You Need to Make a Permanent Hire. What Are Your Options?

Someone has resigned. You have approval for a new position. Your business is growing. Or perhaps you have finally accepted that the role you have been trying to cover internally needs a permanent person.

Whatever has prompted it, you now need to recruit.

So, what are your options?

You could recruit directly, advertise, use a recruitment agency on a contingency basis, work exclusively with one recruitment partner or commission a specialist or executive search.

There is not one right answer.

What matters is understanding what sort of hiring problem you are trying to solve before deciding how you are going to solve it.

One of the biggest mistakes we see employers make is using the same recruitment approach for every vacancy.

A relatively straightforward hire in a candidate-rich market does not require the same strategy as a niche technical position, a difficult geographical location, a multi-hire project, a senior leadership appointment or a confidential replacement and less salary does not automatically mean straightforward.

A £40,000 specialist role in a difficult location with a tiny candidate pool can be as hard to recruit as a business critical £200,000 C-Suite Executive.

So before deciding how to recruit, start with what you are recruiting.

Permanent recruitment options at a glance

If you are recruiting...	Consider starting with...
Straightforward / everyday	Direct recruitment, advertising or contingency recruitment
Challenging	Exclusive contingency or specialist search
Niche / specialist	Specialist search
Difficult location	Specialist search / market mapping
Multi-hire / team build	Project Recruitment / Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Senior / business-critical	Executive search
Confidential	Confidential search / executive search

This is not a set of hard and fast rules. A lot depends on the candidate market, your internal recruitment capability and how much time and resource you have available.

But it is a useful place to start.

First, how difficult is this hire likely to be?

Permanent recruitment tends to fall into several broad categories. Recognising which one you are dealing with should influence how you approach it.

1. The straightforward, everyday hire

These are roles where there is a healthy candidate population and the skills you need are readily available within your geographical area.

For these vacancies, recruiting directly can work perfectly well.

You might advertise on your website or job boards, use LinkedIn, ask for employee referrals, search previous applicants or use your existing network.

The obvious advantage is cost. If you have the internal capacity and receive suitable applications, there may be little reason to pay a recruitment fee.

But there is still a cost.

Someone needs to write the advert, manage applications, screen CVs, speak to candidates, arrange interviews, provide feedback, reject unsuccessful applicants and keep the process moving.

The true cost of recruiting directly is not just the advertising spend. It is also management and Human Resources time.

For a straightforward vacancy, that may be perfectly acceptable.

The equation starts to change as the hire becomes harder.

2. The challenging hire

Perhaps you have advertised and received applications, but not from the people you actually want.

Maybe candidates look right on paper but lack something important when you meet them.

Perhaps you have recruited the role successfully before, but the market has changed.

Or the strongest candidates have several opportunities available to them.

At this point, relying purely on applicants becomes risky.

The people you most want to speak to may not be actively looking for another job. They are not checking job boards or applying to adverts because they do not currently need to.

Your recruitment strategy therefore needs to move from advertising a vacancy to finding and engaging people.

This is where a good recruiter should start earning their fee.

Rather than sending you whoever happens to apply, they should identify suitable people, approach them directly, understand what might motivate them to consider a move and assess whether there is a genuine fit before introducing them.

For this type of vacancy, exclusive contingency or a more proactive specialist search can make sense.

3. The niche or specialist hire

Some roles have a small candidate population from the outset.

You might need a particular technical background, regulatory experience, sector knowledge, qualification or an unusual combination of skills.

The problem is not attracting more candidates.

It is finding the relatively small number of people who could genuinely do the job.

Advertising may still form part of the strategy, but it is unlikely to be enough on its own.

A specialist search may involve defining the target candidate profile, mapping relevant organisations, identifying individuals with the required experience and directly approaching people who are not actively job seeking.

The narrower the candidate pool, the more important market knowledge and research become.

This is also where employers can lose valuable time by advertising first because that is what they normally do.

They wait. They do not get the right response. They advertise again. Eventually, they decide to search the market properly.

If you know from the outset that only a relatively small number of people could meet the brief, it may make more sense to go looking for them from day one.

