New and repeat clients are essential for the survival and success of recruitment agencies, and finding new clients and new ways to serve clients should be high on your priority list.
By finding new clients who are perfectly suited for your agency’s focus and finding new ways to provide value for existing clients, you can increase the size of your clients served portfolio and increase industry/overall stature of the clients you serve.
Whether you are an independent recruiter or run a large agency, focus on finding clients who are especially suited to your company’s focus, who have a good level of stature in your industry or who contract you repeatedly will contribute to your long term success.
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This way you can present faster time to fill, new hire performance and higher client satisfaction metrics to new clients, further increase your ability to sign new clients and your number of inbound leads.
This post will give you ideas for finding new clients and give you answers to common client finding questions like:
If you have been finding clients for years or read our last post on how to get into the recruiting industry [internal link], then many of your initial questions on the nuts and bolts of finding clients for your staffing agency have likely been answered.
So, how do recruiters find clients? There is no magic bullet for finding new clients, but there is also no limit to the strategies you can employ for finding more business for your agency.
For a client to feel confident in contracting your agency’s there’s a few things clients must know:
However a potential client arrives at all of these conclusions (your website, a recommendation in their professional network, a direct pitch, etc.) all are must be met before a client will feel confident in contracting you, not just reasonably comfortable.
If a client has a great first impression which is backed up by great results (because you closed a client with recruiting needs in your agency’s wheelhouse), they will be more likely to:
So, what is the best way to get clients for your staffing agency in the most efficient and successful way possible? Playing to your strengths
It may seem daunting when you’re first starting out, but just remember that for every question you have, there is an equal amount of resources, platforms, and guides out there to help you along the way.
As great as it would be for businesses to approach you with their recruiting needs, you will more often than not find yourself needing to find with new clients.
Here are several of the most common answers to the question, how do recruitment agencies get clients?
A good way to see who’s hiring in your area is to look at the various digital job-posting platforms and identify businesses that put repeated listings.
Companies with high turnover or within a rapidly growing market, like software for instance, that are posting on these websites, are more than likely going to be receptive to a pitch that offers to help mediate and facilitate the process of hiring new talent.
When scanning these sites, look at industry-specific job boards. These will help narrow your search, thereby allowing you to hone your pitch, and lead you to companies that best match your recruitment specialties.
If you have focused on recruited in a specific industries, roles and skill sets, you will have a leg up in pitching clients on your ability to deliver talented candidates. This is an effective method of sourcing clients, especially if you are exploring how to get clients for software companies, or how to get clients for a temp staffing company, or any other skill-specific market you are hoping to establish a foothold in.
Note: while not as cutting edge, applying this same method to the job listings in your local paper can open you up to clients that are locally-focused and may otherwise slip under the radar.
We are living in a time where over 90% of surveyed businesses acknowledge that social media plays a fundamental part in their marketing and sales models. Because of this, almost any business, in any market, you can imagine will have a presence on social media. Don’t be afraid to source prospects from sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. as these platforms are some of the ripest grounds for making connections. Just be sure to check out which social platforms potential clients are the most active one to find your best contact channel.
If you were hoping to make a more formal introduction than through social media, LinkedIn is an invaluable resource. The reason why so many recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates is that you are able to list your qualifications on your public profile for everyone to see, reach out to potential clients in a more professional context, and also source candidates from the same. As far as recruiting in the digital age goes, there aren’t many better places to start than on LinkedIn.
Referrals are an underutilized method of prospecting new clients, but word of mouth is one of the most effective methods of getting new clients. Having a previous client refer you to a new one is how recruiters find clients once they have started to build up their reputation and the number of client’s they’ve served in an industry. It will always be easier to close on a client if you were sent to them by someone they know and trust.
The following section is a list of questions you can ask yourself when considering how to approach clients for recruitment. By answering these questions, you can create the building blocks of your client acquisition strategy.
If you can answer these questions definitively, then you are well on your way to knowing how to get clients in the recruitment business.
If you identify clients who have needs perfectly suited to your agency’s recruiters, tech stack and track record, then they will conclude that you’re the perfect agency to hire.
To help them reach this conclusion in your initial discussions and pitch, answer these questions to define what criteria this client has for this recruitment project and how to meet them.
We hope that this guide has helped to shed some insight on how recruitment consultants find clients, and will aid you in finding your next big client.
If you’re looking for tips on speeding up the time to fill for all of the new client’s you’ll be signing, check out our post : Executive Search and Placement: Ways to Speed Time-to-Fill
