No matter the size of your agency or your role in recruitment, sourcing new clients to grow your business is always going to be high on your priority list. Whilst the ultimate goal is to establish an agency so successful that new leads come to you, it takes a lot of skill, planning and hard work to get to this stage.
There is much more to business development than just working on expanding your client and candidate bases. What you really want are systems and processes that drive a steady, predictable and sustainable flow of new leads for your business, but it takes time, strategic thinking and commitment to playing the long game if you want to see these results.
If you’ve been looking for meaningful, actionable business development ideas to help your recruitment agency grow, then look no further. Here are some of the most successful ideas we’ve seen working in the recruitment industry.
The idea that you just need to contact a certain amount of potential clients before one converts is flawed in many ways.
Firstly, it’s not very efficient. If you consistently spend lots of time contacting people who have no interest in working with you, then that time is being consistently wasted.
Secondly, if you’re wasting time pursuing endless new leads, you’re going to have less time to nurture the clients you’ve already acquired. Building meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships is a far better and more sustainable business strategy than trying to hit targets every month.
Making hundreds of prospecting calls every month in the hope that one of them might turn into a lead means that your chances of success are limited.
Even worse, you might start to gain a negative reputation.
Research from Social Talent found that 50% of a recruiter’s time is spent on unproductive prospecting. That’s a massive proportion of your working day wasted on leads that never go anywhere.
A high volume of calls should not be the KPI that your agency is pursuing unless it’s based on some pretty solid data and you’re not concerned about potential reputation risk. Equally, you shouldn’t be aiming for a high number of new clients every month if it’s going to mean they only stay with your agency for a short while.
Instead, find ways to connect with the right people who you know have a genuine motivation for working with you. Spend your time doing background research before any of the prospecting calls that you make, so that the conversations you have are meaningful, productive and help you to stand out.
We recommend that you always start a prospecting conversation with an angle in mind. If you haven’t got a specific story, event or interest point to begin your interaction with a potential client with, you need to go back and do some more research until you’ve got a plan in place.
You can read more about how to make positive impressions and build quality relationships with clients in our blog posts on How to Write A Killer Recruitment Sales Pitch and Cold Calling in Recruitment: Where You Might Be Going Wrong.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) activity improves the ranking of your website on search engines by increasing links to and from the site, regularly adding new content and incorporating keyword phrases that your target audience is searching for.
If you haven’t already incorporated SEO into your business development strategy, you’re missing a trick. It’s one of the best ways to increase leads by driving more organic traffic to your website.
The beauty of SEO is that as you develop your visibility, generating leads becomes passive and consistent. It also means that you are getting found through people actively searching for your service, increasing the number of leads you convert and reducing the amount of time you have to spend prospecting with clients who may not be interested.
SEO is also a cumulative process, so as you develop it over time you only get stronger and more effective. You rank higher and higher, and for more and more phrases. This means you only ever continue to grow the volume of targeted leads who are contacting you each month.
It is possible to teach yourself the basics of SEO and implement it in your business plan, or there are marketing firms out there who offer different SEO services and even specialist SEO for recruitment agencies (hint hint!). The work they do for your business may include technical optimisation, press coverage that leads to links to your website, or implementing a content strategy that helps you get found by more of the people who can become clients.
SEO that you can do for yourself includes improving the loading speed of pages on your website, optimizing title tags and meta descriptions and doing basic keyword research so that you can start increasing the visibility of your content for certain phrases.
These may seem like small places to start, but 57% of marketing executives say that website content development is one of the most effective SEO techniques, and over a third of SEO experts agree that title tags are the most important element you should optimise on a webpage to make a difference to your site’s ranking.
Small changes = big overall impact.
There is a huge opportunity in the recruitment industry to benefit from this, as we have found with all clients we work with where we’ve managed to make huge strides forward in a short amount of time. This had led to them getting a return on investment within a few months and that ROI only continues to grow from there.
A great pitch to a potential client is only as good as the evidence that supports it.
Therefore, a key strategy in business development is to lead with your success stories.