4. The difficult-location hire

Sometimes the job is not particularly unusual.

The location is the problem.

Perhaps you are based somewhere with a limited local talent pool. Competitors employing similar people may be concentrated elsewhere. Or the position requires five days on site when much of the candidate market expects some form of hybrid working.

You need to understand:

• Where do suitable candidates currently live?

• How far will they realistically travel?

• What would persuade someone to make that journey or relocate?

• Is the salary competitive for the geographical market you need to recruit from?

• Is your working pattern realistic compared with the alternatives candidates have?

A recruiter can find candidates, but they cannot make an unattractive proposition attractive.

Sometimes the most valuable outcome of testing the market is discovering that something within the brief needs to change.

That might be salary, flexibility, working pattern, experience requirements or geographical radius.

It is far better to discover that early than spend three months repeatedly advertising a vacancy that the market is telling you it does not want.

5. The multi-hire or team build

Hiring one person is one thing.

Hiring five, ten or twenty creates a different recruitment problem.

Now you need to think about market capacity, attraction, assessment, timescales, candidate communication and the internal resource required to manage the whole project.

Questions include:

• How quickly do people need to start?

• Can the local market supply enough candidates?

• Are competitors recruiting the same people?

• Who will manage the volume of applications and interviews?

• How will candidates be assessed consistently?

• How will you keep candidates engaged throughout the process?

For multi-hire projects, the recruitment process itself needs designing.

A Project Recruitment or Recruitment Process Outsourcing solution can give you dedicated resource and a consistent process rather than treating every appointment as an individual vacancy.

6. The senior or business-critical hire

The greater the impact of getting an appointment wrong, the more rigorous the recruitment process should become.

A senior hire may influence strategy, culture, revenue, operational performance and the people working beneath them.

But seniority is not the only consideration.

A position at any level can be business-critical if leaving it vacant has a serious impact on customers, compliance, production, revenue or your ability to grow.

The question should not just be:

“Can we find someone who can do this job?”

It should be:

“How confident are we that we have identified and assessed the strongest people available to us?”

That requires looking beyond whoever happens to be searching for a new job at that moment.

Executive search can include market mapping, proactive headhunting, structured assessment, benchmarking, market feedback and a managed interview and selection process.

It costs more than placing an advert.

But that cost needs to be considered against the commercial impact of leaving a critical position vacant or appointing the wrong person.

7. The confidential hire

There are times when you cannot advertise.

Perhaps somebody is being replaced and does not yet know. There may be a restructure underway. You might be creating a strategically sensitive position, or you do not want employees, customers or competitors to know what you are planning.

Candidate approaches need to be carefully controlled. Information may need to be released in stages. Non-disclosure agreements may be appropriate. Even apparently harmless details within a job description can identify the organisation.

Confidential recruitment therefore lends itself much more naturally to a controlled search with one trusted recruitment partner.

It is not just about finding candidates.

It is about controlling who knows what, when they know it and how your organisation is represented throughout the process.

So what are your permanent recruitment options?

Once you understand the nature of the hire, you can decide which recruitment approach makes sense.

And you do not have to use the same approach for every vacancy.

Recruit directly or advertise

For a straightforward role where there is a healthy supply of candidates, this may be all you need.

Pros: Lower external cost, direct contact with candidates and complete control.

Cons: Your team manages the entire process and you are largely reliant on people you can reach or those actively looking and willing to apply.

Advertising can generate a lot of applications, but there is a big difference between generating more applications and finding the right person.

If your first advert does not work, repeatedly advertising the same vacancy without changing anything is unlikely to solve the underlying problem.

Use a recruitment agency on a contingency basis

With contingency recruitment, you pay a fee when the recruiter successfully introduces the person you hire.

This can work well for straightforward and moderately challenging vacancies where you want someone else to take on the work of finding, screening and engaging candidates.

Pros: No fee unless you hire, access to an established candidate network, proactive candidate searching and less internal time spent on the early stages of recruitment.

Cons: Service and quality vary between recruiters, so choosing the right partner matters.

One thing we would caution against is assuming that giving the same vacancy to lots of recruitment agencies automatically gives you more choice.

