External Recruiting Agency

External Recruiting Agency vs. Internal Recruiter: What’s Better for Growing Teams?

By Published On: June 10th, 2025

When your company needs to hire, especially for high-impact or hard-to-fill roles, one key question often comes up:

Should we hire an internal recruiter or work with an external recruiting agency?

While bringing someone in-house can seem like a natural next step, many companies find that partnering with an external agency offers faster, more scalable, and cost-effective results, especially in today’s competitive hiring landscape. Here’s why growing teams increasingly choose to outsource recruitment to firms like Tamarack.

1. Faster access to talent

Internal recruiters need time to ramp up. They must learn your business, build new pipelines, and create sourcing strategies from scratch. External recruiting agencies already have these systems in place. At Tamarack, we maintain a vetted network of high-performing professionals in finance, operations, HR, and IT, so when a client opens a role, we can move fast.

A LinkedIn Talent Solutions report shows that top candidates are only available for 10–14 days on average. With faster access and fewer delays, external agencies reduce time-to-fill and help prevent costly vacancies.

2. A recruiting team, not just one person

Hiring an internal recruiter gives you one person’s bandwidth. With an agency, you get a full team—recruiters, researchers, and client managers—working together to find the right fit. That means faster candidate outreach, stronger passive sourcing, and better responsiveness when hiring ramps up.

This is especially important for lean teams or startups where hiring may come in waves and bandwidth is limited internally.

3. Expertise in tough-to-fill roles

From Controllers and Tax Managers to Heads of HR or IT leaders, highly specialized roles require proactive outreach, deep market knowledge, and strong candidate relationships. These are exactly the types of searches agencies like Tamarack are built for.

Internal recruiters often juggle multiple roles and may not have the time or expertise to go deep into one niche. Tamarack focuses exclusively on corporate functions and high-skill placements—so we know what good looks like, and where to find it.

4. Cost-effective and scalable

Hiring an internal recruiter adds fixed costs: salary, benefits, platforms, training, and time. With an external recruiting agency, you only pay when a hire is made. According to Glassdoor, the estimated total pay for an Internal Recruiter is $91,923 per year.

By comparison, agency support is variable, on-demand, and scales with your needs. Whether you’re filling one role or staffing an entire team, you’re not tied to permanent overhead.

5. Built-in tools, insights, and data

At Tamarack, we don’t just deliver resumes. We provide real-time feedback on market conditions, candidate expectations, and compensation trends. That means every search comes with strategic insights—like how to improve your job description, when to speed up your process, or how to position your opportunity to the right candidates.

This kind of data-backed hiring strategy is something most internal recruiters don’t have the tools or time to provide.

Final thoughts

Hiring the right people is critical to growth, but that doesn’t mean you need to build a full internal recruiting function. An external recruiting agency like Tamarack gives you access to high-impact talent with speed, flexibility, and precision.

If you’re deciding between hiring in-house or working with an external partner, let’s have a conversation. We’ll help you assess what works best for your goals, your team, and your budget.

Learn more about our approach or get in touch with our team today.

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