The idea for this article came from a simple dinner conversation with my wife.
She looked at me and said, “Wait — so companies are expecting their internal HR teams to do the same job as you? When recruitment is literally all you do? That doesn’t really make sense.”
And she was right. (Why am I surprised?)
In civil construction, HR departments are asked to wear an impossible number of hats — compliance, onboarding, training, development, wellbeing, EBAs, policies, grievances, performance reviews — the list goes on. Then on top of all that, we expect them to also be across the entire market: knowing who’s available, who’s performing, and who might be open to a new opportunity.
It’s a lot to ask.
And here’s the thing — we don’t expect our Engineers to manage payroll, or our Project Managers to handle HR compliance. So why do we expect HR to be expert-level recruiters on top of everything else?
If you take a step back, it’s actually a bit absurd. We’ve built this unspoken belief that HR should be able to do it all — but no one can truly “do it all” and still do it well. The modern HR role is so broad that the recruitment component often gets squeezed between everything else that’s urgent.
That doesn’t make them less capable — it just means the system is overloaded.
Over the years, I’ve seen agency recruiters (myself included at times) make the mistake of assuming that HR doesn’t know what they’re doing because they’re not across the whole market.They’re managing the people who are the business and scanning the horizon for who might be next. This is where a recruitment agency should come in — not to take control, but to lend focus. To take that one slice of their workload and go deeper. To be the eyes and ears in the market while they stay focused. When that balance exists, it’s not about competition or credit — it’s about complementing each other’s strengths to achieve better outcomes for the business as a whole.
When you think about it, it’s no wonder recruitment agencies often have access to more talent. We should —it’s literally our full-time job. It’s also no wonder HR teams sometimes push agencies away. Have you ever met someone who likes being spoken down to or knows you’re speaking behind their back? I certainly haven’t
At Sammen, we’ve built our business on experience and empathy. We put ourselves in the HR team’s position and ask, “What would good collaboration actually feel like?”
The answer is pretty simple:mutual respect and teamwork.
We’re not trying to take over. We’re trying to make things easier. To bring specialised knowledge into one small but crucial part of their world — the part that requires networks, conversations, and intuition built up over years.
And to the business owners reading this — I’d ask you to think about it from your own perspective. You don’t try to do every single thing yourself. You hire specialists because you know that’s how good businesses run. Why should your HR team be any different?
If anything, supporting them with external expertise is just smart leadership. It’s recognising strengths and using resources wisely — not replacing but complementing.
That’s the approach we live by at Sammen. We love recruitment. And we believe the best results come when both sides work together.