Making the decision to leave the security of agency employment and starting your own business is a tough call, especially with increasing competition and advancements in the recruitment industry; starting your own recruitment business can seem unfathomable, but with the right skills, knowledge, and spirit—a talented recruiter can start their agency.
Recruitment agencies don’t just source and contact candidates for their clients. They also aim to provide better career choices for candidates. With the world opening up to post-pandemic practices, it has become more important than ever to help people and companies fill positions to continue operations and ensure business survival and long-term success. The pandemic saw a massive rise in remote work practices, showing us the potential of remote businesses. As a result, many businesses have entirely shifted to working remotely. These changes that are gradually taking place across the workforce are affecting new and coming businesses.
If you’re a recruiter who wants to take the leap and start a recruiting business, consider these eight tips!
Table of Contents
1. Identify/Define Your Niche
When starting a recruitment business (or any other business), the initial step should be identifying what you want to specialize in, the services you want to provide, your target audience, and even your geographical location. Specialist agencies that find a niche and provide expertise within it tend to do better. Ensure that you have a strong level of expertise and a vast network in your niche; otherwise, it’ll become difficult in establishing yourself within your field, and you’ll face obstacles in building relationships with clients and candidates.
To identify what you want to specialize in, identify any gaps in the target market and develop a service that addresses these services. If you can provide a solution for a core business challenge for an audience, you’ll be in a prime position to thrive in your business.
To determine what kind of service you want to specialize in, examine your network and the knowledge and level of experience you have—then choose a market to provide your service.
2. Consider A Recruitment Model
As mentioned previously, another crucial factor for any recruitment business is considering the type of recruiting strategy you want to opt for. To give you a better idea, here are four different types of recruitment models you can consider:
- Contingent Search: Contingency search is a performance-based model. The agency gets paid when an employer makes a hire of your candidate. Clients can pay the fee in several ways, but it is typically based on a percentage of the salary.
- Retained Search: This model requires employer clients to pay a fee to get a dedicated effort to fill their open positions exclusively with an organization. This model is often used to fill senior positions with a need for immediacy.
- Contained Search: Contained search is a hybrid of retained and contingent search services, which ends up being more time and cost-effective. The employer pays a partial non-refundable fee to get a dedicated team to work exclusively on priority for a position.
- Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO): This is a model where an organization assigns recruitment functions to a third-party recruitment provider. An RPO vendor can act as an extension of an organization’s recruitment functioning, providing a holistic hiring solution. An RPO provider will deliver the necessary staff, technology, and methodology to fulfil the recruitment requirements.
Other than these models, you can consider several other types of agencies for your business models, such as headhunting agencies and staffing agencies.
3. Assess Your Finances
Starting any business requires a good amount of financial backup, as starting a business can involve risks in starting your own business. Before making any decision about your business, make sure that you assess your financial condition. Consider the minimum income you require, as well as what the ideal income might look like in the future, and most importantly, what you require to build and sustain your business. Consider costs like office equipment, software and staff.
To plan and manage effectively, create a budget spreadsheet or a list and seek professional financial advice if needed.
Conventionally, you’ll require enough cash reserves to support your new business for 18 months without revenue. In addition, the reason behind the failure of many new businesses is due to undercapitalization. Therefore, before embarking on this new venture, determine the source(s) of money for investment, whether it’s personal savings, loans or conventional financing.
4. Invest In Technology
Whether your business is large or small, recruiting technology has become an indispensable part of recruitment. Recruitment has drastically evolved with the onset of technology and AI throughout the years, making recruiters’ lives so much easier! Recruiting technology significantly lightens the load of recruiting agencies. Instead of manually sorting out piles of papers, spreadsheets, emails and applications, the right software will manage all the tedious tasks and make the job much more manageable.
Recruiters can incorporate technology through recruiting software like Applicant Tracking Systems, which allow organizations to automate daily recruitment tasks and workflow. Applicant tracking systems increase productivity, accelerate time-to-fill, reduces cost-per-hire and helps build a robust candidate pipeline.
Applicant tracking systems have become such an indispensable part of recruiting that 68% of recruiting professionals claim that the best way to improve recruiting performance over the next five years is by investing in new recruiting technology.
Also, research by Capterra has shown that 75% of recruiters use applicant tracking software.
An Applicant Tracking System is one of the most crucial technological investments you can make for starting a recruiting business. It can help streamline your work and improve the quality of your work through standardization and automation.
5. Investing In A Robust Team
Building and sustaining a successful recruitment business starts with investing in skilled people invested in your business. As an up and coming business, it’s crucial to invest in the right people who form your team because their skills and work ethic will take your business to higher levels. With the right people on board, it will tie your entire recruitment system, and you’ll reap the rewards faster than ever. Investing in a skilled and robust team will also help build more credibility for your business, which will build your reputation in the industry. Remember, it is your team that defines your work ethics and credibility! Therefore, ensure that you are investing in the right individuals to reap the best results.
6. Build An Online Presence
With the onset of social media, social recruiting—the use of social media platforms for recruitment has been on the rise for many recruitment firms. More than 90% of recruiters today use social media to identify and recruit ideal candidates. Not only does social media work as an excellent tool for identifying and recruiting candidates, but it’s also essential for building your business! Building an online presence has become a vital marketing strategy for many businesses—especially for recruitment agencies. An online presence for your recruitment business is a great way to promote your employer brand and make yourself stand out from the competition.
Organizations are turning their focus to online employer branding to manage their online perception by clients and candidates and how that perception affects recruiting, hiring, retention, and more.
Building an online presence isn’t just an effective marketing or employer branding strategy, but it has also become a vital tool for recruiters today to engage with the new generation of job seekers.
In essence, don’t miss out on the wealth of opportunities the internet brings by establishing your online presence!
7. Leverage A Unique Sourcing Strategy
As a recruiter, identifying strategies to source candidates can become overwhelming, especially with evolving recruitment trends and tactics in this competitive world. Therefore, it’s vital to get crafty with your sourcing strategy for your recruitment agency to attract clients. When you’re just starting your recruitment business, you won’t see progress unless you build up your specialization area. If you are attempting to start in a general niche, then it might not be able to survive as you will face many competitors who are much more prominent than your agency. Do some in-depth research to determine which areas do not have many competitors around you and where your expertise and experience lies.
8. Set Plans & Goals
Last but not least, if you want to go big, a clear set of goals and a plan is key to starting a business! A successful recruitment business not only counts on experiences and a massive amount of candidates but also a clear set of business goals and plans. Set up short and long-term goals to keep yourself and your employees inspired and motivated. For example, you could aim to increase clients by 10% in 3 months. Maybe you’d like to expand your service area within the following year.
To keep track of these goals, creating and tracking metrics like KPIs can help you track progress and pinpoint any obstacles to achieve more. After all, numbers and statistics are essential to any long-term business!
Essentially, once you have these pointers taken care of and everything on your plate, it’s time to start your own recruitment business!
About Carson Derrow
