The recruitment sector is fiercely competitive. So, if you don’t devote effort to the growth and development of your firm, you will be left behind. As the competition heats up, growing your agency’s profit should be a key goal.
To assist you with strategizing, we’ve compiled a list of ways for you to bring your recruitment strategies to a profit-generating level. Read below now to find our top six profit-boosting strategies for staffing firms.
Strategy #1: Increase Your Margin 📏
Rather than focusing solely on top-line growth, a key method to increase profitability is to use a series of tactics that all have one thing in common: profit margin.
There are several options for doing so:
- Examine your pricing strategy: Are your products or services priced well enough to offer a good profit margin while still enticing the target market? Could you shift things around to boost your net profit and your bottom line?
- Concentrate your efforts and talent: Instead of just increasing prices across the board, consider concentrating your efforts in critical areas. As a staffing agency, you may have a relatively broad focus, but you will also have areas that consistently perform best. Could you focus your talents on these areas more to increase sales and boost your gross profit margins?
- Focus on selling through your most lucrative channels: In every kind of business, there are products or services that always garner more interest and that you may be able to charge more for. These lucrative channels are an easy way to grow your business and increase your profit margins.
- Look for methods to give your clients and consumers more value: While increasing profit margins is going to help your business, you should also consider how it will affect your customers. Make sure that the strategies you use to increase profits also enhance value for the consumer. Consider providing valuable insights to your clients or offering solutions before they even ask, positioning yourself as a strategic business partner.
- Lower your IT expenses (e.g., move to the cloud ☁️): Lastly, one of the easiest strategies to increase profits that you can do is to lower your own operational costs. Are you paying a lot for IT services? Cut these back. Utilize the cloud and keep your day-to-day costs down.
You should make sure you’re getting the best fees possible from your clients—of course, backed with a strong market analysis. A lot of recruiters don’t know that they can utilize several marketing strategies to ensure that they make more than they lose.
Strategy #2: Dive Into Other Sectors 🤿
Most recruitment companies specialize in and recruit for a few industries. The scope of possibility narrows as your reputation betters in certain industries, and you become the go-to recruitment firm to work with. You should explore branching out into new areas to overcome this and continue to develop your business and profit.
Keep an eye on the business landscape for industries that are growing in popularity. Make contact with companies that are expanding in new, emerging markets. Emerging areas of the market are on their way to becoming a developed market, but not quite there yet, and they tend to be a good place to put your money!
There are a few steps to take to spot an emerging sector, industry, or market. These include the following.
Strategy #3: Go International 🌍
Recent government statistics in the US show that the number of foreign-born employees is at its highest yet. In fact, the statistics show that this number has been on an upward trajectory for a number of decades. But what does this mean for a staffing agency?
Well, to begin with, it means there is definitely a market for international recruitment. And while going international as a company may seem like a big step to take, it may be more lucrative than you have considered.
Source: Harvard Business Review
Any company with its ear to the ground will know that there are a ton of benefits to hiring staff from overseas. Benefits include:
- Accessing the international talent pool 🏊: Staff from overseas, especially those who have been educated in emerging markets, will have skills that might not be as popular in the US. This means with broader access to potential employees, you’ve also got access to a better pool of talent.
- Less competitive: If you’re looking at a wider pool of potential employees, then it stops companies from targeting the same groups of people in their recruitment process. It means companies are more likely to be able to recruit talent that suits their company culture.
- Diversity and culture: Improving diversity in a workplace can have remarkable benefits. In fact, diverse companies are not only much more likely to be able to capture new markets, but they’re also 35% more likely to outperform their competitors.
These benefits can set you apart as a staffing agency. If you’re relaying all the advantages of an international talent pool to your clients, too, then they are more likely to see you as a strategic company to stay linked up with.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Strategy #4: Evaluate The Effectiveness Of Your Advertising 📢
One of the most important sources of cash flow in your organization is your candidates. You can’t complete transactions without them. If you don’t have candidates, then you’re not going to make any money. So, one of the biggest focuses that you should have as a staffing company is your advertising strategy.
