A Six-Step Approach to Improve Your Recruiting Business

As an owner or leader of a recruiting firm, how much room for improvement do you think you have? What are you “leaving on the table” right now?

If you think you have the potential for significant progress and it matters to you, then read on. You’ll learn a proven process to improve your recruiting firm results. BTW, these principles apply outside of your business too. 

 Habits run our lives

As humans, we’ll continue to do what we’re accustomed to doing (habits) until we develop new habits to replace them. Most recruiting firm owners and leaders are habituated to focusing on what’s right in front of them… anything to help make placements today. This causes them to react quickly to phone calls, emails, staff issues, etc. Some of these “working in the business” activities are required to be effective. Think of these tasks as “maintenance-oriented" work.

 The problem is that working in the business can become a habit that keeps you away from the “working on the business” tasks that lead to outstanding results. Think of these tasks as “improvement and growth" oriented work.

 Here’s the kicker:  if your maintenance-oriented work isn’t balanced with improvement-oriented work, your business will decline over time since your environment is constantly changing. You’ll find it hard to adapt. The world-famous management consultant Peter Drucker said, “knowledge has to be improved, challenged and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” If you’re not consistently learning and improving, you’ll fall behind and pay a steep price!

 How do you keep improving your recruiting business?

Many owners and leaders want to know how to scale a recruiting firm. Unless you already employ recruiting industry best practices across the board, you're hindering your ability to scale, Below are six simple steps to improve your firm's results. Make these steps a habit, and you’ll stand out from your competition so that you can make more money with less stress:   

1. Keep records of just a few simple metrics that get to the heart of recruiting industry success. For example:
   • # Of candidate/client interviews per placement
   • # Of initial prospect conversations per quality job order
   • Percentage of jobs filled
2. Shortly after metric-related events occur (e.g., an initial prospect conversation), reflect on what went well and what didn’t. Note your insights. There’s an expression that says, “experience doesn’t make us smarter; experience plus reflection does.”
3. Review your metrics monthly so that you can spot trends. “On the spot” and monthly reviews bring different types of reflective value. Do both.
4. Make specific adjustments to your approach based on your insights (e.g., have an initial prospect conversation on Zoom instead of phone). Be willing to experiment with your techniques and measure the results of these experiments. This is the scientific method at work.
5. Talk to other people on your team and people in your industry to get their opinions and challenge your own. Industry mastermind groups and experts can be excellent resources for this.
6. Focus on continuous small improvements over time rather than sudden home run changes that will double your revenue in three months. The reality of success is more a compounding of constant improvements over time rather than a sudden epiphany.

When you study success in recruiting or any other field, you’ll find that an ongoing, deliberate improvement approach is one of the common denominators. When it appears from the outside that a person or company had “overnight success,” the people inside know that this wasn’t the case. 

What small steps will you take now to improve your results?