In a competitive job market, finding new clients is always difficult. Every recruitment firm must continually seek clients that can support them in the long run in order to expand and become financially sustainable.

We’ve had a number of recruiters write on LinkedIn and drop emails asking “How to get clients for a staffing agency?” or “How do we keep finding endless clients?” We decided to devote a full-fledged lengthy post to this.

Traditionally, a recruiting agency’s outreach efforts such as advertising job positions, shortlisting prospects, and conducting interviews, among other things, are adequate. And focusing just on this will never lead to long-term success in acquiring clients.

In an ideal world, all recruitment agencies want to attract clients to themselves and increase clients coming to them with their recruitment requirements. However, with 20,000+ recruitment agencies available, only in the U.S, operating 39000+ offices. It’s safe to say the space is crowded. 

Needless to say, this creates a need for agencies to strategize their approach plan, improve outreach and streamline the process. Read on for tips on how recruitment agencies can find clients, to keep the business running.

1. Use Job Portals To Know Who Is Hiring

All companies, irrespective of the industry, use job boards for the job posting. Usually, companies find job portals very effective to recruit, however, this may not work out best if it’s a time-critical position. This is where recruitment agencies can step in, and get in touch with these companies to discuss how recruitment agencies’ hiring services can help them fill positions with qualified candidates.

Proactively crawling job portals help assess prospective clients and their recruitment needs. Use recruitment CRM to manage leads for staffing companies and future relationships that you would build with clients. Using job boards could be the easiest way for recruitment agencies to prospect for new clients.

2. Connect On Social Media

Social Media has created a virtual world of communication for all spheres, hence, it’s no surprise that it has also made inroads for recruitment-related activities. Almost every potential client and applicant can be found on social media. 

Did you know nearly 49% of professionals follow companies to stay aware of their jobs? In fact, networks like LinkedIn, Quora, and Facebook are used extensively for running employee branding campaigns. Similarly, these platforms can be used for putting the word out there for your recruitment agency. 

Another good way to leverage this would be to join professional communities such as pages and groups to network with potential clients.

3. Ask For Referrals To Existing Clients

Like any other business-to-business company, recruitment agencies have to spend time cultivating connections and maintaining professional relationships. 

Read Also: How do I Find The Best Recruitment Agency?

Here, identifying decision-makers and end beneficiaries helps understand how much effort to put in with each stakeholder. For instance, hiring managers will revert back to the agencies which helped them during the time of recruitment. Later, you can seek a referral with this manager and look for some new leads. Or even ask this connection for prospecting if anyone in his or her network is looking for recruitment services.

While some clients are proactive in spreading the word about your staffing company, some may require a nudge. Don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for referrals either through regular communications or emails.

4. Many Recruitment Agencies Find Clients Through Cold Calling

Cold calling is the oldest trick in the book, for prospecting clients in both B2B and B2C settings. However, it can prove to be expensive with little returns if not done correctly. In recruitment, cold calling has proved to be very successful. A Twitter survey suggests, 50% of the agencies rely on cold calling for prospecting clients. 

It is important, however, to put in some work before adopting this method. First and foremost, identify the persona of your potential customer. Then create the target groups, and map their needs with the services you are offering. 

Secondly, book the right time slots and places for conducting the discussion. Thirdly, instead of making a generic pitch, make it specific by pitching for current open positions. This shows you mean business and a positive response is more likely. 

5. Run Email Campaigns And Track Them

This is a tried and tested method, and its effectiveness is also questioned time and again. Despite the debates, email campaigns actually produce results to compete with social media. Auto-forwarding a single email to all clients will surely result in failure. Thus, to make this method a success is to ensure the content shared is relevant, personalized, and of use for potential customers. 

Another useful tip is to use analytics from recruiting CRM to plan and monitor email marketing. This will help you target your efforts better, and reap the results. Using technology for your efforts certainly brings great results, faster!

6. Participate In Networking Events

Networking is the most overused word in the world of marketing, sales, and career. Everyone can gain from networking. 

The most common way to network is to participate in corporate or local networking events. However, many times, we miss tapping into our organic networks of college friends, college alumni, former colleagues, bosses, and fellow contacts. They may know people or local businesses who may benefit from your service. Hence, maintaining a strong network is vital to cast the net wide. 

7. Be Found Using Content Marketing

Everyone does their research before they make any decision. And they use Google search as their primary tool to do that. Be it buying a new television set or making a business decision, everyone does Google search. What do you think companies seeking recruitment agencies would do? They would mostly Google for the best recruitment agencies. And you want to be on that search result. Don’t you?

The only way you can be on a Google search list is by writing relevant content. Creating quality content and producing it regularly is no easy task, but with the search engines adding to the promotions it’s a tool for the future.

Content marketing is a passive method that aims at creating trails and bringing in visitors. When content marketing starts working for you, it could bring exponential growth to your business. Investing in creating an authoritative and knowledgeable web presence will increase the chances of clients approaching you for solutions.

