Hi Craig, I am currently managing an internal TA team, we moved to this approach nearly 5 years ago, the cost of agencies was out of control and something needed to change! Our journey has been a bit up and down if honest, we have had an amazing hands on recruiter who drove costs down in only a few months by running internal assessment centres with the hiring managers, this person wasn't from a recruitment background but was a definite people person. Sadly they moved on, and we hired someone with a recruitment background both internal and agency and this wasn't so successful, they didn't have the targets as they would have money wise at an agency so worked on more senior roles to get the recognition but the high volume roles suffered. Covid hit and we had no talent team in place for this period, we covered the position within the HR team, and got ourselves into the place of high agency spend again. We currently have a team who have been in place for around 8 months and so far it is working well. I would say from feedback from our hiring managers that they prefer to work with someone internally as they know the business, and so have the commercial side at the fore front. From the talent side it is a steep learning curve from someone with agency experience as it isn't so target driven, and the stakeholder management can be tricky! Hope this helps! Claire

In reply to cbarnett3:

Hi Claire, thanks for your reply. That was an interesting insight.

I'm fortunate (maybe) to never have worked in a sales based recruitment role so don't have that commission-based drive. I know what you mean though as a lot of career progression within high-street agencies is based on margin (or it was in the business I worked for) and they are primarily sales people at the end of the day.

I actually really enjoyed my switch to the RPO side as I feel a little I'm looking after an internal recruitment team a bit. I guess my thinking is that working within an internal team I would have the opportunity to get involved in more strategic elements along with branding, retention and other projects that fall under the overall talent remit as well as building strong ties with hiring managers.

More organisations seem to be switching back to recruitment teams rather than using agencies, there seems to be a lot more TA roles advertised. I imagine that will be cost driven as you say.

Thanks for your time!