Instead of just a general introduction to your agency, always present a prospect with a clear outline of how you have helped other companies recruit talented candidates. We’ve found that the best way to get through to a potential client is to lead with data, as this will have much more of an effect than any amount of sales patter.
After all, truly impressive results will speak for themselves.
As well as persuasive statistics on candidate recruitment, retention and satisfaction, one of the best pieces of data you can collect is direct testimonials from other clients. Sharing evidence of your success on your website and social media will give your agency more credibility, along with letting any potential clients who have found you online know that you are an agency that really makes a difference.
This data also creates more opportunities for content that can be shared on social media platforms or optimised for SEO to drive more traffic to your site.
Two wins in one!
If you want to use your data for a more targeted approach, consider putting together a case study document that breaks down the work you have done for other businesses and explains your process. You can then send this document to a select few potential clients in a similar niche, providing them with solid evidence of what your agency could do for them if you had the chance.
The ultimate marker of business success is when your existing customers generate as many new leads as your marketing efforts. There’s truly no better source of advertising than satisfied clients who want to shout about the amazing work that you do.
But it’s not enough just to sit back and hope that your work speaks for itself. Unless you prompt your clients to share the word, most people are going to be too busy dealing with their own business to shout about your good qualities.
A great way to change this is to give existing clients a good reason to refer their friends and partners in the industry to you. By identifying what is valuable to them and offering it as an incentive, you’ll spread the word about your recruitment agency as well as making existing clients feel special.
According to Texas Tech University, 83% of consumers are willing to refer after a positive experience—yet only 29% actually do. At the core of this stat is the fact that consumers don’t have referring your business to others at the front of their mind.
Many agencies forget how powerful referrals are, and asking for them is simply not built into their sales processes. Start with your clients who have had the most success and work backwards to gain new business!
There are two approaches to incentivising referrals, depending on how well you know the businesses you work with.
One of these is to offer a simple cash incentive, discounted work in the future or even a free trial for something like content marketing or PR for a month. The more referrals a client makes, the more valuable the incentive that you offer.
Or, if you’re a smaller agency that knows your client’s on an individual level, you can offer an incentive that you know has personal value.
Things like tickets to sports games, favourite alcoholic beverages or items relevant to certain life events like a marriage or new baby all have the added benefit of demonstrating to your clients how much you care. And this exceptional customer service gives them yet another reason to refer you!
If you’re stuck, simply reach out to your prospects and ask them what they would be incentivised by, as people have different motivators that are sometimes impossible to guess.
Investing in PR work to drive leads is a strategy that recruitment agencies often don’t consider.
What they don’t realise is that they’re missing out on a marketing approach that can be incredibly effective.
Companies looking to partner with a recruitment agency are more likely to go to those who are known as experts within the industry and have a record of finding the best candidates for their client’s roles. If you want to establish this kind of expert reputation, PR is one of the best ways forward.
A PR strategy that improves your standing as an expert in the recruitment industry or within your sector is a key way in which you can boost your agency’s reach and generate new leads. If you’ve got the resources and want to really make a difference, hiring a PR expert will ensure that your agency starts receiving coverage and increasing its visibility from the get-go.
Things like press releases and PR campaigns are designed to catch the attention of precisely the audience you’re trying to target, as well as getting your name shared in prominent industry publications or national news websites. New clients might find you through this coverage, or it might just prove as a fantastic conversion tool when they see on your website that you’ve been featured on a variety of top media.
Even if you can’t hire a PR specialist, you can still work on building an endorsed reputation for yourself by identifying what existing media your target audience are already consuming and then trying to get your name shared there. You will then need to strategize how you’re going to get coverage and links from these sites, which could involve contacting journalists, offering a reciprocal feature or speaking to people directly.
Carroo is a recruitment app provider who has done several brilliant PR campaigns and stunts to get people talking about their business, and perfectly find the right balance between attention-grabbing ideas and relevant approaches that their potential customers are actually going to take an interest in.
Take a look at their #ProjectPicker PR campaign that involved getting real cherry pickers to get businesses ‘in front of the right people’. Or #ProjectPie that focused on getting their name in front of some of the North’s best recruitment agencies.
