How to Run a Successful Recruiting Company

Success is measured in many ways, but there’s one measure of success that beats the rest: the financial success of your recruiting company.

To run a financially successful recruiting company, you need to have a reputation that clients can trust and make high quality placements for these clients before your deadline.

You can’t have success without delivering great results for clients, and these best practices will show you how to leverage the great work that you do into more new business and more success for your company.

Always be Closing New Business for your Recruiting Company

“Always be closing” is a classic sales motto that is essential to your recruiting company’s success, because gaps between major contracts hurts your bottom line.

The most successful recruiting companies manage a continuous schedule of clients, grow their ability and capacity to serve clients and successfully close a higher number of projects, earn more per contract or otherwise get the most bang for their recruiting buck.

Here’s how it’s done.

Always Be Closing New Business

To close more new business, clients need to see evidence that your company is the perfect choice for their hiring needs.

From the leads you choose to the evidence you provide, your pitch process needs to play to your company’s strengths and the expertise of your recruiters.

Use these best practices to hone your pitch and prove that you are the right company for a new client’s needs:

• Find leads with similar hiring needs as past clients and with hiring needs that match the successful track record of your recruiters.
• Prove to leads that your company is the right choice to meet their hiring needs.
• Give leads an overview of your methods (tools, specialized recruiters, etc.).
• Show them proof of your past success that is relevant to their hiring needs (testimonials, success rate statistics, high profile placements, etc.).
• Show them the work you’ve already done for them (example candidates for an open job, a recruitment project plan for their open job, etc.).
• Demonstrate your value and win more new business for your recruiting company.

Always Manage your Bandwidth

You need to close more new business, but you also need to manage your bandwidth to be successful.

It’s terrible for your company’s reputation to over-promise and underdeliver, so never spread yourself too thin as you take on more work.

By delivering great results on-time, you can generate a large volume of positive feedback, satisfaction statistics and testimonials, all of which will help you to close more business and start projects with higher levels of client confidence.

Use these best practices to help manage your bandwidth and maintain a fully-booked schedule:

• Always complete projects according to your timeline, ensure the criteria of contracts are fulfilled and ensure clients are satisfied with their hires.
• Schedule the initial work for new contracts to begin as current projects are successfully closed.
• Collect feedback from clients and ask them to complete satisfaction surveys.
• Always update candidates when a hire is made and ask if you can present them with job opportunities in the future.
• Conclude projects with clients by asking them to consider you for their future recruitment needs and asking for referrals.

Always Choose the Right Recruiters for Each Project

To keep new clients calling, recruitment projects need to close successfully and on-time.

You will need good recruiting tools to provide this value to clients but, more importantly, you need to choose the right recruiter for the job for each new project that your company takes on.

Here’s how you choose the right recruiter or recruiters for new projects:

• Choose recruiters who have successfully made placements for the same role at similar companies or for similar roles at similar companies.
• Choose recruiters who clients favored when presented with them during the pitch process and/or recruiters specifically requested by the client.
• Choose admin and research staff who are most experienced supporting recruiting projects for this role.
• Evaluate the progress of your assigned recruiting team continuously to gage if more recruitment, admin or research employees should be assigned to the project.

Always Collaborate with Clients

You’re the one being contracted by your client, but collaboration with clients is essential for ensuring successful, accelerated conclusions to search projects.

By securing buy-in from clients at the beginning of projects and setting the expectation that they will get better results by cooperating you, better results is exactly what you will get.

From the increased insight you get into client hiring needs to greater client confidence in the candidates you present, having a collaborative process ensures better client relationships and better results for your recruitment projects.

• Start projects by setting expectations for collaboration and outlining the case for collaboration (better insight into client needs and work environment, better communication, better referrals, etc.)
• Start projects by introducing the recruiters who will be working on the project and ensuring that these people are communicative and easy to reach.
• Start projects by collecting resources from clients, such as real examples of the future hire’s deliverables or competitors to target for talent.
• Start projects by showing clients your recruitment strategy, and benchmark candidates whose credentials match the client’s requirements.
• Start projects with getting client approval of the job description you will use.
• Start projects with a clear timeline laid out and adjust benchmarks to be attainable.
• Establish the method by which the client will be updated on your progress and the frequency of updates.
• Have recruiters consult with client stakeholders to ensure that they are “on point” when portraying the client’s company to candidates they work with.

Always Present Ready-to-Hire Candidates

Every candidate you present to clients must be “ready-to-hire,” meaning that they are fit for the role, available now or in the near future and intrigued by the job opportunity.

If you can ensure all presented candidates meet these criteria, you will have happier clients who never choose a candidate that is unavailable, unqualified or uninterested in the role.

• Ensure that research staff understand the criteria for acceptable candidates for each new project, the nuances of the client’s requirements and benchmark candidate profiles that were approved by the client.
• Ensure that recruiters and research staff collaborate to qualify potential candidates who are worth contacting.
• Ensure that recruiters gather information that proves candidates are ready-to-present: their fitness for the job, their interest levels in the job and when they will be available to take the job.
• Ensure that the Candidate Assessment prepared by the project lead clearly communicates that the candidate is fit for the role, the candidate’s possible start dates and the reasons the candidate is considering the role.

Always Use Technology to Your Advantage

The success of your agency depends on the talents of you and your recruiters, but success also depends on keeping up with your competitors by using technology to your advantage.

Here’s how your company should be using technology to your advantage:

• Use CRM and ATS tools to effectively manage client and candidate relationships.
• Use the right business tools to support your company’s financial and administrative requirements.
• Use communication tools to ensure good internal communication between partners, recruiters, researchers and admin employees.
• Automate time consuming manual processes and integrate interrelated programs.
• Use candidate sourcing tools that can aggregate data from every relevant online source.
• Use tools that enhance your ability to engage, manage and communicate with candidates.
• Use technologies that save time for your recruiters and make them more effective.

Loxo is an all-in-one recruiting platform created to improve outcomes for your clients, increase the effectiveness of your recruiters and generally get more done than your competition.

Utilizing tools like ATS + CRM and Loxo AI, the world’s first intelligent sourcing assistant, Loxo’s increases your output by unearthing top talent across hundreds of data sources, nurturing candidate relationships with built-in marketing and providing process automation and shortcuts to accelerate the successful close of search projects.

Our customers are leading executive search and boutique staffing firms that are tired of complex recruiting software that slows them down. Loxo is simple and intuitive so you can reduce your overhead and dramatically simplify the way you work.

Not only has Loxo automated your manual and mundane processes, we built smart tools into your recruiting experience. From finding contact information with the click of a button to automatically sourcing the top 10 percent of every market, it’s time for your software to work for you.