Your clients can be one of your best sources for new business through referrals, but your existing clients can also be a source of new business if they call for an encore search following a few successful placements.
From expanding the executive and other recruiting services that you provide, to onboarding/training employees and auditing for organizational skill gaps, expanding your role and the value you provide to clients can win you quite a lot of work from companies you’re already working for.
By positioning your firm as a strategic partner for your clients instead of just another service provider, you can gain greater access to the client company’s strategic decision making process, allowing you to advise clients on their recruiting strategy and identify more opportunities to expand the services you provide.
As long as you provide great results through your active role as a strategic advisor and asset, your clients will be calling for their encore search partners to provide ever more insights and services.
Like any other instance where you’re asking for work from a client, you need a compelling pitch to ensure that your clients will be enthusiastic about the expansion of your services, as well as a concrete plan for the implementation of these expanded services.
Your clients have already entrusted you with recruiting for executive roles, and you should use your insider advantage to create a pitch that is tailored to your client’s recruiting and other staffing needs.
For instance, if you know that your client’s ATS is disorganized and under-utilized, part of your pitch would focus on the benefits that your preferred candidate tracking/management platform will provide.
Beyond the pitch, your expanded services plan needs to be tailored to the current needs of your clients, their short and long term corporate strategy and the HR heads/resources you will be working with.
While some clients may want you to step in and take over the entirety of HR’s recruiting function, others will want you to act as a support partner to HR. To create a plan and pitch that is accepted by your clients, you must understand the role that your client wants you to play and how this role will work with their internal recruiting and HR personnel.
Answering these questions will help you choose the primary focus of your expanded services plan and the pitch that you give to your clients:
Once you have identified the ways in which your firm can support the ongoing objectives of your client, the next step is identifying the specific strategies and services you will use to provide this support.
Here are some examples of services that can provide value to clients and assist them in reaching their goals or even exceeding their goals. Feel free to use this list as your encore services wiki for offering the next round of expanded services for your clients and building the pitch to land this work.
Executive transitions are highly important for organizations as well as their share prices.
Succession planning can ensure that your clients stay on course to execute their current strategy even when critical executives fall off along the way, and succession management ensures that executive transitions go smoothly and result in successful outcomes.
The execution of your client’s strategy will depend on the hard work of their employees, from entry level to the C – Level.
By evaluating the company’s organizational and staffing strategy in relation to their ongoing objectives, your firm can identify current and future organizational/staffing requirements that must be met to achieve your client’s goals.
Strategic workforce planning is essential for organizations in industries undergoing rapid changes, and helps these companies to remain in lockstep with their competitors.
Paired with the evaluation of your client’s organizational/staffing plan, your client can be prepared for the demands of current and upcoming market/industry forces that will affect their ability to meet objectives.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is perfect for companies that are experiencing dysfunction in their hiring processes or who are experiencing hiring demand beyond their internal capabilities.
When a client’s HR department is already stretched thin, RPO can free up internal talent for the work they need to do while ensuring that all staffing requirements are met quickly, without sacrificing quality of hire.
Companies with problematic cultures can lose public confidence and share value in addition to lots of great employees.
Culture transformations are no easy feat, and offering guidance in strategy, rebranding of the client’s employer brand and establishing policies to enforce new culture standards will help rebuild the confidence of employees in the client company as well as public confidence in the company.
Executive coaching services help to shore up skill gaps in your clients leadership team, reign in executives with problematic behavior and ensure that all executives feel supported as they take on the biggest challenges your clients are facing.
To ensure that your client’s executive team is getting the guidance they need, you can offer board of directors services to select the best board members for your client’s needs and work with their board to create the best working relationship possible between board members and executives.
By offering services like board member recruiting, board competency evaluation, board member coaching, board culture evaluations, board oversight and board member succession planning, your firm can help your client to get the guidance and strategic insight they need from their board of directors.
Discovering current organization skill gaps and forecasting impending skill gaps is critical to your clients, especially those who are in close competition with competitors.
By closing skill gaps with your services, your clients will be better equipped to meet the evolving demands of their industry and leap upcoming hurtles more quickly and effectively than their competition.
Onboarding and training services help new hires reach greater levels of productivity more quickly, improve new hire impressions of your client company and increase new hire engagement.
By using your firm to fulfill critical onboarding and training requirements, your client’s hiring managers and HR staff can be freed up to do more advanced work for the client company.
Employee engagement is closely related to employee performance, and a culture of disengagement can easily be responsible for your client’s slipping productivity levels.
By offering employee engagement services, you can help to increase productivity, employee satisfaction and employer brand strength, while decreasing turnover.
Performing an audit of the executive recruiting software systems used by your client can improve the overall speed of their hiring process and improve the quality of candidates sourced, interviewed and hired by identifying bottlenecks and other issues being caused by your client’s current recruiting software.
Following the audit, your firm can also provide services for your client’s recruiting software woes, whether this means optimizing the use of their current software system or adopting the use of a new software system.
To more quickly and effectively implement a new recruiting software system, your firm can be the driving force behind your client’s adoption of new recruiting technology.
Whether they are adopting a new ATS, CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) or even a training/onboarding platform, your team will ensure that your client starts receiving the strategic benefits of their new technology investment more quickly and that their systems are more effectively integrated into recruiting and other people-centric processes.
By expanding the services you offer to your executive recruiting clients, you can create a continuous working relationship that spans years instead of months.
By leveraging Loxo’s sourcing automation powered by AI, the time you used to spend sourcing and scouring the internet for contact data can be spent offering strategic support and expanded services to your clients.
To see how Loxo supports expanded services models for recruitment agencies, you can schedule a demo here.