costs. Vacancies left open for longer increase workload for existing staff, delay projects, and can even affect customer experience, for instance. 

That doesn’t make external recruitment bad spend, but it does underline the importance of an efficient, automation-heavy, data-driven function. 

• Is everything that can be automated, automated?
• Do you know which channels are actually worth spending on?
• Do you have robust visibility over all your teams and processes?
• Do you use video screening software?
• Are you keeping great candidates in-process?
• Etc…

• Long time-to-hire

Recruiting externally almost always takes longer. You’re building awareness, pipeline, and trust from scratch – especially if your employer brand isn’t yet well known in the market. And that longer time-to-hire has knock-on consequences:

• Productivity drops when key roles sit unfilled
• Existing teams stretch to cover gaps, increasing burnout risk
• Candidates disengage, causing drop-outs and wasting effort

Industry benchmarks suggest that top candidates are often off the market within 10 days, while average hiring processes often stretch beyond 40 days.  

This gap is one of the biggest issues with external recruitment. The right tech – especially AI-enabled recruitment software that champions efficiency – can cut weeks from the process, but only if you’ve also reviewed your end-to-end processes.

• Cultural misalignment

No matter how qualified someone looks on paper, hiring externally introduces the risk of misfit. They may have the right skills but lack alignment with your company’s pace, style, or values. 

And ultimately, even subtle mismatches can cause friction, derail projects, or trigger early attrition.

LeadershipIQ research finds that 46% of new hires fail within 18 months, for instance, and interpersonal skills issues are the major culprit (much more so than technical skill).

Successful talent acquisition teams understand that even the best recruitment automation in the world isn’t about removing recruiters. It’s about enabling recruiters to spend less time on the grunt work, and more time on values-led, human-to-human assessment, coaching, and onboarding. 

• Damage to morale 

Although external recruitment can spare you from the political complexities of hiring internally, the flipside is the potential damage to morale. 

When a role goes to an “outsider”, internal employees who aspired to the position might feel passed over; rejected. Especially if there’s any existing dissatisfaction with career progression opportunities within your organisation.

That can cause frustration, resentment, disengagement and ultimately damage the unwritten trust between you and your people. At worst, it can impact productivity and drive unnecessary turnover. Clear communication is crucial.

• Risk of bias 

Yes, the chance to improve diversity is one big potential benefit of external recruitment. But it’s not a straightforward win. 

External hiring processes touch hundreds or even thousands of people – far more than internal moves. This scale multiplies the risk of bias creeping in, consciously or unconsciously, across job ads, sourcing, screening, and interviews. 

Endless studies have robustly proved the business case for diversity. If your hiring processes are biased, you’re limiting who you bring into the business.

Successful external recruitment teams prioritise fairness, creating equitable, inclusive processes. (That’s how Coventry City Council increased diversity hires by 122% using Tribepad 💅)

• Data fragmentation 

External recruiting typically spans multiple systems, platforms, and environments – job boards; agencies; social media recruitment channels; your ATS and CRM; onboarding software; screening software, HRIS, and so on. 

The danger is, these processes become disconnected and hiring data is refracted into a million pieces. This introduces inaccuracies, increases manual admin, obscures visibility, and increases compliance risk.

For external recruitment to work well, TA teams need consolidated recruitment software that brings data and processes into one place (either through embedded modules or through comprehensive integrations). 

• High attrition

External hires typically churn faster than internal hires. For example, one analysis found external hires had a 61% higher rate of involuntary exit and 21% higher rate of voluntary exit versus internal movers. 

If not keeping the people you’re paying good money to hire, that’s a big issue. However efficient your recruitment function, if people are leaving before they pay-back in productivity then you’re wasting spend.

To make external recruiting a success, teams need to focus beyond initial recruitment. New hires need deliberate integration: clear success metrics, supportive onboarding, and early wins that build belonging. 

Now let’s dig into how to make external recruiting live up to its promises…

Best practices for external recruiting that actually works

Today’s recruitment landscape is challenging, to put it mildly. GenAI has rewritten how hiring happens and how fast everything moves. Meanwhile budgets are getting tighter, C-suites want more proof of ROI, and candidate expectations are through the roof. 

The truth is, external recruiting isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s powerful when it’s done deliberately – guided by strategy, supported by the right tools, and executed with humanity. 

Here’s what effective external recruiting looks like in 2025. (Read more in our full article on recruitment best practices for post-AI hiring). 

1. Hire for skills

In an AI-powered world where CVs are increasingly automated, progressive TA teams are focusing on behaviours, learning agility, and potential. Skills-based assessments and structured interviews help uncover fit that credentials miss, reducing bias and surfacing hidden gems.

2. Double-down on employer brand
   

External recruiting lives and dies on reputation. Candidates research you before you ever see their application, and they can sniff out inconsistency fast. Authentic, consistent employer branding across every touchpoint amplifies trust, improves offer acceptance, and strengthens retention.

3. Make speed non-negotiable 

Slow processes mean lost talent and higher costs. Teams need to hire in days and weeks now, certainly not months. Streamline recruitment with comprehensive automation, smart workflows and AI assistance, without sacrificing fairness or quality.

4. Pay attention to quality of hire

Staying power matters as much as speed. Link your recruitment metrics to business outcomes, to turn TA from a cost centre into a value driver. 

Read more: How to improve quality-of-hire

5. Prioritise DEI
   

Bias damages more than candidate experience; it damages brand and performance. Embedding inclusion into job descriptions, communication, and assessment design is how modern employers earn trust and attract the widest, strongest pools of talent. Abandoning DEI is shortsighted. 

6. Be strategic about integrating AI 

AI should amplify good processes, not automate bad ones. The goal isn’t “more AI,” but better integration — using technology to remove friction, support ethical decision-making, and free recruiters to do more human work.

7. Let data drive every decision
   

Modern TA leaders can’t afford to rely on instinct. Good recruitment data connects external hiring activity to outcomes, showing which channels deliver quality, which stages leak candidates, and how hiring drives performance and retention. It’s how you move from guesswork to growth.

8. Strengthen recruiter–manager collaboration
   

In an AI-accelerated market where candidates can apply for hundreds of roles in minutes, recruiter-manager clarity is everything. When everyone agrees on what “good” looks like – the specific skills, behaviours, and success markers that matter –  you avoid wasted effort, misalignment, and poor hires. Tools that enable shared dashboards, transparent scorecards, and faster feedback loops make collaboration easy, fair, and fast. 

9. Communicate like people, not processes

Great communication is one of the simplest ways to stand out as a recruitment team – and one of the most neglected. Candidates invest time and emotional energy applying to your roles. When communication is slow, inconsistent, or robotic, it damages trust and erodes brand value faster than almost anything else. Set clear expectations upfront, keep candidates informed at every stage, and never ghost.

Read how Tribepad makes candidate comms easy.

The verdict: is external recruitment all it’s cracked up to be?

External recruiting is one of your most powerful levers for growth but it’s no silver bullet. It delivers real value when it’s strategic, data-informed, inclusive, and human – not when it’s a reflex-action. 

That means building connected systems, empowered teams, and people-first processes that make every hire count (wherever they come from).

Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, Video Interviewing, and Onboarding, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.

Trusted by organisations like the Tesco, NHS Professionals, and Subway, 30-million people in 16 languages use Tribepad.