For your staffing agency to grow and continue to win business from new clients, it’s essential to ensure new clients can find you, are aware of what you do and are attracted to you. Among the variety of staffing websites available today, clients should be confident and see that you have an efficient and easy application process. Employers want to see a sophisticated recruitment website design and quality controls in place to ensure quality and follow their brief effortlessly. Here’s what you can do to attract new clients to your staffing agency.
Master Matchmaking
For you to best serve your existing clients and thereby develop a reputation that attracts new clients, staffing businesses need to master match matching your candidates with your client companies. Having a thorough understanding of both company culture as well as candidate strengths and weaknesses is essential. Such understanding helps to ensure the most suitable employee is matched with the company culture. This successful pairing is what makes staffing agencies work and benefits the employer and agency. It’s important to understand if positions to be filled are temporary, contract or permanent so you can match the right candidate for the job. Developing expertise in a particular niche is a great way to provide specialized matchmaking and save a client time. You can identify your ideal target clients based on whether they are “volume buyers,” “boutique buyers,” or “everyone else” and act according to their needs.
Communicate Transparently, Network Often
Transparency in communicating how meticulously candidates are matched to jobs, where candidates are from, what source they came through, fees applicable to clients are all essential in building trust. It’s the consistency with which you do this that will create your reputation and brand, distinguishing you from your competition. Networking in person and across platforms, including LinkedIn, can be a powerful way to attract new clients, although its results may be seen over a longer period of time.
Harness Social Media Marketing
The digital age makes it necessary for you to market your staffing agency on online social media platforms as well. You need to be able to highlight why you’re unique and why clients should choose you through high quality, consistent content in order to attract new clients and retain existing ones.
Attend Trade Shows, Industry Associations
If you’re working in a niche area, attending trade shows and making use of industry associations for the target industry can provide you with ample opportunity to meet prospective clients for your staffing agency. Local trade shows and associations are also relatively cheaper, giving you good value for your efforts by exposing you to a pool of potential clients. You can even consider government staffing opportunities that have temporary requirements for staffing.
Use Referrals, Job Boards & Alerts
Referrals from clients who have been served successfully and are happy with your business’ offering can be helpful in boosting your image and attracting new clients to you. Even a job board can be a useful way to attract new clients and not just candidates for your staffing agency. Register for alerts from aggregators specializing in your niche to discover who’s hiring. Follow target client social pages and sign up for alerts. When they post a vacancy, you’ll be notified immediately and in a position to help them.
Don’t Neglect Cold Calling
As frustrating as cold calling can be, it can be used to generate leads and attract new clients. You need to be smart, do not waste time and ensure you have a purpose and pay off for your prospect taking your call. What’s in it for them? What is the change state that you’re able to offer your client before and after your call? Think hard about what you can do to add value to their business and use context to frame your discussions. Have they appeared in the news recently? Won an award? Recently announced a new strategy that you can help them achieve? Bottom line, why should they care? Make them aware and get to the point fast or you will waste a lot of time and miss better opportunities to win more business.
Ask For New Business
Within your existing client base, there could be similar hires you can make to expand your relationships with that employer in a different department with a different hiring manager. Ask for those internal referrals where you have already had success in the other areas or specialisms you recruit in. Cross sell other teams into those new client areas or learn the other areas they’re struggling to hire in and why, then introduce someone you trust who can deliver that brief for your client. This will not only help build your client’s confidence in you as a recruiter but as someone who’;s connected and can solve their business problems. Even better, this also helps with reciprocal referrals from the other recruitment consultant you’ve introduced your client to and will help your team expand business down the line.