Recruitment agencies, sometimes called staffing firms, work with companies to find a suitable candidates for the open positions within the company.
They aim to hire the best talent for their clients within a limited time and budget.
The primary responsibilities of a recruitment agency are:
- Identifying their clients’ needs to create an ideal candidate persona
- Launching a strategic marketing campaign
- Writing a compelling job description to attract active candidates
- Sourcing passive candidates within and out of their talent pool
- Assessing applicants and interviewing them
- Building an engagement platform between clients and candidates
- Maintaining a healthy network
- Streamlining the onboarding process, etc.
Recruitment agencies are often well equipped with technologies to get the most out of their investments.
Why You Should Run Your Own Recruitment Business?
New businesses are booming every day, and each of them requires employees to operate smoothly.
But recruiting a perfect employee is not an easy task. Sometimes, employers don’t have enough experience in recruiting, and even if they have, they often lack the resources to do so.
Here comes the need for recruitment agencies that can understand their needs and simplify the hiring process.
It shows that the recruitment business will always be in demand no matter what, which adds to the foremost reason for starting this business.
Four other reasons to start your “own” recruitment business are:
- You can be your boss and have complete control over your time.
- If you have worked as a recruiter earlier, you know the best practices and mistakes agencies make. You can avoid them.
- You can make a profit by taking more innovative and affordable approaches. It helps build an image in the market pretty quickly.
- You can try your hands in a niche-specific industry and make a big out of it.
6 Steps to Run a Successful Recruitment Business
1. Master the Basics First
You have already started your recruitment business, but here are a few things you need to know if you don’t know already:
- Qualifications: To be successful in your recruitment business, you must have proper certification. Only a bachelor’s degree is required to get started. It is even better to have expertise in your recruiting niche.
Apart from educational qualifications, you must have some basic soft skills, like:- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
- Sales and negotiation skills
- Time management and multitasking abilities
- Problem-solving and goal-oriented mindset
- Leadership qualities, etc.
- Valid Licenses: Ensure that you have all the valid licenses you need related to the niche you are supplying the workforce for. It will save you from unnecessary penalties and other inconveniences.
- Insurance: No business is safe from risks, and the same goes for recruitment agencies. You must have the following insurances for your business:
- Professional Indemnity Insurance
- Public Liability Insurance
- Employers Liability Insurance
- These three types of insurance are the must-haves for any recruitment business.
- Price: To ensure competitiveness and profitability, you must set a price for your recruitment services. You must consider the following things before determining the pricing:
- Demographic location of your business
- Your experience in the recruitment field
- Quality of your service
- How quickly can you provide the service?
- Level of competition in your niche
- The fee structure for your client will keep on changing according to the position you are hiring for, urgency for hiring, and ease of sourcing.
Depending on your contract, you can charge two types of fees from your client:- Temporary Fees: It is associated with hiring temporary candidates for a particular position. The fees range from 10% to 25% of the candidates’ yearly salary.
- Permanent Fees: It is charged when a client is looking to fill a permanent contract (for at least a year) and ranges from 17.5% to 25% of salary.
2. Build a Solid Business Plan
After thoroughly analyzing your goals and needs, you must create a business plan to keep yourself focused and efficient.
You must ponder upon the following aspects of the business while creating a plan:
- Your business description or tagline: It helps you describe the core purpose or the most critical aspect of your business.
- Overview of the market and your competition: It will help you determine your business’s “unique” factor.
- Operation and Management Plan: Here, you will list out the primary operations of your business, how they will be managed, and by whom.
- Your competitive factor: If you want your business to stand out in the market, you must describe your services like a pro. Ask yourself what you can provide your clients better than your competitors.
- Marketing Strategy: This will help you map the plan to cater client’s attention. You must be clear about your budget, distribution model, promoting strategies, channels to target, etc.
- Your financial capability: If you have just started your recruitment business, you must be very precise about your revenue and expenses. You will need funding to meet your regular obligations.
- Your Executive summary: This point covers the entire business plan. You must list your business’s strengths, loopholes, values, etc., and convey the same to your team.
3. Build a Reliable Network
Recruitment is people’s business, and networking can be your most potent weapon for success in this field.
Whether you network online or offline, it can benefit your business dramatically, from business expansion to career growth, if done strategically.
Here are a few tips for recruiters to network like a pro:
- Hosting your own event can give you a reason to approach influential people you find difficult otherwise.
- Improve your online visibility on social media. Engage with your followers as they can be your ideal candidate in the future.
- Make your profile compelling.
- Follow up with people after the event ends. It will ensure your place in their contact list.
- Join online forums and participate actively.
- Attend webinars, non-recruitment-related events, etc., and ensure you reach out to the people you are interested in networking with. Don’t expect them to come to you.
4. Stay up to Date with Industry’s Latest Laws and Regulations
It is essential for you to stay updated with the laws or guidelines issued related to your business.
To protect your business, you must be thorough with legal documents, tax regulations, and legislation.
You can also hire an expert to provide guidance and keep track of legal contracts and updates.
5. Invest in Technology
Investing in the right technology can be the best step toward improving the productivity of your working model.
With an AI-proctored recruitment software, you and your team can rest from all the menial tasks and focus on something more critical like candidate engagement and experience, networking, etc.
You must invest in an Applicant Tracking System that can be integrated with multiple other tools to streamline your hiring process.
Other tools you can invest in are a resume parser to screen bulk resumes in minutes, video interviewing tools to access candidates without any bias, sales tools to convert leads, automated schedulers, etc.
These tools smoothen your work process and enhance the candidate experience, especially during high-volume recruiting.
The only advice is to start investing in technology as early as possible and be wise while choosing the right tool for your business.
6. Launch a Recruitment Marketing Campaign
You can find hundreds of ways on the internet to market your recruitment business successfully. Here are four pointers that we feel are the most important ones:
- Keep your website updated: A website is the most crucial tool for any business; still, many agencies underestimate its worth.
You must actively promote and invest in your website. Keep your career page updated, so the visitors keep coming to the site for the information.
You must also consider your website’s design, architecture, and loading speed to attract potential candidates. - Start Blogging: Blogging is the best way to provide value to your audience. Dedicating time and energy to creating a blog with valuable content pays off really well.
You must utilize SEO to rank your blog higher in the google search engine. It will help you attract a lot of new candidates.
You must find ways to turn your site visitor’s into subscribers. You can then send newsletters to them, updating them about upcoming events, new blogs, etc. - Social Media: Social media can be your best friend while networking and building a diverse talent pool. You can interact with global clients and candidates through social media, which will help you expand your business.
- Email marketing: Customizing regular emails professionally and scheduling them for prospective clients and candidates can help you maintain contact with them.
Email marketing is the best way to keep your existing talent pool engaged.
On a Final Note
Running a recruitment business can be lucrative if done correctly. Before setting up your staffing business, you must have already looked into its pros and cons, like how it gives you flexibility and let you be your own boss but at the same time increases your workload by multiple folds.
It is evident that your business is not going to blow up quickly. It will take time, so you must be patient and consistent with your efforts to pay off.
Remember that your team is your biggest asset. Make sure you onboard skilled members with the same vision in mind. With the right members by your side and these six-pointers in the article above, you are good to go.
