Growing your staffing agency is more than hiring recruiters and getting new clients on board: you’re also building a framework that’s scalable.”

The coronavirus pandemic has sent the whole world on a wild ride and the job market is no different. Many businesses were forced to make major staff cuts, while others switched to working remotely. As a result, there are still growing job markets, even in midst of the pandemic.

For staffing agencies, this meant a new approach – both in acquiring new clients and looking for new talent. With that in mind, this is a great time to promote and grow your staffing agency.

Here’s how you can do it with ease.

Grow your staffing agency through optimization of recruiting process

Growth often comes in spurts when you hire new people for your staffing or recruiting agency, or when you sign on new clients. While any growth is welcome, you want growth that is sustainable and scalable and for that to happen, you need to optimize your recruitment process.

It sounds complex, but it really boils down to three things for most staffing companies:

• analyzing your current recruiting process
• finding bottlenecks
• finding ways to optimize or automate processes to resolve those bottlenecks

The good news is that you can do most of this quite easily – by using the right tools.

How to use the right processes and technology to deliver benefits to clients

Every client cares about two things: filling their vacancies fast and saving money. You can help them achieve both by using the right tools and processes to ensure positions are filled quickly. This needs to be a mix of:

• using the right applicant tracking systems
• automating data entry to save time for your recruiting team
• automating parts of candidate communication
• automating the way you schedule and hold interviews
• automating the hiring pipeline updates, from job boards to the end of the process

The first part is easily solved by using a great staffing agency software like Recruiterflow.

And for the second part, this entails just listening to your recruiters. They will know exactly which processes are most time-consuming and what needs to be added or removed to enhance the candidate experience. Once you know what you want to automate, you can use the recruitment automation suite in Recruiterflow to automate large parts of your process

How to use Automation to increase an engaged talent pool

If your staffing agency has a talent pool of people who are open to looking for new jobs, the worst thing that you can do is – do nothing. Instead, you want to constantly remind them that you have openings with a client.

The best way to do so is to send them regular automated emails. Instead of getting your recruiting team or hiring manager to constantly write new emails, develop a repeatable process using your ATS & CRM platform.

In Recruiterflow, you can create multiple email sequences for this purpose. These sequences are a part of the campaign feature and they nudge candidates to take action and can be adjusted to enhance the candidate experience. 

This way, you can automate the most tedious part of hiring – communication with your talent pool. You’ll immediately know who is at which stage of the hiring process and reaching out will be a matter of seconds. While you cannot fully automate relationship building- this is as close as it gets.

Create and scale a repeatable sales process to bring in more clients and candidates

In order to grow, you should develop a repeatable and predictable sales process that helps you generate leads. You also need one more process on the flip side, for making sure candidates are happy with the roles where you end up placing them.

It starts with identifying whom you want to sell to, differentiating between the good and bad clients, growing your pipeline, and ultimately, sending the right message to people interested in your staffing services.

Here’s how to do just that and improve your sales process.

How to identify your best business

When you think about your best clients, you probably already have a good idea of which companies to list. These are businesses that:

• constantly have new openings
• have been with you for a longer period of time
• your recruiting team quickly finds candidates for
• love talking about the success that they have had with you
• have candidates that end up working for them for long periods of time
• produce a constant flow of revenue for you

Some of these metrics are quite easy to measure, such as revenue. However, the best business isn’t necessarily always the one that spends the most with your agency.

Money is always good, but in order to retain those clients and get more of them in the future, you want to focus on the long-term effects of your work.

In other words, the best companies for your agency are those where you meet their goals fast and where they are consistently happy with the services you provide.

So, besides tracking your internal metrics, you also need to create a feedback loop to ensure the long-term satisfaction of clients, with the employees that you provide for them.

How to identify your ideal clients

As mentioned in the previous section, the best business doesn’t always mean one that spends the most money with you.

Your ideal clients are the ones that are happy with the way you solve their problems and that bring repeatable business. Finding your ideal customer is the first step to acquiring more great business in the future.

Primarily, that means clients whose job openings you can fill fast. One of the biggest items in the cost of hiring is the time to hire. Ideally, you want to keep that number as low as possible.

At the same time, you want to ensure that they are happy with your services. Once you find out who they are, jot down information such as:

• the size of the company
• their industry and niche
• their location
• the positions that they most frequently fill
• the number of new positions they have per month/quarter/year
• their budget for hiring new talent
• the person in the company in charge of hiring a staffing company

Once you have all of this information, you have a measurable way of determining who your ideal clients are and you can start growing your pipeline and along with it, your agency. This process is also called building an ideal customer profile(ICP). You can read more about creating ICPs and useful ICP templates for recruiting & staffing agencies here. 

How to grow your client pipeline

You probably already have a client acquisition process in place, so before introducing anything new, make sure to analyze your current performance. This means taking a look at your:

• Ad/PPC performance
• Leads coming in from SEO
• Cold outreach/other email performance
• (Virtual) trade show ROI

Find out which channels drive the most qualified leads first. Then either optimize or completely remove those which don’t provide a consistent return on investment.

