It’s getting increasingly difficult to stand out from your competitors when trying to generate new business for your recruitment agency. And whilst networking, prospect emailing and warm calling still bring us great results – did you know you can easily drum up new business leads just by performing a few tricks with your recruitment software?
Here are three ways you can start using your CRM to generate new business leads for your recruitment agency:
1. By keeping your data up to date
Keeping your recruitment database up to date isn’t just good practice (and a legal obligation under GDPR) it’s great for flagging up new business opportunities too. There’s huge placement potential lurking in every candidate database – or better still, in your talent pools if you have them set up – by simply matching your candidates to appropriate companies.
If you’re communicating well with your clients, your recruitment database will be a valuable resource full of information regarding the kinds of roles they normally recruit for and the types of candidates they would consider - based on how they’ve hired in the past.
This makes it much easier to make a match with your existing candidate network: If your CRM allows you to perform a reverse search on candidates and companies, you can quickly identify a potential match and jump on the opportunity before your competitors do.
2. By sending speculative candidate CVs
There are situations where sending CVs on spec to a new client can work in your favour – particularly if the candidates are extremely high quality and most importantly, relevant to their needs. But it’s easy to go wrong with this technique, and if you don’t get it right, you risk souring the relationship before it’s even begun!
Recruitment software can make the process of CV speccing much more effective, less time consuming, and most importantly, keeps it GDPR compliant. Any good software will include a candidate portal, where candidates must make clear their contact preferences and how they’d like their data to be shared. This means you’ll only ever send CVs to your clients in situations where the candidate has explicitly authorised that their data is shared with third parties.
Sending your clients CVs in a scattergun approach is only going to annoy prospects and devalue your reputation. But if you use your software to pull out highly relevant candidates who are keen to have their details shared with your clients, this will give the impression that you only deal with the best quality of candidates and clients will be keen to tap further into your network.
Find out how Firefish is approaching GDPR for our users.
3. By automating triggers
Even those recruiters who know their database inside out can’t keep tabs of everything going on within their candidate networks. But by setting up triggers within your recruitment software, you can ensure no opportunity for new business falls through the cracks.
Set up talent pools to flag up candidates who have reached a particular milestone in their careers (for example, if the candidate works in the legal sector, this trigger could be when they reach a certain number of years certified - see example below) and get in touch to let them know how much they’re worth on the market now that they’ve reached that milestone.
Automation is excellent for flagging new business opportunities in real-time. You can set up talent pools and jobs searches to continuously flag up matches as soon as a new candidates comes into your database, or if a candidate updates their details in the candidate portal, so they can be matched in real-time to new opportunities.
If you're interested to know a bit more about how Firefish can help you generate new business (and much more!), click below to book a chat and a member of our team will be in touch.
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