When roles are business‑critical, choosing how you hire can matter as much as who you hire. Do you build everything in‑house, lean on agencies, or move to an MSP model that orchestrates the whole picture? This article helps you decide based on reality, not theory.
1. Internalize: when building in‑house still makes sense
Internal recruitment works best when your hiring is predictable and aligned with your long‑term roadmap. You invest in your own TA team, tools, and employer brand, and you keep direct control over every decision.
Internalizing makes sense when:
- You hire a steady volume of similar roles every year.
- You value culture fit and long‑term retention over short‑term speed.
- You can justify investment in tech, sourcing, and recruitment ops.
The trade‑off: you carry the full cost and can struggle when demand suddenly jumps or shifts—exactly what happens with critical, project‑driven roles.
2. Externalize via agencies: flexibility with hidden costs
Working with agencies is the most common way to externalize recruitment. For a handful of critical roles, it can be the fastest way to tap into existing networks and niche expertise.
Externalizing to agencies works when:
- You have a small number of high‑stakes hires.
- You need speed and are willing to pay higher fees.
- Your internal team lacks specific market or technical knowledge.
Over time, the weaknesses appear: rising spend, vendor sprawl, inconsistent candidate experience, and very little aggregated data on what’s really happening. That’s where externalization alone reaches its limit.
3. MSP: a third option for complex, critical recruitment
An MSP in recruitment doesn’t replace your strategy; it operationalizes it at scale. You still decide what’s critical, where to invest, and which roles matter most. The MSP builds the engine that delivers consistently.
For critical roles, MSP brings:
- Centralized vendor management and curated supplier panels.
- Standard processes from requisition to onboarding.
- Real-time visibility on spend, performance, and risks.
This matters most when your critical hiring is not a one‑off event, but a recurring pattern: new product lines, transformation programs, multi‑country rollouts, or regulatory deadlines.
4. How to decide: a simple framework
You don’t need a 60‑page slide deck to decide. Start with three questions:
- Volume and frequency
- Occasional critical hires → agencies or internal team.
- Recurring waves of critical roles across functions → MSP territory.
- Complexity and risk
- Single country, simple contracts → internal or agencies can cope.
- Multi‑country, contractors, strict compliance → MSP brings structure and protection.
- Speed and scalability
- You can afford longer timelines → internal team is fine.
- You need to ramp up fast without burning out your team → MSP adds the capacity and coordination layer.
If you keep answering “high” to volume, complexity, and speed, you’re describing an MSP use case, even if you haven’t named it that way yet.
5. Combining models instead of choosing only one
In reality, most mature organisations don’t choose only internal, only agencies, or only MSP. They combine:
- Internal TA for strategic, long‑term hires and leadership roles.
- Agencies for niche, one‑off searches or highly specialised profiles.
- MSP to orchestrate contingent and high‑volume critical hiring across suppliers.
The question is less “which model is best?” and more “which model should own which part of our hiring?” When that split is clear, critical recruitment doesn’t depend on one heroic team—it runs on a designed system.
6. What this looks like with Sparagus
At Sparagus, we see many clients come to us after trying both extremes: building everything internally or relying entirely on agencies. The pattern is always the same: once complexity hits, they need an MSP layer to keep control without slowing down.
Our MSP model lets you:
- Keep ownership of your talent strategy.
- Externalize the heavy operational work and vendor management.
- Protect critical roles with structure, data, and clear accountability.
If you’re wondering whether you’ve reached that point, our Managed Services page shows how we’ve helped organisations make this shift since 2021—and what it could look like in your context.
