When you launch a new recruitment agency (or the pipeline dries up), you have to work twice as hard to win new business. Fortunately, we’ve been through it all and today, we’re here to share the top 5+ business development strategies for recruitment.
Here’s how to get from point A to point B(usiness)!
1. How to Compete with Your Recruiting Competitors Using Business Development Strategies
Prospective clients keep getting calls and emails from your recruiting competitors, but are you the one agency that can give them results?
You can’t promise results, but you can go the extra mile to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Use an account-based business development strategy for recruitment. Create a list of prospects who have:
- The budget
- The authority
- The need for your service
For example, you wouldn’t target an early-stage startup that hasn’t yet received funding. But you would target a Series B startup that’s rapidly expanding and needs help from expert recruiters.
Similarly, hirings & firings in a mid-market company could be a call for recruitment help.
Don’t stop at LinkedIn Recruiter. If you’re developing your recruitment business, you need the Sales Navigator, too.
Source: MarTech
Then, network with the key stakeholders in the target companies. You won’t be able to scale this approach as your agency grows, but in the beginning, be prepared to deeply understand the prospect’s challenges and devise ways to resolve them.
Take it one step further by selecting the ideal candidates from your own pipeline. When you understand the client’s challenges, whip out the right resume with the help of Allsorter.
2. Essential Business Development Tip for New Recruiters: Build a Brand
Every new business struggles with asserting legitimacy, which is where recruitment branding helps.
When a prospect receives your email, you want them to feel like they’re in the hands of an expert. They’ll judge you by more than just the cold email content:
- Appear on social media with insightful advice and opinions. When recruiting prospects look you up on LinkedIn, make sure your content speaks to their challenges.
- Create relevant sales collateral. Which companies have you helped in the past? How have you improved their hiring metrics? If you’re new, case studies might be hard to come by, but you can create specific sales collateral targeting your niche—for example, a whitepaper about specific fintech recruitment challenges.
- Build in public. Explain the steps in your recruiting process, how you communicate with clients, and how you improve the candidate experience. Give your recruiting business development prospects a taste of what it’s like to work with you.
- Brand everything. Every resume you send to prospects and clients needs to be branded and feel like your agency. If you’re too busy thinking about recruitment business development strategies, speed up resume formatting with Allsorter.
- Incentivise referrals and recommendations. Clients talk, and there’s nothing like word of mouth. Request recommendations on LinkedIn and tap into your previous clients to generate referrals with a good referral programme.
3. Go into Action During Your Warm Call
Don’t say you’ll follow up with an email. If a prospect is qualified and interested, make the next step right in the call:
- Discuss ideal candidate profiles
- Understand their previous recruitment experiences
- Establish expectations
Everyone needs to shorten their time to hire. Prove you’re uniquely qualified to find the ideal candidate fast by gathering the necessary information and offering expert suggestions for moving forward with the process.
Expert Business Development Tip for New Recruiters
Try to gather information about the prospect’s recruitment blockers and address them in the call. Highly-valuable prospect? Give them a few candidate examples from your ATS.
Hit the ground faster with Allsorter – instead of scrambling to get the right resumes, you’ll have them ready for the client.
Wow your ideal prospect; come to the call prepared and brand the ideal candidates’ resumes.
Allsorter
4. Business Development for Recruiters Is (Still) a Numbers Game
Remember the golden rule: keep your pipeline full.
The more targeted prospects you have, the easier it will be to expand your book of business. And once you start hopping on calls or firing off those emails, keep an eye on the metrics.
How to Use Vital Recruitment Business Development Metrics
- Sales lifecycle – How long does it take for the lead to turn into a customer
- Conversion rate – How many leads turned into customers?
- Lead generation velocity – How quickly do you generate new leads?
These metrics will show you where to speed things up and where to give them more time.
For example, a 5+ stage sales lifecycle may be too long and result in leads dropping off.
Similarly, if you generate leads quickly, but your conversion rate is nothing to write home about, you might want to improve your prospecting.
5. Keep an Eye on Industry News to Win New Recruitment Business
You don’t have to become a journalist to launch a successful recruiting business development strategy. However, it’s much easier to specialise in one industry and stay tuned to the news to find new leads.
For example, was there a recent acquisition in your target industry? Did a company receive funding?
All of these are good signals that the company requires a recruitment specialist.
Similarly, staying updated on your target industry’s events will make you better prepared for the call.
Prospects find it refreshing when someone understands their industry – or shows the willingness to accommodate its little quirks in the recruitment process.
If you can’t specialise, understand the critical recruitment challenges in the prospect’s industry. For example, if you’re targeting a SaaS company, empathise with the challenge of finding high-quality software developers and prepare a mitigation plan.
6. Personalise Your Cold Outreach
There are two things unavoidable in life: death and cold emails. If the latter is getting you anxious, remember the best practices:
- Warm up your email address first with a tool like Instantly.ai.
- Personalise your cold outreach with tools like PersistIQ to reference the client’s name, job responsibilities, and perhaps even their boss or latest industry news in your email.
- Create personalised videos with Vidyard.
If you can pick a list of highly-targeted prospects and pre-select (and anonymise) a few candidates from your ATS as a taste of what’s to come, you’ll get higher open rates.
But if that’s not an option and you need to focus on quantity, personalise. Your competitors don’t have the time for it.
Show your personality through Vidyard’s personalized videos.
Source: Vidyard
It’s Time to Land New Recruitment Clients!
Don’t get intimidated by business development! As a recruiter, you’ll drive plenty of value to your clients.
However, remember to pick the right prospects, personalise your communication, and establish your brand early on. Your competitors already have a network – you have yet to build it. Do it properly and soon enough, you’ll have clients calling you.
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