A modest proposal- inhouse Talent Acquisition shouldn't be a separate department
I understand that this sub is at least 50% in-house recruiters, maybe more, so this take may be controversial. Just my thoughts after seeing both sides of the wall, inhouse and external:
There's a lot of complaints about HR departments out there in the world. Many of them are unfair, but a lot of them have merit. I don't love the rise of HR as an equally powerful department within companies these days, frankly. On the specific topic of inhouse talent acquisition, I think it'd be better if internal recruiters were part of the department they're recruiting for (engineering, finance etc.), and not part of a completely separate department called HR. (Obviously, your company has to be big enough for that to make sense first). Again, I realize this is not going to attract a lot of upvotes on this sub, but inhouse recruiter quality...... varies wildly. Yes, some of them are good- and some are not.
If departments hired and supervised their own inhouse recruiters, and held them accountable- recruiter quality would increase. An engineering VP is only looking for a good recruiter and would hold them accountable. By contrast, what's an engineering VP going to do with a recent Communications grad from Party State U who doesn't know the difference between Java and Javascript? Who ignores or unresponsive to good candidates? Who is incompetent at their job? Nothing- you can't discipline someone in another department. And corporate politics being what they are, asking a different department head to discipline or re-assign an incompetent employee is a knife fight and probably dragout argument- not a good use of anyone's time or political capital.
TLDR, there are some not-great inhouse recruiters out there, and just from a structural perspective no department has an incentive for them to get any better. By contrast, if department heads hired for competence and held their subordinates to professional standards, inhouse recruiting talent would only increase.
Thank you for coming to my wall of text. No offense intended to any inhouse TA, some of whom are fantastic