Why you should start a recruitment business this autumn

After a rather hot summer, Autumn is officially here, and so is one of the busiest times of year in recruitment. The January blues and the "September effect" are extremely similar. In addition, people have recently returned from their holidays, giving them an opportunity to reflect and question whether they are in the right employment for them. So, as a recruiter, it is now time to shine. Here are several reasons why you should start a new recruitment business this Autumn.

NEW START OF A SEASON

Summer is when we have spontaneous holiday breaks consisting of beaches and weekends away to relax and enjoy some time off work. But now we have transitioned from Summer to Autumn, with the official first day of Autumn landing on the 23rd of September here in the UK. A new season means new starts all around and getting back into our routines. Getting back to the grind enables you to thrive in your job even more so than before. So, focus on your ambitions this upcoming season, start setting goals, and put your dreams into action!

TIME TO MAKE THE BIG BUCKS

Back-to-school time is when self-reflection and evaluation start to kick in. And for many candidates, it means realising they want to look for a fresh start - a new job. Luckily for recruiters, many candidates will be looking for a permanent placement. Placing a couple of permanent placements can majorly bump up your cash flow. If you are a Recruiter and don't already run a perm desk, you should be thinking about expanding into this market.

IT’S A GREAT TIME TO BE A SMALL FISH IN A BIG POND

There’s no denying that the market is pretty crowded at the moment. But interestingly, you don’t need to be a big-time player to compete in this market if you’re innovating in your niche.

And with recruitment software, marketing automation and recruitment AI all smashing their way on to the market for us to capitalise on, the possibility to do things differently and better than agencies twenty times your size are at your finger tips. Remember that it’s so much harder and takes a lot more time for a larger agency to implement change i.e. competitive prices and technology into their business, whereas a new business owner can evaluate, select and implement new software and strategies before a larger company can even organise a meeting to discuss a change in direction!

This is such a strong advantage for an SME agency so make sure you work innovation and technology into your USP. But please - make sure you’re not just chatting nonsense and make sure you establish a strong ‘market-product fit’, so to speak: Establish your niche target clients’ challenge, offer a solution and most importantly – learn to do it better than everyone else. If you don’t get this right the market will simply knock you down...

IF IT WAS EASY, EVERY ONE WOULD DO IT!

So I’m not going to lie to you – there will be times where you’ll think, “Jeez, what I have done?”.

And be prepared to make sacrifices, give holidays a miss and potentially take very little money home at the start. But if you pick your positioning on the market correctly, starting or expanding your recruitment business in 2023 will stand you in good stead for success and could be a great opportunity to establish yourself as a really strong competitor on the market.  

So, you’re thinking of starting your own recruitment agency, but you’ve never worked for a recruitment agency? 

Is this just crazy fantasy on par with me thinking that I could date Angelina Jolie or is it, in fact, something you can do?

I bring good news. With a bit of courage, hard work and determination to do things the right way, you can start a recruitment agency without any experience of working for one previously.

How can I be so sure of this? Well, it’s something my business partner and I have achieved. Over the past five years, we have built a Recruitment Franchise with hundreds of Franchisees and Clients. There’s a bloody bleak statistic that states that over 5 out of 10 recruitment agencies fail to make it past their first year. I do not write that to ‘blackpill’ you but that is the reality. However, I want to tell you how you can ensure that you do not add that number. It can be done, we’re proof, and we have we have many franchisees trained and earning. 

HOW HAVE WE NOT ONLY SURVIVED, BUT THRIVED?

Could you launch a recruitment agency without any experience of working in recruitment at all? Possibly. But I’d highly recommend you at least surround yourself with people who do understand the art of good recruiting. Put simply, when we started, we knew sales, education, technology, and recruitment, but we didn’t know if we could transition into a recruitment franchise model. We had developed successful multi-million-pound Education and Sales Businesses.  Working internally for a business within sales or recruitment provides a unique perspective and one that we think gave us an edge. Why? Because the internal recruitment process is quite robust. There is a heavy focus on the candidate, their experience, and cultural fit. A lot of people go from agency recruitment to internal recruitment, but few go in the opposite direction. There is a reason for this. 

DID WE THINK WE WOULD SUCCEED?

Of course, we believed in ourselves but ultimately, we didn’t know how successful we would be and that’s the point. You can never know. It will never be the right time. But you can take the lessons you have learnt previously alongside the network, platform, and knowhow you have built. You can use all of this, and you should.