Ideally, move away from channels where you cannot predict a good ROI. Focus on channels such as PPC where you can account for every dollar spent and optimize the way you generate leads.

Moreover, launch a referral program if you already haven’t done so. This is one of the most common staffing agency methods to generate leads predictably using their existing networks.

How to use the right message to convert your leads into clients

Okay, you now know whom to target and you have a steady pipeline of leads coming your way. Now you need to change your website and overall messaging to attract that client and not any business out there. You need to start with your website and describe the specific benefits you deliver to a client or specific pains that you solve for them

• the types of candidates you hired for a similar business before the overall recruiting metrics you achieved
• 95% of Salespeople you hire achieve their quotas in the first year
• 92% of your hired people stay at the client for more than 2 years

Also, you need to have consistent messaging across all of the channels you are touching your clients and candidates. Marketing is the art of saying the same thing, again in a wide variety of different ways. You can drive home your messaging about your USP or the pain that you solve by having social proof in terms of case studies, testimonials, reviews, videos, and or copies of your ads and copy of your emails.

Remember that you want to show the two sides to a coin: the happy client and the happy candidates. You need a separate but consistent messaging strategy for both sides of your business.

Create a balance of social proof on your website, showing satisfied businesses and newly hired employees. Once you show that your recruiting teams can make both sides happy, you’re mere steps away from sealing the deal.

How to identify the right metrics and KPI for growth

Once you decide to intentionally grow your business, you first need to look at your existing metrics, such as:

• meetings booked
• deals closed
• new opportunities made
• successful referrals
• calls made and emails sent

In the end, the way your staffing agency generates leads will be unique. For this reason, analyse your current efforts and write down a handful of the top ways you get new business. Transfer that into your KPIs and measure them religiously.

How to stand out from the competition

One of the best paths to staffing company growth is finding a way to stand out. No matter how crowded your niche is, there is always something you can do better, quicker, or more efficiently than your competitors.

Most importantly, there are always ways to make your clients and candidates happier.

The first way to stand out is to be laser-focused on a certain niche. While general staffing is great, it also makes you more of a generalist than a specialist. With a focus on a niche, you are likely to attract more business. Think about this scenario – let’s say you are looking to eat Mexican food. You have two options:

Restaurant A – Mexican specialty restaurant that promises to serve authentic Mexican cuisine

Restaurant B – A restaurant that serves Mexican, Italian, Burgers, and Indian food and promises to serve authentic Mexican cuisine 

What would you pick? The likely answer is A.

This scenario also holds true for recruiting and staffing businesses. The narrower your focus, the better recall and more focused messaging you can have. 

For example, you focus on hiring outbound sales representatives for SaaS companies. While your overall customer base will be narrower, you will have an easier time attracting your ideal clients (as described above) and standing out among your competitors.

Besides the ideas, we talked about before for increasing your conversions, one of the top choices that you can make is content marketing and SEO. Find the keywords your target audience is searching for (using a tool such as Ahrefs) and create engaging content around them.

To show off your expertise, talk about your own experience with clients and candidates and how you solve specific problems – but without being too sales-y. Start by researching your competitors first to get a general idea of the direction you want to take and then work to create something 10x better.

How to nurture the right team culture for high-growth staffing agencies

You can’t grow without hiring the right people. Since the main goal of a staffing agency is to help clients hire great talent, you need to be very careful about the recruiters you hire yourself.

When looking for new members to add to your staffing agency team, don’t just aim to hire former recruiters. 

Agencies can greatly benefit from hiring experienced sales professionals as well. Even without any experience in the recruiting industry, sales professionals have a “shark” mindset and they don’t stop until they meet their (sales) quotas for the day, week, or month.

This is just one piece of the puzzle, though. Meeting their quotas will make the clients happy, but at the same time, a great recruiter needs to ensure that the candidates are satisfied as well. This means ensuring that they:

• find the right fit for each candidate
• measure and optimize the candidate experience
• don’t make hires just to make the client happy
• consider the needs of everyone involved in the hiring process
• realize that the hiring process doesn’t stop when a candidate signs a contract

In essence, you’re looking to build a team of empathetic recruiters with a sales mindset.

Your recruiters should aim to fill vacancies as quickly as possible, while at the same time ensuring that at no point in time do you compromise on your role of being a matchmaker and push a suboptimal outcome, either for your candidates or clients.

Finally, you want to hire people who don’t blindly accept your processes and roll with them. Your recruiters should give you feedback on everything they do and constantly find ways to spend less time on mundane tasks such as data entry or emails. Ultimately, their main aim should be to make the clients and candidates happy.

How to Grow Your Recruiting Agency with Recruiterflow

Now that you know what it takes to bring in new business for your staffing agency, it’s time to start using a reliable tool to help you get there. Recruiterflow automates the tedious parts of recruitment so you can focus on doing what you do best – building relationships! Try it out today, completely free!