Pretty smart stuff.
Social media has been taking over the world of marketing and business development for quite some time now. If you’re not already on there, you’re majorly missing out.
But the majority of recruitment agencies are already established on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. The question is, how do you grow your visibility and establish a trusted following?
Our advice is to focus on key platforms where you know your target audience spends a lot of their time.
LinkedIn is obviously a core part of most recruitment agencies’ strategy, but being more strategic in how you use that and other platforms can result in a much better return on the time you’re spending. Instead of trying to manage profiles everywhere and spread yourself too thinly, you’ll be much more successful with a consistent, targeted approach.
We also advise on using different platforms for different purposes. LinkedIn might be a key place to grow a following and shout about your qualities for new business purposes, Instagram could be for showing off your culture internally and Twitter could be for engaging with influencers.
Once you’ve identified where your audience is spending time scrolling, decide what goals you’re trying to achieve with social media and what kind of content or campaign you are going to use for each of these.
If you’re just aiming for more followers, this could be a really engaging post series that you share across your profiles to try and bring more followers to a specific account. If you’re trying to increase website traffic, it could be a piece of content that you publish on your company blog and share snippets across places like Instagram and Twitter to drive more users to your site.
Strategy and forward planning are the keys to business development through social media. If you ensure that every post or piece of content is aligned to a business goal and can have its impact measured, you’ll ensure that you’re spending time productively and driving your company forward.
Finally, remember that social media is not just about your company account. Get your staff engaged and active on their personal profiles to further grow your reach and build your brand image, whether that’s through sharing their general experience at work or reposting content and success stories from within the business.
Email marketing is an approach that many people assume is dying out. But there are thousands of successful marketing experts who argue the exact opposite.
Not only is email one of the best channels to target warm leads, build loyalty with your client and candidate base, and convert passive leads into customers, statistics also suggest that ROI for email marketing is four times higher than any other digital marketing channel.
Who can argue with that?
All successful recruiters will know that prospecting both candidates and clients often involves playing the long game. One of the best ways you can keep your agency on your potential customer’s minds and target their specific interests is through automated email marketing campaigns that respond to reader behaviour and help you to more effectively target your audience.
First, you’ll need something on your website where people can enter their details and sign up for your emails. This could be through a lead magnet allowing access to a piece of gated content or a place to sign up for a regular newsletter.
You can then use an email marketing provider to set up a string of automated emails for your mailing list, beginning with an introductory message. Statistics show that welcome emails have an average open rate of 82%, so you really can’t afford to be missing out on all that engagement.
Instead of just sending out the same, generic email newsletter to everyone who has subscribed, the key to success is segmenting your audience based on what they are interested in and then personalising the emails they receive to increase engagement.
You can use your email marketing provider to track what links your readers open and engage with, and then tailor the content you send the next time around to make it more relevant to their interests. The more options for segmentation you set up, the higher your audience’s engagement and the more business you’re going to generate.
In the recruitment industry, email marketing is one of the most useful approaches you can use in your business strategy to drive and convert both clients and candidates. The above advice is only the tip of the iceberg – once you dive in there’s a whole world of tips and tricks to discover.
You can also use email in cold outreach, by using tools like LemList, or BombBomb. This allows you to stand out from the crowd by including video and other interactive, hyper-personalised imagery in your outreach. Imagine receiving an email with someone holding a laptop with your website, or LinkedIn profile, perhaps your name on a coffee?
Outreaching in this way can drastically improve your response rates, it’s all about standing out and making your cold outreach feel warm and researched.
It’s almost impossible to find anyone who doesn’t listen to podcasts nowadays. If you’ve got an interest in it, there’s probably a show out there.
In a similar vein to PR, podcasting is a great way of establishing yourself as a thought leader in the recruitment industry, particularly if you’re a specialist agency. Whether you focus on sharing advice, discussing the latest trends or interviewing prominent people in your industry, you’ll create regular content that can be used to drive traffic along with reaching a larger audience and cementing a sterling reputation.
