9 Essentials to Starting a Successful Recruitment Agency

Before establishing my recruitment marketing & design agency, I spent six years running Media Square Recruitment before a stint in-house. I had a great time and will always remember the thrill of running my own agency. Like us all, I did a few things well and dropped the ball in a few times, too.

To help others, I’ve created a list of some of the most important parts of running a recruitment agency – in my opinion.

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means but from my experience running a recruitment agency and from speaking with agency owners on an almost daily basis, it’s certainly some of the most important factors you want to keep an eye on.

Cash

The most important part of running any business is your cashflow. You can be running an extremely profitable business, with invoices sitting with clients for tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds but if you run out of short-term cash and you can’t pay staff wages on time then things will quickly unravel.

Accountants

Embrace a good accountant as soon as you can! Your accounts, balance sheets, P&L, confirmation statements are vital and need to be filed on time to avoid fines and penalty points. However, they can be incredibly time consuming and draining to complete – even when you know what you’re doing. It takes a special type of person to be an accountant and that certainly wasn’t me.

Social Media

Of course, contemporary business dictates the need to stay active on social media, but it can be hard to allocate an exact ROI from it. Don’t spend any time doom scrolling. Focus instead on what makes money for the business and stick to that. And don’t get drawn into online arguments – it’s never worth it.

Backdoor Clients

Make a note to look back every few months at all submitted CVs, not just the candidates that landed interviews, but all CVs sent to your clients. I’m sure the large majority of your clients are highly ethical, but I often hear of clients going behind the backs of recruitment agencies and directly engaging with candidates to bypass a fee.

Laziness

There’s never space for apathy when running a business – especially recruitment business! Naturally, holidays are essential to let your mind and body rest and spend time with family & friends but avoid any habit of laziness. Turn up to work on time each day, don’t leave early and put those extra hours in as they’re always needed.

Business Development

When the market is buoyant and you’ve got clients phoning in vacancies daily, it’s easy to switch to focusing solely on candidate delivery; however, this is rarely the wisest move. When the market is client-led you need to adapt to delivery to keep clients happy and bring in the revenue. But you should always set time aside for business development, even if it’s just a few calls a day.

Every recruitment agency should have a list of say 20-40 dream clients you’d love to work with and from my experience, the best time to start conversations with those clients is when the market is good so put some time aside to plug away, reaching out to their key stakeholders.

Partnerships & Communities

Running a recruitment business can be lonely, even when you have colleagues. You’ll likely spend the initial period by yourself until you have the budget and stability to take on your first hire. In the first twelve months my advice is to reach out to recruitment agencies in your space – but not necessarily in the exact niche as you – to partner up with.

During my first year in business, I probably made around £10k in revenue through split fees. There are also so many great membership organisations in the recruitment space and I’d strongly advise you factor in some budget and join one. Invariably, they will provide essential networking opportunities, training, legal advice and so much more.

Best Practice

It’s so easy to cut corners when the market is tough or when you’ve been in the business for a while, but you should always remember and stick to the basics. Stick to best practice in every procedure, CV formatting, client pitches, updating your CRM, etc.

RecTech

There are two sides to this and it’s easy to be too extreme.

You’ll need to sit somewhere in the middle – let me explain. I’ve seen agencies take on way too much recruitment technology, swamping their consultants with technology, eating up time and slowing growth, whilst simultaneously increasing monthly costs before each consultant is profitable.

On the other side I’ve seen agencies not update their tech stack in over a decade, slowly being left behind, using antiquated products, spending unnecessary time on admin tasks that could quite easily be automated. My advice is to use recruitment technology sparingly but always keep an eye on what’s out there in the market and how it could help your business – I find that peers can be a great source for referrals & recommendations.

Rob has worked within the recruitment industry since 2006, selling recruitment advertising space, running his own recruitment firm, launching job boards, in-house talent acquisition teams, and creating enterprise level recruitment software. He now runs Abstraction Labs, which specialises in recruitment agency website design (https://abstractionlabs.co.uk/).