As Corporate America emerges from the pandemic and its economic fallout to resume something approximating business as usual, most companies are finally ready to begin rebuilding or ramping up their workforces. That means hiring. Only one problem: Who, specifically, is going to do it?

With so many of Corporate America’s companies downsizing, restructuring or simply losing employees over the past two years, hiring departments felt the squeeze as well. Fewer new hires meant a diminished need for internal hiring specialists. Now that businesses are beginning to invest again in new talent, many are waking up to the reality that their hiring teams are woefully understaffed.

Filling those roles won’t be easy. It’s an employee’s market, which means competition for the best talent will be fierce. Hiring is expensive and time-consuming in the best of times – and it will take even longer when the team in charge of that process needs more help. The natural tendency for most companies is to want to build their own hiring department. Internal teams can be more cost-effective, and who knows what sort of prospects fit into a given environment better than company-dedicated hiring experts who operate within it?

But what about when those experts aren’t yet in the building? And what if, at this moment, you can’t find the people to fill those roles? Do you have time to wait? Or will you rush to bring aboard hiring personnel, find that they aren’t the right fit and wind up back where you started only a few months from now? Can your business afford not to hire the right recruiters, right now?

An external firm would be more viable in terms of expediency, but an outside hiring agency typically charges 25-30 percent of first-year-compensation up front, for each new hire. That quickly becomes expensive for any company seeking to hire a large number of employees and challenging, if not prohibitive, for small companies.

As an alternative, consider a vendor-partner with a more affordable tech-enabled solution: PeopleCaddie’s platform offers the ability to match companies with the best available independent contractors for the role, hire quickly and be competitive in terms of salary and benefits while maintaining workforce flexibility that isn’t possible with a staff made up of only full-time employees.

PeopleCaddie provides an established network of contract workers that are searchable by experience level, compensation range and skill set. Over time, a company can tap into PeopleCaddie’s talent cloud to re-engage contractors it has employed in the past, bypassing the usual onboarding process and ensuring a seamless transition from new hire to productive employee.

Hiring doesn’t have to be hard, time-consuming or cost-prohibitive. Given the potential opportunity cost, leveraging a talent cloud now to hire the workforce you need today ultimately may be less expensive and more effective than laboring to build an adequately-sized internal recruiting team, a sizeable portion of which may not be needed when the economy cools. The PeopleCaddie platform cuts through the clutter and traditional challenges of hiring to open up a world of possibilities for your company, now and in the future.

Find out how PeopleCaddie can help by clicking here.