Inviting guests onto your podcast is a particularly good move as it is likely they will share their episode with their following and help you get found by more people who already have an interest in what you offer. If you carefully select guests to match the profile of your target market, then the chances of new leads coming from there are extremely high.
But not only can setting up a podcast do wonders for your reputation; it will also help you to gain trust from potential clients when they are considering whether to use you or a competitor.
An agency that is not only confident enough in its talents to host a podcast about recruitment, but also speaks to recognised industry professionals is going to seem like the best choice when a company is deciding who to work with. Focus on producing the kind of content that you would love to listen to, and watch as interest starts to climb.
If you’d like some inspiration, check out our post on The 17 Best Recruitment Podcasts for a rundown of some of the most successful shows out there at the moment.
We’ve already banged on a lot about how business development for recruitment is often a long game. It takes time, persuasion and probably multiple visits to your agency’s website before a client decides they want to work with you.
So how can you ensure that you are staying at the front of your potential customer’s minds whilst they move down the buyer funnel?
Remarketing, that’s how.
Remarketing or retargeting is a form of paid advertising on places like Facebook, Instagram or Google where ads appear in front of people who have already visited your website. This means they already know who you are and have found your site for some reason, most likely by looking for your services or the general topic that you cover.
It’s an excellent way of ensuring that you don’t lose out on business because potential clients forget the name of your agency or the service you offer. Remarketing adverts can re-emphasise the strengths of your business and why people should work with you, or they can promote content you’ve produced that drives people to your site.
As paid advertising campaigns go, it’s one of the best ones to include in your business strategy.
Research has found that web users who are retargeted are 70% more likely to convert than those exposed to regular advertising efforts. That’s a pretty significant difference.
Whatever the goal, the key to remarketing is that you’re enabling yourself to be found by people who are already aware of you and in a place where you can tailor the message you want to communicate.
Rather than constantly contacting new people who have never heard of you, finding new ways to appear in front of an already warm audience is much more likely to breed success.
In the recruitment industry, partnerships don’t just have to be the companies you work with to source new candidates.
Partnering with brands who share the same customers as you can be a lucrative exercise. Not only is it a brilliant way to reach a wider audience, but you can also gain valuable industry insight and share data that can have a big impact on your business development.
Building a partnership with another brand is all about working together to increase the reach of your marketing material, target potential clients who otherwise might not have found your agency, and build a mutually beneficial relationship.
Depending on who your business strategy is targeting, you want to find a partner who already has an audience made up of potential clients or candidates. If you’re a specialist recruitment agency in a certain industry then this may be easier, but broad recruitment agencies can focus on a specific demographic and find a company that caters to this group.
Once you have found a brand to partner with, decide what it is you want to get out of this relationship. Are you looking to gain a certain number of new clients? Increase your social media following? Complete a PR campaign that brings your agency more attention from relevant publications?
Working with a partner can be as simple as sharing insights and data to improve both of your marketing strategies. Or it can involve sharing content across each other’s platforms, creating guest content or running joint advertising campaigns to boost reach.
The key thing to remember is that partnerships should be goal orientated. It’s nice to have friends in the industry who share a target audience, but if you want to focus on business development then a partnership should have clear aims that align with your goals.
Successful business development should always start with a long term plan to build systems and processes that gain momentum over time.
It’s important to celebrate what you achieve along the way, but you should also always keep your next step in mind along with how you can maximise the value of each tactic you are using down the line. Business development shouldn’t just be a checklist that you work through and forget about once you have reached a target; it’s an ongoing process that should influence everything you do to grow your agency.
From marketing to personal research, invest the time to ensure that every action you take sets you up as an agency that knows the market, cares about its clients, and goes above and beyond to get the job done.
If you do that, you will create a flywheel that consistently gains momentum and makes the business development process easier and easier as time goes on.
If you’re interested in finding out more about any of the above approaches to recruitment agency business development, why not get in touch with our team? We’re a bunch of industry experts who have helped countless other agencies grow, and you could just be our next success story.
About the author
Tom Mcloughlin is the Director of Growth Recruits. A passionate marketer, he loves sharing his ideas with the industry and helping people take that knowledge and use it to get extraordinary results.
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