Is your staffing agency on track to achieve your revenue and growth goals for 2021? How about 2022? Are your recruiters?
Staffing agencies are operating in some of the toughest markets and harshest conditions in living memory but there is almost incredible demand in some sectors and specific roles. Some consultants have a drastic shortage of talent to fill their vacancies, whilst others have too many applicants and not enough quality to fill the jobs. Other agencies don’t have the right staffing technology stack in place to drive their process efficiently and their hiring process is too slow. To focus on driving revenue growth, here are a few top tips and observations we’ve pulled together from our most successful Staffing Website Design clients.
Tip 1: Analyse Placement Activity:
Your placement funnel data is usually the most enlightening “Ahha” moment that’s already at your fingertips. This analysis can have a dramatic and significant impact on your bottom line. Often, it’s understanding this data, being able to report on it, and interpret it that gives you the highest ROI after running your analysis on your applicant tracking system (ATS). Using tools such as Cube19, you can get massive insights into what your business is doing “under the hood” as well as how to control it better and produce better business outcomes. Staffing Future helps staffing agencies drive activity at the “top of the sales funnel”, helping staffing agencies analyze data before it goes into your ATS. Driving time on site, repeat visitors, conversions, and engagement, as well as using technology to push notifications to your target audience can drive a huge uplift in prospective placements and more clients through your sales process faster. Even understanding what content you should be producing has a huge impact on the top of your sales funnel and business process.
Your Placement Funnel is a visual way of understanding the total number of jobs or mandates you start working on that eventually become placements that convert into revenue. This gives the staffing agency leadership team conversion rates for each stage in your sales process. In other words, this report can show you how efficient your firm is at placing candidates, so you can identify weak points in your conversion process. Monitoring this data regularly and using it to drive activity on a weekly basis allows you to “improve your game,” as well as identify additional opportunities to improve, drive productivity and revenue.
Tip 2: Identify Clients That Make You Money:
Taking a moment to deep dive into your data and take a detailed and analytical look at past performance can help you identify which of your clients aren’t profitable. This allows you to focus your recruiter’s efforts on those clients that make you more money faster, are more profitable. The time you take to review this will help you build a higher quality sales pipelining process. This allows you to win in other areas too, like driving more engagement and doing more outreach on those particular clients that are bringing in the most profit, not those that are making the most money. Business intelligence software can quickly generate reports for you to help analyze this data, freeing you up to drive your business cleanly.
Tip 3: Harvest Opportunity from Social Media:
Most staffing professionals understand the value social media could bring. Personal branding, engagement, reach, opportunity, lead discovery, this new business conversion would have been a pipe dream just a few years ago. Most recruiters rely on LinkedIn, but the potential payoff for leveraging all of the “big three” (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) social networks and niche counterparts such as GitHub, Stackoverflow or Xing allows you to reach, connect, engage and convert passive candidates into your talent pipelines.
Facebook is usually underutilized by recruiters and has almost 4 or 5 times more users than LinkedIn. Some sectors just aren’t on LinkedIn nearly as much either. While it’s generally still perceived as a personal network, Facebook has grown up and now has forums, messenger, groups, pages with incredible targeting functionality (Such as Friend Lists or follower lists as well as location, income, and interests). Recruiters taking advantage of this usually outperform their competitors.
In addition to the networks, you can also be proactive and introduce technology to drive your sales process – like retargeting, remarketing or boosting your post reach to specific audiences in specific locations you’re trying to engage with. Staffing agencies understand they need to push content regularly, but how do you find content your audience will want to engage with? Consistently. Paiger is a piece of staffing technology that helps with that sales automation and scheduling as well as lead generation and targeting. After you’ve decided on the channel, and the audience you’re trying to engage with, then you need to consider the content format you’ll be using to engage with people Blogs for SEO are great at generating time-on-site and visitors, but only if you have the right content, audience, and calls to action embedded on the page to convert your ideal target audience.