A lot of agencies, as you may know, promise the world. Do not do this. Take that experience you have potentially had with them and identify what you’re not going to do. It sounds rather counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Why would you focus on what others do badly? But this is where the real lessons can be found.

Recruiters, have a very low bar to entry. One only needs a laptop, phone, and an internet connection, that’s it. But, as the statistic at the top of this piece shows us, most fail. You have to hone in on why they fail. What is it they do wrong? 

DO YOU NEED TO NICHE DOWN?

Man, we thought about this a lot. We tore ourselves apart trying to think of our niche. It was pointless. Being a specialist is good and there is a place for it, but you must really know the sector you are targeting.

We found it better to take a more generalist approach while obviously being very aware of our strengths. Accountancy, Legal and Sales. This ultimately helped during the infamous COVID year of 2020. Thought experiment: imagine we’d ‘niched down’ on the service sector prior to that period? We all watched restaurant after restaurant being forced to close their doors for lockdown. We wouldn’t have made it out of the other side if we’d picked that sector as our focus. 

GETTING STARTED

It’s humorous to look back now, but the early days of common sense were basic. We had a shoebox office that could just about fit us both in.

My point? As I alluded to previously, it is rarely the right time. An Accountant, who rented the office across from us, would pop in every morning and remind us to ‘build the bank’. What he meant by that was to walk before we could run. 

It is very easy to spend what you earn. You pull in your first cash injection and the temptation builds. Resist. Focus on accumulating what you can, especially in the first twelve months. If you have no cash flow, life is miserable. However, remember it takes time to learn and develop in the world of Recruitment if you are a novice and be careful in where you spend your money. i.e. Job Boards, Marketing etc.

YOUR NAN WAS RIGHT, PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE

We went into this with some strong relationships. We had, or at least we thought we had, people who may potentially employ us to recruit for their business. But even with a decade worth of respective contacts, the revenue didn’t materialise instantly. 

Being able to leverage these relationships helped, although ironically it wasn’t the most obvious ones that provided us with much needed business. Regardless, being able to reach back toward some of these people enabled us to get traction. However, we slowly learnt how to build a client list away from our network, approach clients with candidates that they could be potentially interested in hiring and winning clients and building a client for life by developing new strong relationships.

BE DEFINED BY YOUR SERVICE

Sometimes you’re going to need to have tough conversations with those who you’re recruiting for.  Whether it be pay or flexible working, from time to time the employer might be a little out of sync with what the market dictates. 

It is your job, fundamentally, to provide clarity. In some cases, it may be that salary is the defining factor, but that’s all too often the reason recruiters cite as to why they’re unable to find a quality candidate. 

Do not base feedback to employers on your ‘gut feeling’. Always try to rationalise and provide context or data on why you may be finding it tough to identify the right person. We frequently undertake quantitative research to back up our theories before we give feedback to the client on why we might be struggling to fill their role. This is something many others don’t do.

In some situations, the answer is to adjust the remit slightly. Could your client, for example, need a junior for the role? Could they be missing something in their spec that may be better placed to attract the right person? These are all things you must endeavor to establish.

A local business came to us recently looking to employ a Solicitor. They said that the opportunity had been advertised with three other agencies to no avail. After diving a little deeper into the role, we took the information away and researched what others in the same geographic area were paying for the same role. Within a 15 mile radius from where the company was based, nine other roles were available at a higher rate of pay. 

Outlining feedback like this softened the employer and I was surprised that no other agency had this conversation with them or maybe I wasn’t. 

TRUST, TRUST, TRUST 

A lot of the behaviours, especially within a recruitment agency, are driven by an unintentional number. While it is obviously important to ensure you are contributing to the ‘bottom line’, it can create pressure that negatively impacts the experience of a candidate. Moreover, from the perspective of the employer, they can quickly lose trust in your ability if they feel like you’re putting people forward willy-nilly for roles that are just not right. Everybody you speak to has probably had calls from recruiters who’ll tell them that they do things differently. We, as recruiters, must change perceptions of our trade.

Finally, I hope this article has provided value for thought. I strongly recommended to watch the Job Bank Virtual Tour that goes into more detail on how you can start a recruitment agency with or without experience. If you are thinking of getting started and have questions, we’re open to fielding them. Just drop us a message on any of our channels or via email and we’ll get back to you.