Starting your own recruitment business can be one of the most exciting and most terrifying experiences. You’ve taken the ultimate step in gaining your professional independence, but how do you keep your business growing to support your goals?
Top tips for growing a recruitment business
Set your business objectives
If you’re preparing to grow, you need to think about the future of your recruitment business, and what you’d like to achieve in one, three or five years’ time. Keep your plans and objectives SMART.
Specific.
Measurable.
Achievable.
Realistic.
Time-bound.
Here are some examples:
- Increase the number of applications via your website by 15% in the next quarter, reducing the use and cost of job boards
- Create three inbound leads that are hiring over the next 6 months – saving time on outbound effort and costs
- Develop one piece of original and relevant content a month for the next 6 months, increasing traffic to your website and subscribers to your newsletter
- Attend two networking events per month that are relevant to your business, this will help you to fill your ‘little black book’ and meet like minded business owners.
Find your niche
Recruitment is an active and changing sector and recruitment business owners need to adapt to the ever-changing working culture. There has been huge growth in online recruitment, so recruiters must become smarter and prove their worth over automated job boards and social media platforms.
Everyone wants an expert. If you needed to have an operation, would you seek a generalist or a specialist? It’s the same in business! The pandemic created new business opportunities to help solve a wide range of challenges. This led to the rise of professional niche recruiters, and many businesses have realised that niche recruitment is an important part of their hiring process.
Look at your past experiences and where your expertise lies. Pick the field that interests you and you know you can thrive in. Research your market and how it is growing, look at what kind of roles might be in the pipeline for your clients in future and keep yourself ahead of the game.
Build your pipeline
Sometimes a client will know of a contract coming up that they will need to recruit to fulfil. Get ahead of the game by knowing who might be available.
Make sure you have a detailed candidate acquisition strategy with different routes to market, as the best candidates for your clients are likely to be the ones not actively searching. Utilise tools like LinkedIn to see who is likely to be looking for a move. Maybe they’ve worked somewhere a long time with no obvious progression, could your clients offer them the next step on the ladder?
Keep checking back every few months with both your clients and potential candidates.
Outsource the boring bits
Are you currently wearing the hat of credit manager, HR manager, insurance guru, administrator and bookkeeper? All whilst trying to run and grow your business?
Outsourcing is often the most cost effective way to make sure your business grows and survives at the same time. Did you really sign up to be organising your payroll on a Sunday evening because you ran out of hours in the week? We doubt it!
WeDo can take care of all the boring stuff, leaving you to concentrate on growing your recruitment business. Our back office support covers finance, HR, insurance, payroll, tax, technology and more.
Let us do the dull stuff and you can get out there and grow your agency!