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Why Having a Deep Recruiting Bench Is Bad For Your Business
On paper, it sounds like a positive thing to have a “deep” recruiting bench. With plenty of talent at your disposal, your business has the flexibility and agility to respond to a multitude of projects. Your talent pool can be as diverse as you need it to be. Right?
Well, yes and no. While having a fully stocked bench of ready-and-waiting employees may give business owners a sense of security, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
Deep Benches Are Expensive
First and foremost, there are substantial costs correlated with bench strength. Naturally, these consultants aren’t working for free, and businesses pay a premium to retain their services.
Instead of paying to keep a legion of consultants at the ready, businesses can reduce their hiring and personnel overhead by selecting candidates as needed. Third-party recruitment firms can help here by connecting the right talent with the right businesses without the need to pay for unnecessary personnel.
Deep Benches Are Distracting
It’s easy to understand how excessive bench strength can be expensive, but fewer executives understand how it can misalign corporate priorities. For example, when businesses work with outside consulting firms (as is so often the case these days), the first reaction these consultants typically have to a bench full of talent is to put them to work. They over-prioritize usability metrics and lose sight of other, more valuable, optimizations.
Naturally, this is a problem. Getting staff out the door isn’t near as important as finding the right roles to suit their specific talents. This tunnel vision is hard to avoid when consultants see an untapped talent pool, but significantly reduces the value you’ll find from their consultations.
Deep Benches Do Not Support Growth
All talent gets stale over time. The longer a staff member stays unused on the bench, the less relevant his/her skills become. We have a tendency to justify this behavior in all aspects of our life. We keep old DVD players in the basement, just in case we ever need them. We keep medicine past its expiration date, just in case it’ll come in handy someday. And business owners keep benches full of employees at the ready…just in case.
But as we can see, things lose usefulness as they become outdated, and the same holds true of your bench. The best consultants realize this and prefer to move around organizations rather than stagnating. This helps keep their minds sharp and their skills relevant. This is a key advantage of outsourced recruitment—by working with a firm that vets candidates before hiring, organizations can guarantee that each employee will be at the top of his/her game. Be wary of organizations that have deep benches of unused talent—chances are, they’ve been sitting there for a while.
Acquire Talent As You Need It
Keeping a fully stocked bench seems logical on the surface, but exposes businesses to significant expense, misalignment of priorities, and stagnation. Urgenci understands the value of acquiring talent-as-needed and strives to bring the benefits of outsourced recruitment to each of our clients. Contact us at Urgenci for a free consultation of your business today.
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