As a recruitment entrepreneur, you have to constantly be on the lookout for newer ways to find both candidates and clients.
Growing any form of business is always a challenge, and the best way to focus on growth is to have a clear plan and balance.
Unfortunately, keeping a recruitment business steady, no matter what the economic conditions are, can be daunting, and pinpointing any single recruitment business development strategy is not doable.
To maximise profits for any agency recruiter, we’ve put together the best business development strategies in this article, so keep reading to find out more.
10 Business Development Strategies for Agency Recruiters
We often get asked how to do recruitment business development, and our answer remains quite the same…network extensively, be persistent, and ask essential questions.
Take a look at these innovative strategies that’ll help you land clients in no time.
1. Take a Look Into Your Existing Client Database
Employee turnover rates are without doubt expensive, and as per the American Staffing Association (ASA), the median annual turnover for recruiters and account managers is 25%.
This roughly means 1 out of every 4 employees leave their recruitment agency every year. With the turnover rate being so high, even the best clients can drop out any time, and you should be on your toes to replace them. Look into your existing database and identify the following:
- Who gives you the best Return On Investment (ROI)? What’s their business size?
- Is there any niche or business type that causes stress to your monthly or yearly revenue?
- Which type of businesses do you generally do well with? Is it hospitality, fashion, clinical etc.?
Once you have a clear idea, onboard only those kinds of clients, who are bound to bring you more revenue and less distress.
2. Keep a Stock of Your Candidate Pipeline
Your candidate pipeline should always be full. Unfortunately, recruiters often overlook their candidate pipeline while working with clients that are generating massive cash flow. Furthermore, in such scenarios, having a comprehensive cash flow statement in place is imperative. This statement will meticulously reconcile the numbers in your bank account with your actual income and expenses.
Set up a plan and ensure you have prospective candidates at each stage of your sales process. It’s best to have both an active and passive candidate pipeline as you never know what might come in handy for your client.
Read more: 10 candidate sourcing strategies that recruiters can use this season.
3. Networking on LinkedIn & Clubhouse is Key
LinkedIn and Clubhouse are some of the biggest networking platforms this 2021, and it goes without saying that they’ll still remain to have their influence on entrepreneurs and businesses.
So don’t be afraid to network with potential clients on these platforms.
Read more: 7 tips for hiring the best candidates from LinkedIn
Pick up the call and ask them questions about their sector, have a chat with them, focus on telling them how your staffing firm can help them double up on talent and bring extensive growth.
You must act as a salesperson, but again, don’t get into it right away. Here are some key points to keep in mind:
- Make the conversation more about what THEY do and less about what YOU do
- Be a good listener
- Spend as much time on the phone as it takes to understand their key requirements
- Don’t try and sell right away
Read more: How can recruiters use Clubhouse for business growth?
4. Research Like You’ve Never Researched Before
If you’re an agency recruiter, your research ability needs to be top-notch. Spend a significant amount of time finding out who you are about to call and note down what you’re about to say. Unless you’re friendly and genuine, there’s a huge possibility of losing clients.
Here’s a lovely staffing business development example—
Suppose you’re calling person X, who runs a company ABC. It would be more than bland if you just ask if they require more talent. So instead, a successful agency recruiter would point out how ABC has similarities with your company’s values and goals, past and recent hires, latest products and services, etc. But, of course, with research comes a massive responsibility of absolutely owning what you’re saying to your prospective clients.
Before a client trusts you and decides to outsource their hiring needs, there’s a possibility that they’ll be asking for testimonials or case studies or might even look it up on their own. Show off your success with real examples of how you’ve been helping Client X grow their company and achieve their business goals in less than 3 months or even reduce the employee turnover rate for Client Z by 40% and more. Sharing such case studies will also help improve your employer’s brand to a great extent.
Read more: Recruit CRM helped South Africa-based RPO firm slay their recruiting game.
6. Train New Recruiters
If you’re a rookie, picking up that phone to make your first call can be more than daunting. Unless you’ve got the feel of your new role, you can’t simply jump in and manage to slay the game. You’ve got to understand more about the recruiting market, the clients you’ve been presently working with, and the type of clients you’re targeting for the future.
It takes a lot of patience and practice to be a good recruiter. As the entire landscape keeps changing with time, it’s important to be continually trained by the senior members of your agency to ensure you provide the best results.
Read more: 6 recruiting lessons from the world’s successful recruiting leaders.
7. Your Sales Process Should Be Automated & Optimised Wherever Possible
Your sales team needs to make sure that the sales pitches they’re creating for their clients and candidates are resonating with them. Sign up for a good recruitment CRM to help your agency optimize its sales process.
For instance, the stage feature in the Recruit CRM system lets you customize your sales pipeline. You can set up your own stages and add multiple stages from the sales pipeline. However, only admins in the account will have permission to customize such fields.
Whether you’re looking for new candidates or clients, prepare meaningful presentations and have them ready to go. An excellent recruitment business development strategy would be to not work with too many clients or candidates at once. Be very clear about the services you’re providing.
8. Take Help Of Technology
To stay ahead of the competition, use the latest recruitment technology. Just like automating a significant part of the sales process is necessary, recruitment automation can also help save time and resources.
Usage of a cutting-edge Applicant Tracking System, CRM software, interview scheduling software and more can help you analyse results and take communication to the next level.
Book a demo with Recruit CRM today and understand how it can completely transform your recruitment agency.
9. Analyse Your Results
Start by tracking your cold calls, business meetings, warm calls and client onboardings. The more you analyse what you’re doing presently, the better you can be in the future. Always remember that data speaks for itself. Thus, focus on doing lots and lots of analysis and research. Learn from experienced recruiters around you and get yourself signed up for a software that lets you measure every bit of your business with high-level reports.
Recruit CRM offers 5 kinds of reports that lets your team get a better insight into your performance and how your business is operating. The 5 reports are as follows–
- Team KPI report: Measure how your teams are performing. Choose your own KPIs for instance— candidates added, emails sent, jobs added, candidates in different stages of the hiring cycle, payments received and so on. For Team KPIs we generate a quick chart with all your data in it that you can easily export via a CSV file.
- Job statistics report: This is very similar to that of the client performance report mentioned below but the only difference is here you can specialise that for specific jobs. For instance— if you’re hiring for the role of a store manager for IKEA, you can take the role of “store manager in IKEA Atlanta” and run a report on just that.
- Candidate lifecycle report: Check which candidate is in which stage of your hiring pipeline.
- Client performance report: Measure how many candidates you’ve sent to your clients, how many have been interviewed or selected, the amount of money they’ve given you, the number of invoices you’ve raised and more.
- Deals status report: Check whether your deals are open, in progress, or lost via this report. Select a date range and our system generates a report of the status of your deals.
10. Be a Pro in Building Relationships
One of the best ideas on business development for recruitment firms would be building relationships and managing your employer brand.
Apart from sharing with your clients how you’ve transformed companies by supplying quality candidates, tell them how your staffing firm will benefit them in the future. Earn their trust, follow up with them via a combination of calls and emails to give them a clear picture of how you’re working and what you can do to help them in terms of recruitment, develop an ongoing marketing plan that will help your agency stand out from the rest.
Further resources: 8 business development strategies for new recruitment firms
Let us know in the comments below what are some of the business development strategies you’re sticking to nowadays?