Tip 4 Write Purposeful Content with Intent
More often than not, the highly targeted candidates you are trying to recruit won’t answer your phone calls and/or respond to your messages because they are busy and/or focused on something else. Making a connection with them can be extremely challenging. One way to connect with high-quality talent is to use compelling, attention-grabbing, informative content. Ask your in-market experts, respected clients and awesome talent to join online discussions, share your content, and engage with your posts so your content can begin to generate leads, engagement, and conversion. This can require a great deal of subject-matter expertise, but if you break it down, it can be very simple. Once you have a rhythm, you can then start to create a long-term steady flow of candidates and clients that have the skills you need and are looking to work in roles you have. It’ll also help your reputation, build awareness and convert leads that are already in your sales process or on your database that you’re not engaging effectively with.
Tip 5: Increase Placements Using Job Aggregators:
Posting job adverts to your company website (routinely) or a job aggregator / job portal is sure to increase visibility, drive applications, maintain quality, reduce time to shortlist, interviews, and make placements faster. All driving revenue. Quite often, staffing agencies struggle to get their job adverts visible and online, targeting the right audiences effectively or converting the right candidate profiles for their roles. Keeping your job adverts fresh, taking into account Diversity and Inclusion, with technology such as Get Optimal, makes it easier for recruiters to get the applications they want, not too many applications they don’t want.
Sharing your jobs on your social channels and syndicating them on wide-reaching job aggregators such as Google for Jobs, Indeed, Adzuna, Talent or Neuvoo is commonplace now. All your vacancies should be distributed on these channels. If you have a particular requirement, you can easily boost these to drive applications for specific roles, in specific locations and specific job titles. This activity helps you launch into new markets, locations, and sectors and build your reputation along with your revenues. All Staffing Future staffing websites run Future Portal to help you automate this process and increase your job visibility.
Your candidates are one of your key sources of cash flow into your business. Without them, you can’t close deals. You don’t make a profit.
The way we work is changing. With more people choosing to leave the 9-5 and joining the evolving remote or freelancing industry, more workers are assessing where their careers might take them. Take advantage of all of these people considering change, and introduce yourself as the staffing business to facilitate it.
Staffing is a highly competitive industry. If your agency doesn’t spend time focused on your growth and profit strategy, you will get left behind. As competition intensifies, increasing your staffing agency’s profitability should be a top priority.
This should help you strategize.
Tip #6: Increase your margin
Focus on vanity metrics or sanity? Revenue or placement volume? Rather than focusing your time and effort on top-line growth alone, a key way to improve your profitability is to focus on one shared focal point: Margin.
Using some of these tips is how some of the staffing agencies Staffing Future work with improving their margins.
Tip #7 Evaluate your pricing structure
Focus your best efforts, talent, and attention on selling in your most profitable channels. Look for fresh ways to increase the value you offer to prospects and customers without the heavy lift in your process.
What have you got already that you can use better, smarter, or faster already?
Analyze and review your client list and determine which clients are making you the most money right now?
Which sectors, clients, and locations have the most growth potential?
Which clients or consultants aren’t making you money? Cut them loose.
Lower your customer acquisition costs and cut any unnecessary overhead as soon as you can.
Tip #8: Evaluate how well technology is working
Redesign your workflows, create your ideal workflows and design your technology and systems for greater efficiency (back office, technology, process, data, analytics, job ad posting, reporting, etc)
Take a closer look at your advertising and candidate sources. Ask yourself challenging questions like
How many candidates sent for an interview / placed were already on your ATS? Identify where your fresh candidates are coming from that are being placed into roles.
Establish how long your team spends searching your database before advertising a new role. Do they need training or help to mine your data?
How clean is your data – you may have thousands of applicants but you won’t find the needle in the haystack if your records are not tagged correctly, easy to sort by sector, location, experience, qualification, industry, and work type. Data hygiene and discipline are key here.
Is your website design performing and could it be performing better? Is your conversion rate strong or below average?
How many new business leads did your website generate last quarter?
