How to grow a recruitment agency by becoming more profitable

Franck Fogliaresi

When looking for ways to grow their company, business leaders will look for ways to expand without over stretching resources. Increasing headcount of a company’s workforce is rarely the solution that is sought after as labor costs can be responsible for up to 70% of a company’s expenses. Most will prioritise finding clever, strategic tech solutions to increase growth rate.

Sales have more than doubled within the staffing and recruiting industry since 2009. If you haven’t seen this upward trend in your business, read on to find out how you can achieve this growth.

Achieving business growth in a recruitment agency

BusinessDictionary.com defines business growth as “The process of improving some measure of an enterprise’s success. Business growth is achieved by improving the top line or revenue of the business through product sales or service income, or by increasing the bottom line or profitability of the operation through cost reductions.”

In other words, you must do one or all of the following:

  • Increase revenue
  • Improve market share
  • Reduce costs

In short, to achieve significant growth you need to increase your sales with the same resources or perhaps even less. This can

in a number of ways, by better promoting your agency and by improving processes with technology, or more specifically, automation.

How to promote a recruitment agency

In order to grow your recruitment agency, you need to reach a bigger client base. As your primary source of revenue, it should comprise of your ideal clients – the ones who will not only hire your agency, but willingly spread the word about it. They’ll recommend and refer your recruitment agency because:

  1. They saw your ad, blog, or social media post
  2. They’ve related to it
  3. They’ve clicked to learn more about your services
  4. They’ve hired your services
  5. And finally, they loved your services

But before they can do it, you first need to spread the word yourself. Be sure to:

Market for both companies and candidates. Remember that you’re “selling” your recruitment agency for both groups. Candidates should trust you’ll get their resume in front of the best companies, and companies should trust you’ll bring them top talent.

Do your research. Spending thousands of dollars on PPC ads and boosting social media posts is useless if they don’t reflect what your audience needs to see. Who is your audience, and what are they looking for in a recruitment agency? As an example: if they’re looking for years of experience, highlight that in your ad campaigns.

Create authoritative content. People will have questions about your services. If you can answer them with clarity and authority, you’ll have an edge over other recruitment agencies. You can differentiate your business by creating ultimate guides (like this one) backed by industry-specific data and powerful quotes.

How to grow a recruitment agency with automation

Imagine if you could double or even triple the output of each recruiter on your team while keeping a manageable workload and increasing workplace satisfaction?

How can technology increase revenue for recruitment agencies?

In Bullhorn’s 2019 Recruitment Trends, which surveyed over 900 staffing & recruitment professionals, 57% claimed that they would be spending more on technology to achieve growth. Artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, and data analytics are some of the technological solutions that are bringing improvements to the recruitment process in many firms. So, how can these types of technology increase the bottomline and generate growth?

Process Automation in recruitment

The HR and recruiting industries are lagging behind when it comes to digital transformation compared to other industries. This is unfortunate as recruiting firms deal with many manual administrative tasks that take up significant time across all verticals. Automating these processes allows recruiters to spend more time on tasks that will directly impact targets.

Optimising data for analytics

A wealth of data passes through recruiting firms and HR departments. However, often this fails to be used in any actionable way. Investing in solutions to clean, extract, and store useful data can help business leaders to recognise important trends, predict future scenarios and identify successful revenue opportunities. For example, transforming static CV data and interrogating a library of this data can allow firms to identify and predict skill and talent trends to inform pipeline growth.

AI-assisted decision making

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to help recruiters make decisions where sometimes human error may get in the way. When selecting candidates for shortlisting, recruiters must be hyper-aware of not choosing based on subconscious biases. Unfortunately, the ‘subconscious’ nature of such biases make this difficult to avoid, particularly under time-pressure. AI solutions can be used to help remove bias from the selection process and ensure that recruiters don’t overlook any key skills hidden in the body of a CV. For example, AI can be used to reformat candidates’ CVs into a standardised format, removing any gender-related words, and highlighting key skills and competencies in a prominent position. This will ensure a better result for both the candidate and client, increasing the chances of positive referrals.

Which technology is best for recruitment agencies?

Deciding to purchase a tech solution for your business can be stressful. One way to alleviate any fears is to make sure your solution can fit easily into your business. Have an open and honest conversation with your stakeholders and consider a few key points:

Can the solution fit easily in with your current process?
Is there significant training or integration costs involved?
Is it easy to use?
Will you have access to customer support?
Will it save you time?

Most of all, if you can find a tech partner who is supportive and understands the needs of the recruitment industry, you’re onto a winner. Ultimately, automation technology is helping recruitment agencies to ramp up sales, eliminate heavy manual workloads, and speed up and improve the recruitment process.

How to grow your recruitment agency using Allsorter

There’s no profitability without agility. A profitable recruitment agency empowers its recruiters by speeding up the screening process while improving work quality.

With Allsorter, you can streamline the busywork of reformatting each candidates’ resume, cutting the whole process down to 5-10 minutes. It also dismisses the need for draining copy-and-pasting jobs, drastically reducing human error.

Our tool is a win-win-win: for your agency, for your clients, and for your candidates. Wow them all with first-rate CVs that perfectly represent your branding and your applicants’ competitive advantages.

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