In the daily distractions of running a recruitment business, it can be easy to lose sight of one of the most important question of all – what exactly makes a good recruiter? Focusing on internal improvements can only get started when you can establish what your weaknesses are and what your clients need from you.  

So, what issues do recruiters increasingly face and what options are available for those looking to improve their approach? 

Why are recruiters so important?

For many businesses, recruitment agencies are the lifeblood that keeps companies afloat. With the most profitable industries often experiencing the greatest turnover, solid recruitment agencies can allow businesses to remain responsive to sectoral change and quickly find members of staff to fill holes in their team’s professional skillsets.

If a business wants to maintain their track record for delivery, recruiters can be essential for fostering growth with businesses and enable them to adapt to ongoing challenges and optimise their approach. The recruiters specialism in delivering highly trained professionals for vital segments in the marketplace can be key to the future success of an organisation.

What are the risks?

However, like any business, failing to take a structured, calculated approach to daily work can result in even the most reliable agency being left in the dust. Thanks to the rise of social media and online technologies, employees that have come into contact with your business can spread the word about how you helped them secure work. This can help strengthen your brand or seriously damage it, with professionals able to easily recommend or advise against working with your teams.

Failing to be a reliable provider can easily result in your business being black listed by providers, especially if you are working in a strict geographic area. Providing an unsuitable or poor-quality client to a business can potentially lumber them with an ongoing staffing issue or cause problems at all levels of the business. While the daily professionalism of an employee is not your responsibility, business owners will often not see it that way and seek out other providers. 

Successfully tackling these issues can leave your business in a position that is not only resilient, but able to leverage its resources more effectively – helping you address issues in the sector you are dealing with and empower your clients to do the same. 

But no matter the current composition of your teams, there are a range of challenges that all companies currently operating in the sector can find themselves facing. 

What are the challenges?

Far from easy, running a successful recruitment agency requires dealing with highly specific client-customer relationships in volume. This raises a number of variables that can prove extremely difficult to tackle. Some of these can include-

Client Management: Whether you are dealing with a manageable group of highly skilled professionals or a large stable of individuals – finding the time to give the potential employees and employers due care can be incredibly difficult. This involves creating and maintaining a searchable database to help source the right match and make sure they are a solid quantitative and qualitative fit. While building solid personal relationships can help, securing the right digital platform to carry out this work can be very useful – allowing you to save resource and respond quickly when it comes to finding the right answer to the niche professional need. 

Skills Sourcing: Hunting down and securing the right professional for the job is a task in itself and without a helpful pipeline, you can often be left without a solid stable of employees to offer to your clients. Taking proactive steps to source and contact the right professionals is key, along with being able to understand the unique value proposition they represent and what their long-term goals are. Tracking this can be highly challenging and getting it right can be the special sauce that differentiates a standard provider from an in-demand specialist. 

Pace of Change: Thanks to changes in communication technologies, business practice, and governmental directives – the market is changing on a regular basis. On one hand, this can be incredibly challenging as it requires your teams to stay on top of regulatory change and incentives across a range of industries and ensure that your clients adhere to the latest standards and possess essential skills. On the other, market disruption can create a fantastic growth opportunity for a number of businesses and any quality recruitment agency can enjoy success in providing the employees that allow a business to flourish in a changing marketplace. 

Digital Innovation: No matter the sector you operate in, every profession is feeling the impact of digital innovation in the modern marketplace. This can range from changes to remote working practice, the disruptive influence of cloud technologies, or the rise of platforms that can help automate or regulate time-consuming tasks. Staying abreast of these is incredibly important and, without them, you and your clients run the risk of being left behind.  

External Factors: Simply put, the employment market can often prove to be extremely volatile when it comes to negative change or unavoidable challenges. While it may be impossible to plan for all elements that may affect your business, future employees, or your range of clients – having professional contingencies in place can be invaluable. This can range from recessions, sweeping change to employment practice, or uncontrollable elements as we have seen with the rise of Covid 19. Being able to adapt and respond is essential and – without it – any business will flounder, including your own. 

Understanding these issues allows you to put in place plans to address your problems, helping to consolidate your place in the current market and care for your client’s unique needs. 

What do clients look for?

When it comes to working with clients, being able to provide high-level reliable care is essential. While it can be difficult to ‘go the extra mile’, focusing on some elements of your work can be massively rewarding for your clients and customers, and allow you to enjoy the recurring revenue needed to remain afloat in a competitive market. Some key elements include-

Follow Through: One of the most essential attributes for any business, being able to commit to a task and complete it is essential. Having the ability to track client and customer demands on your system and access them with reminders can quickly and elegantly allow you to take care of key issues when it matters most. 

What you want to hear: “I really appreciate you coming through on this one!”

Insight: Being able to spot opportunities for professionals and businesses can be incredibly helpful and allow your company to act as an external resource. This can be as simple as having an awareness of upcoming trends, changes to standards, or finding the right, well-rounded person to add value to a team. 

What you want to hear: “I didn’t realise that, that’s really useful information”

Connections: Overall, your job as a business is to be a facilitator and being able to put two and two together. If a business contacts your team, being able to quickly and correctly find the right individual to undertake a task is key. Being able to make a connection through professional research, digital assistance, or gut instinct is a highly valuable one and should be pursued through all possible avenues.  

What you want to hear: “They were a great catch; we’ll definitely be in touch in the future”

Care: The hardest to quantify. Having a provider give a damn allows a professional and a business to feel supported throughout the recruitment process. Working with a business or professional allows you to better understand their overall roadmap and anything that lets you provide the right person or opportunity to fulfil that, the better. This creates a reciprocal cycle of trust 

What you want to hear: “Thank you, we’ll be sure to watch out for that during the hiring process”

What can help the process?

Installing a new system can help you not only operate with greater efficiency but allow you to automate essential tasks and gather data about your work. This can help reduce errors, prompt call-backs or inquiries, and improve your responsiveness in the most saturated of markets – allowing your teams to enjoy full oversight of your customer base and provide the right professional for their unique needs.

Choosing the right system to support your work can allow greater-

Oversight: While it’s impossible (and unwise) to micromanage every element of your business, choosing a digital system can allow you to enjoy awareness of all segments of your business. This can help with the maintenance of client casefiles, harvesting big data for business improvements, or allowing you to track your budgets and overheads with ease – letting you make the right decisions for your business that are backed up with evidence. 

Productivity: If you’re looking to get more out of your teams without risking burnout, digital systems can prove to be a valuable force multiplier. Streamlining processes, helping with invoice generation and daily timekeeping can free up time in the day to allow the members of your team to not only complete their work but to do it right.

Bespoke Care: Any reliable system will be highly customisable and be able to match your daily workflow, letting you get the most out of the system without having to significantly change your approach. Where overall improvements are necessary, many systems can enjoy ‘out of the box’ deployments that standardise and regulate your daily practice. 

Finding the right provider can help you make the most out of your staff and improve your approach without additional resource expenditure, allowing you to get more for less and improving your organisation and awareness of your stable of clients and across the sector as a whole.

What next?

If you want to learn more about improving your approach to recruitment or your overall practice, our team at Practical Software is here to help. With many years’ experience, we are on hand to provide the professional care you need to optimise your approach.

You can view our full list of services and packages here. Or, if you have specific questions and queries, please do not hesitate to get in touch directly and let us know exactly what you need to improve your daily operations and ensure that your work is future-proofed for the years ahead.