Your staffing agency can only grow as fast as you can hire – and ironically, the talent acquisition strategies of recruitment agency owners are stifling their own business success.
56% of recruitment agencies cited internal talent attraction as their biggest challenge last year. With job vacancies across markets hitting their lowest volume in years, and end clients slashing their hiring budgets in response to the economic slowdown, staffing firms are increasingly competing for dwindling placement opportunities – and they need the best internal teams to succeed.
Poach the best consultants from your competitors. Here’s how innovative leaders are finding and hiring top performing recruiters.
The Reasons Why You’re Struggling to Recruit Internal Talent
Sales by nature is difficult to hire for: a highly competitive function, business development requires inherent personal qualities such as tenacity in abundance, as well as the ability to leverage vast amounts of market and business knowledge. Recruitment consultants need an even more specific and niche set of skills including:
- Low Quality Existing Talent Pool
- Leadership – Most recruiters aren’t trained in management skills before they get promoted into management positions. Fast career development is a key incentive for hungry consultants, but accelerating individuals up the career ladder purely on placement success rather than soft skills and team-building potential will quickly lower leadership quality. Bad leaders make bad hires, preventing their teams and therefore the whole business from growing in size.
- Relationship-Building – The candidate-client balance requires smoothly adapting to the very different needs of many stakeholders from one conversation to the next. Recruiters working across markets often switch between languages, cultural etiquette and levels of formality in minutes.
- Communication – Sales is primarily about face-to-face and phone-to-phone conversations, but written communication is a vital daily tool for every consultant, and seldom tested in the assessment process or trained in new hires. Emails and CRM usage are more than admin but essential to maintaining candidate engagement and capitalising on every opportunity to get a placement over the line.
- Compliance – The many pitfalls of IR35 are compounded with a wealth of legislation for every country your agency operates in. From staffing licenses and work visas to arranging travel and accommodation for migrant workers, legal nous is woefully undervalued in potential talent but costs agencies £millions in fines, lost client accounts and reputational damage.
- Granular Technical Understanding – Education consultants can’t source and place the best teachers without understanding the nuances of their individual subjects, Key Stage level and SEND skills. IT resourcers need to know which software, coding languages, platforms and GenAI-driven tools their candidates are using, as well as a basic to intermediate understanding of how each of these work.
The best recruiters want to work for the agencies that will see them succeed in their roles for at least the next few years. If your existing workforce contains poor performing recruiters, junior talent won’t believe your company can offer them the training and development for an optimum career path, and senior talent won’t want to join your business to lead low-skilled teams.
- Poor Employer Brand
The best talent attraction strategy means nothing if the best talent has a low opinion of your company to begin with. Staffing SMEs particularly struggle with their brand image in the market due to:
- Narrow Reach – For all the adverts generated by recruiters every day, firms neglect to invest in their own brand advertising, to their own detriment. Employer brand image goes beyond LinkedIn but extends to all the areas potential employees are visiting for information and connection, including recruitment industry blogs, message boards, influencers, social media channels and events. Failing to show up regularly in the physical and digital spaces preferred by your talent pools makes your brand just one of a thousand when they’re searching for potential employers.
- Providing a Poor Working Experience for Existing Employees – Employees aren’t shy about sharing their anonymous opinions of their current and former workplaces. 50% of job seekers check Glassdoor reviews, and half of all candidates report that they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation online. If your current workforce is unhappy with their pay, workload, management or career progression, they’ll tell the world – and the world will believe them.
- Neglecting Diversity & Inclusion – The recruitment industry’s historical dog-eat-dog reputation has evolved in recent years, but the sector remains male-dominated and unrepresentative of the society it serves. Almost one third of all UK recruitment firms are led by a Board that’s only 5% female (or even less). Experienced female and minority recruiters who see a lack of diversity in your leadership team will believe, rightly or wrongly, that their own future lies elsewhere.
- Relying on the Same Old Methods to Solve New Challenges
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. You tell your clients to think differently when approaching new hiring projects: your hiring strategy must also respond to fast-changing candidate needs and demands.
In today’s market, traditional talent attraction methods aren’t working:
- Referrals – Every individual’s closest personal and professional connections tend to reflect their own background and beliefs. Employees overwhelmingly refer former colleagues and friends who are very like themselves. Poor performers will recommend other poor performers, just because they like working with them (especially when they’re financially incentivised to recommend them through your bonus-based referral programme).
- Job Boards – Most staffing firms spend multiple hundreds of thousands on job advertising annually. The most valuable candidates are often lost through careless CV sifting by unskilled teams, who are overwhelmed with vast volumes of applications to poorly written adverts. LinkedIn isn’t the magic answer and the whole world of data at your fingertips is meaningless without a job description that reaches and excites choice-rich applicants across the channels they actually visit.