8. Upgrading And Staying Up To Date

All companies and individuals are painstakingly aware of the dynamic shift technology has brought to the world, and the capability of technology to reshape the future. As a result, each one of them wants to be future-ready and drive adoption. Thus, optimizing your process and keeping track of the latest practices will help you improve success rates. 

Recruitment technology is no different. It is advancing every day. For example, investing in ATS and CRM makes the recruitment cycle easy to track. According to Recruiting Software Impact report by Capterra, 75% of recruiters use some form of ATS, out of which 94% it has helped improve the hiring process. 

From social media enrichment to automated data extraction and job portal integrations, there are a plethora of innovative tools being deployed to expedite the hiring process. 

Many recruitment agencies use either ATS or CRM to streamline recruitment activities. However, an ATS which offers well-rounded CRM functionalities can be the differentiator between acquiring a client and losing the deal. And since this software allows you to track, manage, communicate and follow up with prospects over time you can be assured of doing justice to a lead. 

In summary, adding layers of efficiencies, deploying the latest tools, and finding a smarter way to connect with prospective clients will make all the difference. Be it a customized newsletter for each industry or adding a personal touch in cold calling, these small changes will make you and your firm stand out and win.

How To Get Clients As A Recruiter?

You may boost your own outreach by taking a more proactive approach and streamlining your recruiting agency’s efforts by using some of the tactics discussed below.

1. Firstly, Have Your Client Persona Ready

Your primary task is to first identify your target audience. Map out the following—

• Who are your prospective clients?
• Where will you find this target client base? Is it primarily LinkedIn?
• Do you have your client persona ready?
• What are you willing to offer to your prospective clients?

Get these ready before you even plan how you’re going to reach out.

2. Find Clients Via Job Posting Websites

Job posting websites are a goldmine for finding clients for your recruitment agency. If you ignore or underutilize them, you may be missing out on something significant. Job boards are typically nothing but job search engines. There are a lot of companies that post open roles they are hiring for on these job posting websites.

There are several niche job forums catering to various industries like Monster, Snag, and Craigslist. Carefully evaluate companies continuously posting their open job roles on these websites. It could either mean they are aggressively hiring or failing to hire for their open roles.

Keep an eye out. Reach out to them and pitch your recruiting agency. Tell them how you can help double their talent or meet their needs with the talent pipeline in your recruiting database.

3. Utilize Social Media

Over 80% of companies are using social media to hire new candidates. Businesses use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media sites as recruitment advertising platforms in order to hire. That’s a sizable number of followers and potential clients for you to contact as you concentrate on expanding your client list.

Nowadays, having professional networks on social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn or in several related pages and groups would be amazing tools for creating connections and attracting clients, even if they are not actively seeking employment.

Keep a track of what your prospective clients are doing. If they are renting a new office or releasing a new product, reach out and congratulate them and ask if they are in need of new talent.

4. Send Out Cold Emails

If you think email marketing is dead, then you’re very wrong. As per HubSpot, email generates $42 for every $1 spent, making it one of the most effective options available for recruitment agencies.

You may try sending out cold emails. Cold emails might lead to an empty worksheet that fills up during the weekend. However, the way in which you send such emails is crucial.

You might improve your cold email writing skills by watching many YouTube videos or enrolling in an online course. Professionally written personalized emails will enhance your open rates, improving the probability of successful client conversions.

Your agency might even want to sign up for mass emailing software or even build your own to target a large number of prospective clients in one go.

It is just as important to keep track of the performance of your emails as it is to produce them. So, keep an eye on the results. List all of the objectives you wish to achieve with these emails and grade your success accordingly.

5. Phone Calls For Follow-Up

Following up is critical. Despite the fact that email marketing is an important tool, a survey found that 60% of potential customers say no four times before saying yes, while 48% of recruiters never make a single follow-up effort.

Your client may have planned to contact you to review further during the first conversation, but owing to the demands of their day-to-day operations, this may have slid lower down their priority list.

They will sometimes entirely forget that they received your email. As a consequence, making a follow-up phone call is extremely crucial. Existing clients should also be polled during follow-up calls to determine their level of satisfaction with your service.

6. Promote Client Referrals

In terms of gaining new clients for your recruiting firm, your readiness to seek referrals from prior clients may make or break your sales. There is no better or more cost-effective marketing or outreach tactic than word-of-mouth recommendations. Did you know that 78% of people rave about their favorite recent experiences to people they know at least once per week?

Consider points of contact who have just migrated to a new firm but may give insight on who to contact at their new or old company. Although many businesses will spread the word about you to their contacts, others may need to be reminded of the importance of recommendations.

Don’t be afraid to ask for them, whether during a normal chat, an email marketing campaign, or a talk with a key contact person. Send your clients a handwritten thank you note and two copies of your business card, one for themselves and one to share with a colleague or friend. As the world becomes more and more digital, these personalized touches may go far.