Almost any human resources specialist has been faced, at some point, with the tough decision of outsourcing. It is not a simple decision to take, and it entails a complicated process. For those outside the field of human resources, further explanations are necessary.

First of all, outsourcing is a practice often used by the human resources department, in various companies and organizations. Outsourcing means turning over an entire function to an outside specialist. That function may be anything important to the company, whether it refers to payroll, shipping, security, benefits administration or computer networking. There are cases when such outside consultants work side by side with the regular employees within the company, or cases when a specific function is moved entirely to a different place, a remote location away from the office. Sometimes, the remote location is even outside the country.

This practice of outsourcing outside the country is more commonly known as offshoring, and has generated many economic and political debates in the past few years. However, outsourcing is far from being a new process, although it has brought more public attention recently. In fact, small companies and family businesses have been outsourcing since forever, even before the practice actually had a name. The practice is old, but when large companies, that have previously used their own personnel for certain functions, turn to outsourcing, it is news. However, it has proved to be an extremely useful staffing strategy, increasingly popular these days.

Why do companies choose to outsource? Because of necessity or choice, but for either reason, outsourcing saves time and money. Let's take them one at a time. Necessity is the generating factor when a certain business requires a certain function to be dealt with, but without buying new equipment or facility or affording to hire new staff. For such situations, outsourcing is often a very convenient and efficient solution. Choice comes to be the driving factor when companies prefers to focus all their resources and internal energy on critical and essential operations, while outsourcing the ones that are necessary, but can be done from the outside.

As a human resources specialist, it is your responsibility to grasp all implications of outsourcing in order to provide strategic counsel throughout any hiring process. You need to assess all advantages and disadvantages, and contribute to the final decision, whether to use this practice or not. However, keep in mind that outsourcing often affects directly the HR function itself, as companies are frequently outsourcing some of their HR services.