- In-House Resourcing – Your employees know your business, but few internal recruiters and HR teams possess the full knowledge they need to assess top billers’ niche industry understanding and expertise to respond to market changes in an agile way. Rec2Recs with specific focus on your client sectors and candidate functions may cost more per hire, but their headhunting efforts can deliver far better quality.
5 Ways to Find Recruiter Talent – How to Hire for Your Sales and Delivery Teams
- Headhunt from Micro-Agencies
LinkedIn reports that only 1 in 4 professionals across sectors and functions are actively job hunting at any one given time. The prospect of a cold desk and months without commission are particularly daunting in today’s cost-of-living crisis, limiting top billers’ desire to take chances in their careers. Most active job seekers are younger, junior employees who are more likely to job-hop early in their careers, leaving a dearth of available talent at the top.
Although there are over 40,000 recruitment agencies operating in the UK, 80% of these agencies work in micro-businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Sole traders are likely to enjoy the independence of their own companies, but could collaborate with you on a temporary or project basis for mutual benefit. Co-Founders who have become disenchanted with high workloads and slow growth, and naturally gifted recruiters who joined a start-up but hit a ceiling without in-house training and progression opportunities, are ripe for the picking.
Target niche micro-agencies for capable recruiters with niche skills that match your market and career, commission and culture needs that aren’t being met by their current employers.
- Open Your Search to Wider Regional & International Talent Pools
Remote and hybrid work can seem anathema to a sector founded on human connections. Whilst in-person interactions are an important part of workplace culture for extroverted salespeople, on-site presence isn’t essential for training, collaboration and motivation with the right strategy and management. The best recruiters are worth the compromise.
Instantly widen your talent pool from thousands to millions by searching overseas. Consultants in other locations can find better flexibility, variety and team cultures from a UK-based business that they can’t get from employers in their home locations. Recruiters from minority groups are often ignored, underpromoted and actively discriminated against in their country of residence, and can particularly benefit from working for an international employer that values performance over personal characteristics.
- Hire for Proven & Potential Skills, Not Arbitrary Experience
X years at certain HR and staffing firms doesn’t automatically equal consultant expertise. Fishing exclusively from larger competitors can deliver recruiters who have fallen into bad practices, relied on tired techniques to attract candidates, and neglected their own development because they’ve been able to hide mediocre vacancy fill rates amongst lower-performing colleagues.
One in five candidates are hired without a single reference check, and of those who are asked for references, 23% report that their referees were never even contacted. Seek out multiple references, not just those supplied by your candidate, but from several of their former workplaces. Weed out candidates who have cultivated manager preference through friendships and personal bias by asking around your existing connections for insider feedback that might surprise you.
Implement skills-based hiring rather than searching for the same old employer names and keywords on CVs. Ask your existing teams what they most want and need from a manager to help them upskill in their own roles. Consult your executives on the skills a potential star player will need to succeed immediately and evolve along with the business.
- Offer a Truly Competitive Employer Package
Smaller brands competing with global leaders must provide a more attractive package – but many are failing to step up. Most employees don’t truly value or even use the variety of benefits on offer, such as free breakfasts, shopping vouchers, gym membership discounts, annual gifts and internal awards.
Reduce your recruiter offering down to focus on what recruiters most want from their employers:
- Commission – Star performers hit a ceiling in most companies. Appeal to the interests of potential talent with a commission structure that grows incrementally, with opportunity for a higher percentage of margin added to their take-home pay as they achieve a higher placement percentage over and above their targets. Bonuses tied to individual and team performance are more directly connected to effort than bonuses based on overall business revenue, and therefore more encouraging to individual new hires.
- Social Events – Team gatherings should present opportunities to connect and reward your teams, as well as encouraging brainstorming and collaboration. Offer social events during office hours so working parents don’t miss out, and go for fewer, higher budget events that employees truly enjoy participating in rather than just drinks every Friday.
- Flexibility – More than just deciding on which days they come to the office, senior consultants want real autonomy over where and how they work. Flexible starting and finishing hours open up your talent pools to those with disabilities and caring responsibilities, and show job applicants that your company will enable them to fit their work around their personal needs and lifestyle.
- Partner Agency Suppliers
Recruitment industry suppliers such as umbrella and contractor management providers work directly with thousands of recruiters. Your suppliers can each provide you with:
- A handful of names of experienced recruitment consultants they know well, for quality referrals you can trust
- Insider insights into what recruiters are most frustrated with in their current roles and what they would most value in a new employer, to help you tailor your talent pitch
- Market knowledge on competitor changes such as planned layoffs that you can leverage to target near-ready talent pools that the rest of your peers don’t know about yet.
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Generate support over 500 staffing agencies with over 100 international payroll solutions. We know what makes for the best recruiters, and we support them to provide the best candidate experience for the best placement rates. Discover how our finance and compliance experts can help your teams succeed.
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