It can have the opposite effect.

Recruiters working on a contingency basis will have several live vacancies competing for their time. If several agencies are working on your vacancy and only one will be paid, your role may receive less investment rather than more.

Candidates may also be approached repeatedly about the same job, which is not necessarily the impression you want to create in the market.

For many permanent hires, one good recruitment partner given a genuine opportunity to fill the vacancy can be more effective than several recruiters racing to submit CVs.

Work exclusively with one recruitment partner

Exclusive recruitment does not have to mean retained search.

You can agree that one recruiter will manage the vacancy for an agreed period while still working on a success-fee basis.

That changes the dynamic.

The recruiter knows they have a genuine opportunity to make the placement, giving them greater reason to invest time in understanding the role, searching beyond their immediate database, approaching people directly and properly representing your business.

Pros: Greater accountability, consistent messaging to the candidate market, more commitment from the recruiter and one point of contact managing the process.

Cons: You are relying on one recruitment partner, so you need to choose them carefully and agree what they will deliver.

For a straightforward or challenging permanent hire, this can be a good middle ground between doing everything yourself and commissioning a specialist search.

Use specialist search

Specialist search becomes valuable when the people you need are harder to identify, harder to reach or require specific sector or technical knowledge.

Instead of relying primarily on applications and an existing database, the recruiter actively identifies the relevant candidate market and approaches people within it.

This is particularly appropriate for niche positions, challenging searches or roles where previous recruitment activity has failed to produce the right people.

Pros: Greater market coverage, access to passive candidates and a more targeted search based on the specific skills and experience you need.

Cons: It requires more investment than standard contingency recruitment and the recruiter needs genuine knowledge of the market they are searching.

Use executive search

For senior, business-critical or confidential appointments, executive search provides a much more structured approach.

Rather than asking, “Who is available?”, you are asking, “Who are the strongest people in the market and which of them could we engage?”

This may involve market mapping, competitor research, direct approaches, structured assessment, benchmarking, market intelligence and management of the entire selection process.

Executive search will often be delivered on a retained basis, with fees paid in agreed stages as the search progresses.

Pros: Thorough market coverage, proactive headhunting, greater rigour and accountability, and a process designed around identifying and assessing the strongest candidates rather than relying on those already looking.

Cons: There is a financial commitment upfront and this level of search is unnecessary for many everyday vacancies.

Not every permanent vacancy needs executive or retained search.

Equally, not every vacancy can be solved by putting an advert online.

The skill is knowing the difference.

How do you decide which approach to use?

Before choosing your recruitment route, ask yourself:

1. How many suitable candidates are realistically available?

2. Are those people likely to be actively looking?

3. Have we recruited this type of person successfully before?

4. How attractive is our opportunity compared with competing employers?

5. How difficult is our location or working pattern?

6. What happens to the business if this role remains vacant?

7. What is the cost of making the wrong hire?

8. Do we have the internal time and expertise to manage the recruitment properly?

9. Does the search need to remain confidential?

10. Are we hiring one person or building an entire team?

Your answers should determine your recruitment strategy.

Not habit.

Match the recruitment method to the hiring problem

There is a temptation when a vacancy arises to do what you did last time.

“We always advertise first.”

“We always send our vacancies to three agencies.”

“We always use the same recruiter.”

But none of those is a recruitment strategy.

They are habits.

Sometimes advertising yourself is exactly the right answer. If you have plenty of good candidates and the internal capacity to manage the process, why pay someone else to do it?

Sometimes a contingency recruiter can save you a considerable amount of time and give you access to people you would not otherwise reach.

Sometimes giving one recruiter exclusivity creates the commitment and accountability needed to properly work a harder vacancy.

Sometimes you need a specialist who understands a small candidate market and knows how to find and engage the people within it.

And sometimes the appointment is so senior, business-critical or sensitive that you need a structured executive search.

So rather than starting with:

“How do we normally recruit?”

Ask:

“What is the most sensible way of accessing and assessing the people we need for this particular hire?”

Start by diagnosing the hiring problem.

Then choose the recruitment method.

Not the other way around.