1. Treat your agency like you treat your clients
The biggest blocker to growth for recruitment agencies is retaining and attracting their own talent. Which sounds absurd for an industry whose job it is to attract and retain talent, but many agencies fail to give it the same attention when it comes to internal sourcing.
If you want to grow your recruitment business it is imperative that you focus on your own talent attraction and retention strategies encompassing everything from employer branding to employee engagement. In the current climate upholding your culture is vital to maintain team collaboration and wellbeing.
It is also important to ensure you hire talent based on their fit with the company and not just because of their track record and CV. Consider how they will assimilate your company culture and the role they could play in helping your recruitment business to grow, not just for the here and now to plug a gap.
Growing a recruitment agency requires different skillsets and can be very different from those needed to sustain or maintain a business. However, it's important to realise it's not a race. Recruitment has traditionally made the mistake of promoting individuals based on billing history rather than leadership aptitude, and taking a look at your management team will tell you a lot about your agency's prospects and ability to perform over the next few years.
Your senior teams should be made up of a diverse group of people, including different genders, ethnicities, abilities and cultural backgrounds, but also a group of people who are interested in management and furthering their leadership careers.
2. Lay the right foundations
Big billers and recruitment consultants are key to any agency’s success, but they don’t work in isolation and are supported by back-office employees that are able to turn placements into hard cash. The best recruiters are the ones who are managing client relationships and engaging candidates, not managing data entry and other time-heavy processes. Where your growing agency will succeed is by letting your consultants build the relationships and the foundations - technology, process and talent - are implemented around them so you are highly efficient.
The right infrastructure backed by robust technology that can support an influx in placements, payroll and contracts as you grow is critical. A SaaS recruitment CRM will be able to scale with you so that it’s always supporting your journey and is constantly evolving to reflect every new legislative change such as the introduction of IR35.
Learn more about our best-in-class SaaS CRM that scales as you grow and demand increase. Book a discovery call to find out how Access Recruitment can help you sustain, grow and thrive.
To be able to seamlessly ramp your business, it is wise to plan ahead and make bigger bets. How you assess and deploy technology is incredibly important.
Cash is king and that hasn’t changed, and nor will it. Growth of any kind takes an investment in the first place, and one way or another, whether it’s in consultant’s time, or resources, it will take cash to start your business growth. Ensure you have enough liquid cash to support this and sustain your business.
3. Outsourcing
There are huge benefits to outsourcing some of your functions and when you’re trying to scale up it’s often a more cost-effective option. Learn more about our dynamic pay and bill services and how they can add further efficiencies to your business.
It also means you get to focus on your team and billings, without having to be an HR manager, lawyer and marketing professional all in one.
4. Stay in your lane
Pick a niche for your recruitment agency and stay in it. The temptation to take on all kinds of roles your clients throw at you will be high, but concentrating your efforts on your specialist sector and training your teams in those niches will mean that you become true specialists and it will pay off. This thinking, as discussed in our webinar "Scale-Up or Stand Still" discusses barriers to growth and why having a plan aligns neatly with the niche you're following.
When the time is right to enter new markets stop and strategically plan the next steps – from market analysis to determine demand, your website, candidate attraction, and client acquisition. Make sure this is not a drain on the business reducing your focus away from what you are really good at.
Read more about how new recruiters can get off the ground quickly and successfully.
5. Use the right tech
As you grow, you’ll need to make sure you have the right systems in place. Picking a system that is intuitive to use actually becomes a competitive advantage for growing a recruitment agency. For instance, a candidate-attracting website should ideally be fully integrated with your recruitment CRM. Discover how a Volcanic website can attract candidates, engage clients and builds your digital brand. And if you operate in high compliance markets, having the right screening software is imperative for a faster candidate turnaround.
In our webinar, "Scale-Up or Stand-Still", Dave Pye from Jump Advisory, and Harry Whysall and Tom Webster of Access Recruitment explain the difference intuitive, dynamic tech can make to a scaling agency - and when the right time is to implement it.
Book a free demonstration on how Volcanic's website integrates with Access Recruitment's CRM and other software in the market.