Hiring and retaining good recruiters has been a real challenge since the pandemic. How can you expect to grow your recruitment business when you don’t have the top billers you need behind you?
The good news is, growing your agency doesn’t always have to involve hiring the best 360 recruiters on the market. There are other ways you can grow – here’s what they are:
If you’re concerned that outsourcing might lower the quality of your service, this should never be an issue if you’re strategic about it. It’s also worth knowing that outsourcing options have greatly improved in the last decade or so.
The beauty of outsourcing is that there’s no commitment so you can be strategic and outsource based on the specific needs of your business at that particular time.
Here are a few areas you could outsource strategically:
If your recruiters are wasting precious recruitment time on trying to craft the perfect job ads or posting it across various channels to get the best reach, you need support from a marketer, not another recruiter.
Hiring an experienced Recruitment Marketer who can manage role communication will free up your recruiters’ time to focus on recruitment. While it’s true that recruitment is marketing in a lot of ways, it’s unlikely anyone in your team got into recruitment because they’re a great writer or a designer, so why burden them with marketing tasks that don’t play to their strengths?
The important thing is to hire an experienced marketer in this situation, not a junior. You need someone who can own and drive all their own projects without needing any support from you and your team.
Download: Recruitment Marketer Job Description Template
So in this set-up your clients can post their own job ads, but you charge them for access to your available talent. To make this work, you’d just need your recruiters to focus on pulling in a steady stream of clients to keep the model profitable.
With this in mind, you could consider hiring a 180 BD-focussed recruiter to do this job rather than a 360 recruiter, which might make hiring a bit easier right now.
If you’re not familiar with how a recruitment franchise model works, you essentially have a number of solo recruiters working under your brand name and gaining access to your database. Rather than pay these solo recruiters a salary, you pay them a share of the deal value (say, 60% for example).
Recruitment franchises work similarly to how a lot of hairdressers operate – self-employed stylists hire a chair in a salon to gain access to the client database and brand promotion. The only difference is that the solo recruiter doesn’t pay any monthly rental to you, but you do take a cut of the placements they make in return for using your brand name and database to win business.
Split-fee partnerships have been around for decades but a lot of agencies still shy from the idea of sharing roles with their competitors - which is understandable. But what’s better – losing business because you can't keep up with workload or partnering up with another agency to get the job done for a share of the fee?
You could also consider teaming up with another agency to pitch for larger recruitment contracts if you know you’re the right agency for the project but the tender stipulates you need a certain number of recruiters to qualify for a retainer. Get just one big contract under your belt and the rest will snowball!
Download the eBook below for more information on the different recruitment agency business models that will help you grow in any job market.