Starting Out and “Selling Out” – thoughts for 2022

January 26th, 2022 | Industry News

Starting Out

So you’re thinking of starting a recruitment agency? Good for you. As we continue to adjust to living with a pandemic, few things contribute as much to personal wellbeing and the economy as employment. Given that 73% of candidates claim that job-hunting is one of the most stressful things they’ve ever done, good recruitment agencies can really help improve life for many people.

Are you going to specialise?

Your choices are:

• Executive and head hunting
• Specialist recruitment
• Temporary recruitment
• General recruitment

Of course, with good online recruitment software you can segment your offering so that you work in more than one area, without looking like you’re spreading yourself too thinly. Natural partners are Executive and Temporary (placing interim executives is lucrative and rewarding) and Specialist and Temporary (same deal – if you’re recruiting in a limited area, you probably have a pool of candidates who could be placed via short term contracts using recruitment database software to meet client needs effectively).

What are you up against?

Understanding your competitors can help you with pricing, marketing and choosing strategies to identify both clients and candidates. This can inform your business plan and help you raise finance if necessary. Given that over 20% of recruiters believe they will not be able to meet the demands of their best candidates, establishing what makes you different to (and better than) the competition may give you market edge.

Prove you can hire

Choosing able consultants is the first recruitment choice you evidence, and it sets the tone for your agency going forward.

“Selling Out” – when to choose to use an agency

It’s definitely true that many startups are suspicious of working with a recruiter, seeing it as a failure of their company culture that they can’t identify the ‘right people’ to work with. However, recruitment software offers a different focus that has nothing to do with selling out or ‘going corporate’. For example, recruiting software cuts out unconscious bias, which is way to develop in a small organisation where everybody is like everybody else. Web based recruitment software also reaches hard to access candidates, the very people that many startups are actively seeing to recruit but lack the resources to engage with.

A good recruiter also saves startups a fortune. Glassdoor says that the average cost of recruiting an employee in the UK is £3,000 and 27.5 days – upfront costs that few startups are well placed to find.

And given that a good agency will make every effort to understand and convey your company culture to candidates, working with a recruitment agency can be a fantastic way to assess your own corporate values and get a sense of how well you’re transmitting them to the world at large.