How much placement revenue and how many interviews? What percentage vs other channels?
Eliminate tasks and activities that don’t add value to your company, customers or candidates
Make sure your technology stack is agile, responsive and you’re not wasting money on technology you thought was a good idea but don’t use or you’re not using properly.
Ensure your consultants are trained up on your tech and know how to use it effectively.
Review your staffing technology solutions – there are usually always ways to convert or disqualify opportunities faster, harvest revenue earlier and make better use of the technology you have in place already. If you’re not using your technology effectively, you’re losing on both your top and bottom line.
Tip #9 Benchmark your team and their activity
Know and understand what “good” looks like so you can see where you’re going wrong. Don’t be afraid to iterate, test and measure, and iterate your recruiting process forward. It’s better to make small, consistent gains of 1 or 2% rather than a whole heap of changes and make an 8% leap once a year. It’s this that drives innovation and success at all major technology companies. What do your site metrics tell you? Bounce rates and conversion rates? What about applicant flow? Where is the “heavy lift” in your process that you can shorten, reduce or eliminate?
Tip #10 Expand into new sectors
Most staffing agencies focus on a few sectors they specialize in and recruit for. As your reputation grows within these and you become the “go-to recruiters” for employers to work with, the scope of your opportunity grinds to a halt.
Overcome this and continue to grow your business and your profit by branching out into new sectors if you’ve exhausted all the potential in your current sectors or locations.
Keep an eye on the business across the USA, Europe, or Asia for sectors that are increasing in demand and where there’s a shortage of high-caliber talent. Reach out to businesses that are growing in new, emerging markets and engage with them proactively.
We’re frequently asked by top staffing agencies operating in a variety of industries, as well as emerging industries what you should know, what trends are emerging, and what sectors are seeing growth. You may find that you’re close to reaching your limit in the geography you’ve chosen to focus on, with regards to the scope of work you have available. National or international recruitment can seem like a big, high-risk step to take, but get it right, you’ll see your profile grow, as well as your profit.
Tip #11: Let your competition inspire you
There is absolutely nothing wrong with assessing how your competitors are operating and adapting your business to what seems to be working for them to grow your own business. They’ll be doing the same thing.
Create a competitor analysis for your main competitors, know the following information:
How are they selling themselves on their website?
How do they present themselves in their marketing and messaging on LinkedIn?
What sectors do they work with, and you don’t? Why is that?
What kind of clients are they working with?
Who are their top billers?
What are their Glassdoor reviews like?
How can you learn from their mistakes and successes?
What’s their approach to new candidates and clients?
Do they have strong customer retention or high customer churn? Why?
Build up a strong picture of your competitors and share it with your team.
They might have more information to add and maybe inspired to try something new.
Tip #12: Take time to reflect
The first place to start is the last year of trading. Ask yourself, and your team, the following questions:
Did your business as a whole hit target?
Did individuals hit their targets?
Which quarter was the most successful?
Which month was the most successful?
Which industries made you the most margin?
Which industries did you work with most?
Were there any points where you felt your time wasn’t being well spent?
What changes did you make to your recruitment process, and was it what your clients wanted?
What similarities are there between your top candidates – volume and revenue levels?
What approach did the year’s top biller take? Can you replicate it across your team?
What was the best approach when reaching out to new clients?
What marketing tools and which marketing channels were the most successful?
What marketing tools were the least successful?
How many fresh business leads did you close from your website?
What’s your top-performing channel?
Did you attend any events that brought in results?
Where did you feel the budget was well spent vs those where it was wasted?
What channels were the best for finding new candidates? And placed candidates?
What’s important is to build up a picture of what works and what doesn’t. Highlight trends that appeared in your recruitment process, how you dealt with them successfully for candidates and clients as well as replicating best practices across your team to drive your growth.
Whatever information you pull out of the above exercises, positive or negative, can be used to help drive your growth and achieve your profit targets. You need to allocate some time and resources to drive your business forward or get in touch and we’ll help you out.