It’s natural to worry when business gets quiet, but at times like this, it’s important to try and stay positive: Slower periods can be valuable in that they give your agency the time and space to work on projects that will make the business leaner and more efficient when business picks back up again.
Successful businesses know the value of high-quality downtime (yes, it really is a thing!) – you just need to be proactive and creative with the time you do have so you make the most of it.
So what can you be doing to capitalise on downtime at your recruitment agency?
Perform a recruitment website audit
Your website is your recruitment agency’s shop window; it’s what sells your business to the world and tells your clients and candidates “this is who we are”. But how much time attention do you really give your website?
Use any down time you have to take a close look at what’s working and what areas needs some work. To do this, take a look at your recruitment software analytics, your Google Analytics account (this eBook has everything you need to know about using GA in recruitment) and try using a heat-mapping software tool (we use Hotjar) to learn more about how people use your website and what you can do to make your website journeys more effective.
If you don’t have anyone managing your website’s SEO, this is the time to learn about how you can optimise your website to make your brand more visible to the right people online – and this SEO eBook will help you with that too.
If you don’t have a Google Search Console account hooked up yet, this is a good (and free!) way to identify any small website fixes you can make that will instantly improve your search engine ranking.
Do a database clean-up
It’s been almost two years since GDPR came into effect – how is your database looking now? Quieter periods are the perfect time to give your data a good spring clean so that when the market starts to pick back up again, you’re ready to go.
Having a clean and engaged database will make your business (and your recruiters!) more productive and the job of making placements a whole lot easier. Getting hold of candidates during the day is likely to get easier in the coming weeks and months, so use this time to get to know your best candidates and get your candidate data up to date.
Create SOPs and Playbooks
Do you have Standard Operating Procedures in place for your recruitment business? If not, you could be using downtime to create detailed SOPs with clear step-by-step instructions on how to do certain tasks that are important to business but only get done every now and again.
For example, do you have an official recruitment compliance process in place? This eBook will show you how to review your current processes, ensure they’re compliant and roll out a new process that will improve candidate experience and make your business leaner.
It’s a good time to also map out what processes currently look like at your agency and put together a playbook that reflects this. That way, you can be sure that any recruiter working for you will be following your company procedures (including any new recruiters joining your team) and your recruiters can refer back to the playbook for guidance whenever they need it.
Test and work new technology into your business
Remember all those interesting new bits of technology for leaner business you keep hearing about but haven’t had the time to test out? Well, now’s the time!
For a leaner recruitment process and seamless collaboration between teams inside and out of the office, we’d suggest trying out the following:
- For online meetings - Zoom
- For internal communication and file-sharing - Microsoft Teams (if you have outlook 365), Google Hangouts (if you use Gmail) or Slack.
- For project/account management – Trello.
- For video outreach – Soapbox.
- As a recruitment marketing and CRM software that can be accessed anytime, anywhere, it makes sense to mention Firefish Software too! We integrate with a whole host of trusted recruitment tools to streamline your recruitment process – you can learn more about them on our integrations page.
Work on your branding
We all know recruitment is a busy job, and unfortunately this means areas like business branding and marketing are consistently put on the back burner as a task you’ll get round to ‘tomorrow’. But ensuring you have a powerful message online is key to standing out when business picks back up again.
Use any downtime to have a think about things like your branding style guide (do you have one?) and work on a longer-term marketing plan. The eBook below has everything you need to get started with creating a solid marketing plan for your agency – and we’ve even thrown in a marketing plan template for you to use too.
