Building Effective Recruitment Businesses

There is very little training available to recruiters but you work in a highly specialist profession and need the best advice to remain competitive. This basic advice outlines some key areas you should consider. For more detailed and specific advice, please sign up for free recruitment tips.

Stick to your core competencies
Generally, recruiters are good at managing people and relationships. Recruiters are not usually good at dealing with repetitive tasks and are likely to find information management uninteresting or difficult. Are your recruiters better with people or with details? If your recruiters excel at relationship management, that's all they should be doing. Recruitment Systems will help you identify and automate repetitive and administrative tasks to allow your recruiters to focus solely on building and sustaining relationships with clients and candidates.

Create a Value Innovation
Recruitment is a highly competitive field and it can be very difficult to demonstrate how your business is better than the rest. Winning industry awards can certainly help, but the essence of differentiation is value innovation. If you can show how you are truly unique you can swim out of the bloody red ocean to the clear blue waters of uncontested market space (as described in marketing guidebook Blue Ocean Strategy).

1. List all the dimensions which you believe are important to customers such as rapid placement times, extent of specialisation, and price.
2. On a graph plot these dimensions depending on how well you think you perform on each dimension.
3. Now plot your competitors to see where you can improve your business and to identify new opportunities for you in areas where your competitors perform poorly.

Focus on what you do best
If you ask your clients why they chose your firm, you will start to identify areas which are most valued by your current clients. You should then focus on improving these benefits to your customers so that you over-perform on these dimensions. If clients tell you that they chose to do business with you because you had a track record for rapidly placing clients, then this is what you should improve further and promote. It may seem wasteful to focus on something which you already do well, but if you over-perform on this dimension, positive word-of-mouth will spread organically and you will forge a very strong brand position.  

Protect your IP
You know that your recruitment database of clients and candidates is one of the most valuable assets in your business. Building up a strong brand in the recruitment industry is very important but there are very low barriers to entry for employees defecting from your business to start their own agency. A good recruitment database can prevent your recruiters from copying or printing your client and candidate lists.

The TRIS Recruitment CRM stores your contacts safely on your own server. TRIS also allows administrators to disable the print and data copy features to keep your IP secure. Find out how TRIS can secure your candidate and client lists, request a call back or contact us.