3 Clever ideas to build a better Recruitment Agency
Wouldn’t it be great if you never had to cold call for new business? Wouldn’t it be great if you knew who was about to recruit and have a candidate waiting for them? And wouldn’t it be great to have your pick of jobs to work on exclusively? In this video, I talk about a simple three point business development plan to do build a better Recruitment Agency. To find exclusive vacancies, suitable candidates and match the two before your client even knows they have a role to fill. These are powerful ways to build a better recruitment business. These are simple methods for a recruitment agency to systematically find and fill vacancies more effectively.
I develop recruitment technology and am always excited by new ideas and clever ways of working. Of course, its not so much the technology that is exciting, but the processes that the technology facilitates and how it can bring about new, improved ways for recruiters to work.
Business Development
Recently, I was approached by a recruitment agency who wanted to improve their business development process. They had a dedicated team tasked with finding jobs online, then emailing those hiring companies to offer their recruitment services. It was a system that worked, but was far from efficient. I spoke to them about the work I do with Intelligence and outlined a plan to massively increase their effectiveness.
The concept behind their approach was good, albeit, poorly targeted. It was a three point plan:
- Find a company in need of a new employee.
- Find a person with the skills and interest in becoming that employee.
- Sell your services as a recruiter based on already having a candidate.
Finding an Employer
The obvious way to find a company in need to staff is simply to look for job advertisements. Unfortunately, from the perspective of a recruitment agency, this is possibly too late in the business development process as that employer has already started work to fill the role.
Its possible to identify an employer earlier in this process by looking for the triggers that create the job opening. One of these triggers is if someone leaves a job or other related job changes. LinkedIn is a great source of this type of information. A Google x-ray search – looking for people who have just started a new job – is a great way to find this.
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Again however, it is likely that the companies identified this way will have already started their recruitment process.
It is possible to identify a company with a hiring need before they start the recruitment process. Perhaps even before they know they have a hiring need! Recruitment Agencies receive clues about employers with every candidate application, and so are uniquely placed to get this information. The challenge for all Recruitment Agencies is to be able to use this information to spot these opportunities.
Spotting Opportunities
Intelligence is a Recruitment system that is designed to do exactly that – to spot opportunities. Intelligence was been built to help recruiters extract value from the data they have and easily use it.
One strategy we use is to automatically cross-reference related information to extract value.
Intelligence automatically cross-references a candidate’s employer with your client list. This means you can easily see which of your clients are about to lose staff. It also allows you to easily see the companies you don’t have as clients who are about to lose staff. By automatically pivoting data in this way, and making it searchable, we can easily list companies or jobs that are likely to appear in the near future.
Finding a Candidate
Most recruiters will start a candidate search looking for people with the basic qualifiers and essential skills in an appropriate location. Places to search include Job Boards, LinkedIn and their own database. Sometimes, a recruiter doesn’t have to search because they already know someone who could be a fit for the role. This is when recruitment is most exciting and most successful! Because when you know someone, you can match them to a job on much more than just skills and location. You will know if that person is right for a job, based on their personality and how they would fit with that employer.
Intelligence can be used to search, not just for a skill and location fit to find a suitable candidate, but it can be used to search for people who will know the perfect candidate – based on their personal knowledge of the employer and the candidate. By allowing the recruiter to find people they know, who are close to the hiring company, you can quickly build a network of referrers. These are people who you know, and who also know the company and the job. These are the perfect people to give you a warm introduction to the perfect candidate.
Closing the deal
Finding a role to work on and finding the perfect candidate are steps 1 and 2 in this process. Step 3 brings the deal together in a profitable way. Approaching a new potential client is a skill and requires knowledge and professionalism. Yet again, recruitment agencies are uniquely placed to have a mountain of information about many companies. To be effective however, that information needs to be converted into insight and knowledge about who in an organization to speak to, and what to say.
Intelligence is designed around converting this information to insight. Again we cross-reference data in a way to help recruiters be more professional and succeed. Candidates, Candidate Referees, your client contacts and LinkedIn all give insights into the structure and decision makers within a company. By combining this in clever ways, Intelligence can show the key people to talk to to secure a deal.
Conclusions
I love to share ideas and concepts I am passionate about. I’ve developed Intelligence around these ideas. I am excited to be able to share these thoughts in the hope that you will be able to take advantage and work in smarter, more effective ways.
This blog is perhaps more focused on my recruitment system, Intelligence, than many of my other blogs. I hope that this will not come across as just a sales pitch to buy my software. It is a sales pitch, in that I believe using Intelligence is the best way to manage a successful recruitment business and I want you to be successful. But I hope that you will see this blog as the basis for my belief that we can use data in much cleverer and more effective ways. By first embracing the best processes, it is possible to wrap clever technology around these to deliver them in simple automated ways.
If you would like more information about Intelligence, please contact me at any time and I will be happy to talk to you about your business, your needs and ways that you can work more successfully.