Hiring in-house or delegating the role: how to decide

The conversation usually starts badly: "do we hire or outsource?". Framed like that, the answer depends on who answers it and which budget they are defending. Framed properly, the question is a different one: what kind of role is this, and what does it need in order to work?

Some roles have to sit inside the company. Not out of culture or principle, but because the work itself demands it. It is worth saying so up front, because it is what makes everything that follows credible.

When hiring in-house is the right answer

When the role is the core of what you sell. If your product is software, whoever decides the architecture sits inside. If you sell consulting, whoever signs off the judgement sits inside. The practical rule: if the work of that role is your competitive advantage, it does not get delegated. What gets delegated is what holds it up, not the thing itself.

When physical presence is required. Warehouse, shop, workshop, site, laboratory. A role that touches things with its hands does not get covered remotely, and no conversation will fix that.

When the volume does not add up to a full-time job. This case gets confused a lot. If the real work is eight hours a week, neither a full-time employee nor a full-time dedicated person is the answer: both are more than you need. What fits there is a freelancer with a specific brief, or sharing it internally with counted hours. Before deciding how you fill a role, check that there is a role.

When you want the knowledge to accumulate in a person who will stay ten years. That exists, and it is a perfectly good reason. You just have to be aware that it gets paid up front: recruiting, training, and the risk of that person leaving in year two.

If your role falls into one of those four boxes, stop reading comparisons and hire. That is what suits you.

When people hire in-house out of habit

Every other case is where the expensive decisions get made, and almost always for the same motive: hiring is the familiar path. There is a process, there is a form, there is a folder with what was done last time. Everything else has to be explained to a committee.

The signs that you are hiring out of habit are fairly recognisable:

• The role has been open for months and the work is being absorbed by your best person "in the meantime".
• The job ad has been rewritten three times to ask for less, because nobody applied to the first version.
• Nobody can say what the role will be measured on, beyond "getting the work out".
• It has been opened part-time "just to try", when the work is forty hours.
• The last time you filled that same role was fourteen months ago, and the time before that two years ago.

That last sign carries the most information. A role that turns over is not a role with bad luck: it is a role nobody is holding up.

The four questions that decide it

Answer these four in writing, about one specific role, and the decision makes itself.

1. Is this work my advantage, or does it hold my advantage up? The judgement that sets you apart stays inside. The execution that makes that judgement possible can live outside without you losing anything.

2. Is physical presence required? If it is, the conversation is over.

3. Is there a full week of work, every week, for the next year? If there is not, do not hire full time in any form.

4. Who is going to manage that person, for how many hours a week, and do they have them? This is the one almost nobody asks and the one that sinks the most hires. A role with nobody to prioritise and review it does not fail all at once: it fades by month three.

If the fourth question has no answer with a name and a number of hours, the problem does not get fixed by hiring better.

What gets delegated and what never does

There is an underlying confusion in the word "delegate", and it is the one that makes people say "I am not letting go of this". What gets delegated is the work. Judgement does not get delegated.

In practice that means you still say what is a priority, what gets done first and what the answer is when a case is borderline; that the work happens inside your tools, with your data and in your tone; and that you set what gets measured. A well-built delegated role looks far more like an in-house role than like a supplier: it logs into your helpdesk, your CRM and your task tracker, and it shows up in your dashboards.

What changes is not who is in charge. What changes is whose contract it is, whose equipment it is, whose risk the absence is, and whose job it is to find that person. How that gets set up, step by step, is in how it works.

And there is one more difference, the one that decides whether the role survives month three: the role is not left alone. A freelancer who does not know something either decides alone or stops. In a pod there is someone behind it who knows that role because they cover it at other companies, who helps that person organise their duties, and who answers for the service working every month. You direct; what you do not also have to be is the one who spots that something is wrong.

The third option almost nobody considers: splitting the role

When the first question gets answered with an "it depends", it is almost always because the role is two roles squeezed into the same job ad. One part is judgement — deciding what gets prioritised, what the answer is in the odd cases, what gets accepted and what does not — and the other is execution, which is eighty per cent of the hours.

That impossible job ad you have rewritten three times is usually exactly that: a role asking for the judgement of someone with ten years of experience and the workload of someone with two. Nobody applies because that person does not exist at that price, and if they do apply they get bored and leave.

Splitting it works better than carrying on searching. The judgement part stays inside at a few hours a week, usually with someone who is already there; the execution gets covered full time. It is the same operation, with the difference that now there really are two roles that exist.

How to compare without fooling yourself

If you decide to compare, compare like with like. The usual trap is putting the in-house gross salary against the fee of the alternative, and that is not a comparison: they are two different quantities.

To the gross you have to add what the company contributes, the equipment, the workspace, the per-seat software, the recruiting hours and the training weeks in which someone on your team teaches instead of working. And on the other side you have to ask the uncomfortable questions: who provides the equipment, what happens if the person is away, who answers for performance, what the replacement costs if they are not the right fit. The five ways to fill a role are compared row by row, including the seven questions worth asking any provider, ourselves included.

And check one more thing: that the role is written down. If you cannot describe on one page what gets done each day, in what order and what it is measured on, neither of the two options is going to go well. The role pages on this site are written that way on purpose: the data and CRM one — migrations, clean-up and documentation — for instance, sets out what it does, what it does not do and what you will measure. It works as a template even if you decide to hire in-house.

Where to go next

Take the role you have open right now. Answer the four questions in writing, in ten minutes, without consulting anyone.

If the first says "it is my advantage", the second says "yes" or the third says "no", you already have your answer and you need nothing else. If all four point the other way, and above all if the fourth has no answer, look at how it works and decide with both numbers in front of you.