What are you doing to ensure that the right candidates apply for your roles? How are you making sure that the best candidates in the field spot your advertisements in the first place? Upping your advertising game is one of the easiest ways to ensure you have the best pool of talent in the market.
So, how can you ensure that your advertising is going to get applications from the best of the best in the field? We’ve created a checklist below of advertising musts for staffing agencies. Check it out.
Making sure that your ads are good enough is one of the key ways you can boost your profits. After all, if you don’t have candidates, then you don’t have a role as a staffing agency.
Strategy #5: Market Your Agency 📈
While advertisements to bring in candidates are highly effective, the other side of the coin is to market your agency to potential clients. Digital marketing is one of the best tools at your disposal in the present day, and so creating a bulletproof digital marketing strategy is going to help you increase profits and grow as a company.
So, how do you market a recruitment agency?
1. Focus on Your Niche
While it can be tempting, you’re never going to be able to be everything to everyone as a recruitment agency. In fact, you’re probably going to be more successful if you have a niche focus in the market. While there is no harm in expanding to emerging markets (as discussed above), staying within certain industry parameters can help you build a reputation within certain sectors.
Once you’ve established your niche, focusing your marketing on the companies within that niche is key. Consider our recommendation from above and create a profile for the clients you want to attract. How can you get their attention? What kind of marketing will they respond best to? Where are they going to be looking for recruitment agencies in the first place?
2. Harness the Power of Social Media
As we mentioned above, social media is a powerhouse of marketing these days. Sites like LinkedIn are the perfect place for you to find not only candidates but also clients. Utilize your LinkedIn company profile to share success stories and candidate experiences and highlight successes within the company.
You can even encourage testimonials from happy clients to boost your marketing efforts and ensure that new clients can see your worth.
3. Encourage Referrals From Happy Clients 😃
Referrals are like gold to recruitment agencies. If one client tells another how much help you’ve been to them, they’re much more likely to use your services, too. So, encourage referrals between clients. Whether that’s through an email marketing strategy or just at the end of a meeting, give them the nudge!
Word of mouth tends to be an underutilized marketing strategy these days. While digital marketing is, of course, absolutely essential to success, word of mouth still has its benefits.
4. Create Valuable Content 💰
Source: HubSpot
Gone are the days when marketers just created as much content as possible and got it onto their site. Now, the key is to load your company website with high-value content that is of genuine use to visitors. This includes a range of formats, with blogs, images, and videos being the most popular types of content used last year.
What this means is that you
- Need a content marketing strategy, i.e. a calendar of content of varying formats that can be added to your site to draw in readers from organic search engine results (as well as when shared on social media!) and
- Need to make sure that your content is valuable, i.e., is a reader going to get something out of it? Are they going to share the content or save it for later?
More and more, too, content is becoming less static and more interactive.
Source: MediaFly
Interactive content boosts engagement, ensures people spend more time on your site, and helps you climb the search rankings. This means that a client is more likely to find you through organic search results because your site is listed among the top results on the search page.
Strategy #6: Look For Ideas From Your Competitors 👀
If you’re struggling to come up with marketing strategies, candidate and client profiles, and other ways to grow your business, one of the simplest tricks is to look to your competitors. Consider how they’re growing their businesses, look at who they’re targeting with their ads, and take a look at their website.
Make a competitor analysis of your most important competitors and learn the following about them.
- On their website, how do they market themselves?
- What kind of image do they project in their marketing, on LinkedIn, and elsewhere?
- What industries do they work in that you don’t?
- What types of customers do they serve?
- Who are the top billers for them?
- What are the Glassdoor ratings for them?
- How do they handle fresh prospects and clients?
Gather information about your rivals and share it with your team. They might provide further information. They might be motivated to attempt something new at work as a result of it.
Conclusion
Growing as a business is essential to success. It can help you to break into new markets, increase profits, and build a strong reputation in your chosen industry. Our top tips should give you some idea of where to start and how to go about growing your staffing agency.
At MyTommy, we offer a range of solutions for small to mid-size companies that help them boost employee retention, improve workplace culture, and maximize productivity. Take a closer look at our solutions here.
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