We’re always on the lookout for the best advice on how to grow your staffing agency. We’ve found the best strategies often come from our industry friends and leaders who are truly exemplifying success and profitability.
We want to know — what have they done to improve their staffing agency?
Even in one of the most competitive employment markets we’ve seen in years, staffing leaders use some key strategies to expand their market access while delivering an industry-leading candidate experience.
A special thank you to Pankaj Jindal and Sense for hosting their recent informative webinar on how top staffing agencies outperform the competition and accelerate their revenue growth year after year. Pankaj is a staffing industry veteran and the co-founder of Sense, the first candidate engagement platform designed specifically for the staffing industry.
How to grow your staffing agency by sticking to the basics
Stick to the basics. It can be easy to chase the newest, shiniest technology or trend to accelerate your staffing agency’s growth. But leading recruiting agencies all agree that the simplest, tried-and-tested strategies are getting the best results. Here are some of the things they all proposed:
- Embrace the flexibility and remote working needs of your employees
- Develop a mature tech stack that supports a dynamic staffing environment
- Take the time to understand the experience of your clients and what employers need
- Support your recruiters to evolve and adapt to change
- Leverage automation to remove administrative tasks from the day-to-day so recruiters can be 100% people-focused
Get creative in attracting talent
Beyond highlighting remote work options and committing to recruiting underrepresented candidates to build a more diverse workforce, here are some creative strategies some recruiters are using to grow their agency:
- Recruit veterans
- People from diverse geographic locations
- Give your candidates choice, options of various employers, and contract/full-time openings
- Match the skillsets of your recruiters to the positions for which they are recruiting
- Put less importance on “short-term” work history
That last point is becoming increasingly important. Previously, recruiters and employers used to see a candidate’s previous position that was only one year as a red flag. But the pace of change in several industries, especially within the tech sector, is becoming so rapid that many full-time employees are exiting their positions in a year and sometimes even less.
Another factor that is driving high turnover after one year is pay raises. Many candidates have found they can negotiate for a better wage increase at a new position rather than convincing their current employer to give them a good pay raise. Their high rate of turnover is your gain.
Focus on building a great employer brand
The “employer brand” is such a big buzzword these days for a reason. Building and strengthening your employer brand is one of the most important things a staffing agency can do to attract clients and valuable leads. Some of the best steps to take in building your employer brand is to deliver a white-glove candidate experience by:
- Provide staffing with an on-demand immediacy of a consumer experience
- Be responsive to answer the questions and problems your candidates are experiencing
- Clearly define every step of the recruiting and hiring process and keep them up to date along the way
- Use chatbots or automation to get them what they need, when they need it
- Leave your candidates with a feeling of surprise, delight, and the desire to work with your agency again
Stay tuned for new ways to engage your talent pool
There are so many new and evolving ways to stay in touch with your talent pool. The biggest key is automation. By automating the manual tasks like sending one-off messages, your recruiters spend much less time on tasks that are taking away their ability to be more people focused.
A good rule of thumb is for any task your recruiter must do more than five times, automate it!
Few things can help grow your staffing agency like clean data
Who on your team is cleaning your leads with data management? If you don’t have anyone, you should consider someone right away. There has never been more data at our fingertips about our candidates, what is important to them and where they’re at in their buyer journey.
The staffing agencies that can capture that data and use it wisely will be positioned to grow their agency like nobody else.
How can we help you grow your staffing agency?
All these suggestions not only sound effective, but they’re proven to work. What’s more, when your staffing agency can go all-in with these tips from the most successful firms, not only can you grow their business in similar ways, but you can have a lot of fun and help job seekers improve their lives along the way.
Let us know how we can help. Whether finding the time or the expertise or developing the overall strategy to grow your staffing agency, Parqa will help you find a way to beat the competition. Contact our team today.
