We Provided A Recruitment Agency With These 8 Business Development Strategies & The Rest Is History

Recruit CRM is back providing amateur recruitment agencies with a take on some of the best business development strategies that they could be using. Read more.

One of the toughest challenges when it comes to setting up a successful recruitment agency is to understand how business development works. Once you have a good grasp of it, you can make the best use of your time and meet all your monthly targets proficiently. While most recruitment agency founders understand that recruiting is not all about sourcing the right candidates, clients and filling roles but also about business development which is extremely crucial for success, rookies might overlook this altogether. You need to realise that there will be no roles to fill or recruit anyone if there are no clients asking you to do so for them.

Business development is not just a fancy term for sales. There is much more to function other than that. According to Scott Palak, one of the contributors from Forbes, says, “Business development is all about creating long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, relationships and so on…” If you’re a recruiter or even an amateur, your business development efforts will involve a variety of activities like- identifying prospective clients, reaching out to them, getting business, taking job orders, maintaining fruitful relationships and so much more.

To help newcomer recruitment agencies and recruiters, Recruit CRM has shortlisted 8 such strategies for you to implement!

8 Business Development Strategies For Amateur Recruitment Agencies & Recruiters

Every recruiter and recruitment agency, whether new or old must be practising these tactics for better development.

1. Take Time To Build Your Brand Identity

One of the key business development strategies includes branding. Your prospective clients will be looking you up on the internet. When they type your name on Google, they would be looking forward to going through a much professional and consistent looking presence that tells them your worth, hard work and credibility. In simple terms, these prospective clients should be willing to trust you with all their heart before they invest their time and energy into it. Therefore, put time into building your presence online. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, make sure you maintain professionalism.

Among all the content that you add to your site, should be your recruitment agency reviews, success stories, candidate experience surveys and so on. You should demonstrate clearly that you meet all your client’s expectations and needs. If you build your brand keeping these important points in mind, your prospects will be interested in giving you a shot.

2. Conduct Warm Calling

Calling strategies have changed with time and you’ve heard from innumerable people how cold calling is dead but try doing that to a recruiter for once! Warm-up your prospects before dialling up their number. You need to be able to tell them exactly who you are when they are on call with you. For instance, try connecting with a prospective client on LinkedIn and take it forward from there or ask your existing clientele for an introduction.

You’ll see how much this pays off when you start conducting these warm calls. They all do it not for nothing!

3. Market Yourself As A Maestro

Start investing in the social aspect of your Business Development strategies. If you’re using social media effectively, share the right, related and authoritative content providing a valuable and knowledgeable contribution to discussions within your recruitment and client network. At some point, you should even be able to get to the stage that you’re getting enough referrals and recommendations that you won’t have to make half as many prospecting calls.

This is the kind of tactic that does wonders when it comes to keeping your sales pipeline full as a new recruitment agency.

4. Your Business Development Strategy Should Be Action-Oriented

Whether you’re calling your prospective client or engaging in an effective email conversation for quite some time, this all should end in some agreed-upon action that must be taken by both parties involved. This ensures that both of you can take the relationship forward. This way your recruitment agency will also get paid for the service they’re offering the client.

Always remember that you need to end a call with a clear call-to-action. If it’s not kept in mind, there’s a good chance that you’ll never connect with that prospective client any time soon. You need to realise the art of committing to business strategies so that you can stay on top of your business.

5. Start Referencing Results Whenever You’re Warm Calling

How is a prospective client supposed to understand that you’re worth investing time and money for? In this case, you need to go through the following tips:

• Start sharing success stories of your recruitment agencies with the clients
• Tell them how you’ve placed top talent in XYZ company and add reference details so that they can cross-check
• Mention how you’ve cut ABC company’s hiring time in half
• Always make sure to quantify the results so that the client understands that you’re not making empty promises.

6. Dig Deep!

Your Business Development strategy shouldn’t be just for the sake of it. You’ve got to dig deep before calling up a prospective client. For instance- research all about who they are, what do they do, has there been any recent media coverage and so on. The point is you have to sell your agency to them so that they can ask you for a service.

As a new recruitment entrepreneur, you have to take it into consideration that your business development strategy will have to focus on how to win their trust for your long-term business goals. Once you show in-depth knowledge about their company they will understand that you have done your homework well and who knows they might even think about trusting their hiring needs with you.

7. Always Quality Over Quantity

Making hundreds of calls with the hope that the laws of probability will carry your recruitment agency to your sales goal is one of those business development strategies that is guaranteed to get you nowhere. The days of call volume KPIs are long over! You should be picking up the phone as much as possible, but the quality of those warm calls matter much more than the number of calls your company is making. And what’s the key to having better quality calls with your prospective clients? Doing your thorough research as mentioned in the previous point!

If you’re in a position that you’re able to have a more engaging conversation from the very start because you actually know exactly who it is you’re calling, what they do and what their recruiting challenges maybe, you’ll have a much higher chance of conversion than your competitors.

8. Talk About Candidate Profiles When You Lock A Business

It’s time to take a job order when your recruitment agency locks business with a client. There’s a lot to talk about before sending out profiles of ideal candidates, but make sure you do the latter with utmost care and precision. Sort the best resumes according to your client’s needs and goals with the help of an Applicant Tracking System. Nowadays, recruitment is all about automation and make sure your agency makes use of the best ATS & CRM software in the market.

Your primary concern after taking a job order must be to narrow down the details like title, qualifications, relevant work experience and so on. However, you should also take the time to ask about your client’s past hires and current employees.

Sometimes no matter what you do, things will not work out as sketched out in your business development strategy. There might be a time when prospective clients won’t even bother to respond to your messages. However, keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you’ll end up bombarding them with messages. Check-in periodically to see how you’re clients are doing and reach out to congratulate them whenever you hear some positive news about their company. By maintaining a professional relationship, you’ll end up retaining them for a longer period of time.

More for such articles on Recruitment & Business Development, visit here.

Originally published at https://recruitcrm.io:443.