Today I want to share some of my top tips of starting your own recruitment business from home.

So, number one is to start with a niche market. When I chose to start my own recruitment business I selected the local market as it was close to home, allowing me to visit clients face to face. When I say niche, the talent pool on LinkedIn would need to have a candidate range of around 5000 and have enough companies with steady growth potential. So, let’s say for instance it might be accountants, so you could choose management accountants that are SME’s with between 10-50 staff; see how many are in that market, how many jobs are advertised on Indeed and how many candidates are on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great tool to give you preliminary information when you’re wanting to build a market. It means you don’t need to gather any big data information as LinkedIn is the main space where candidates hang out. So, number one is to start with a local, niche market.

Number two, is build a really good WordPress website for your brand and the business. It should only cost you around £500 – £1000 maximum to build a really good site. You can get some excellent designers out there from fiver.com and freelancer.com. It’s very easy to manage a WordPress site yourself and you can add a lot to it to make sure the brand looks cool, simple and sleek. There’s lots of Web sites out there you could check out to get some good ideas from. So, number two is to build a really good WordPress site that gets across not necessarily your USP’s but the benefit and the pain point that you’ll help the client with. That will differentiate you enough so you’re not a generic agency- your very niche.

Number three, I would subscribe to LinkedIn premium or recruiter. The reason I would do this, is to get you to market it really quickly rather than building your own data base. I would also use Google sheets in terms of old school spreadsheets to build that CSV file; then the data from there can be put on spreadsheets for your team of resources to manage. So they’re building up your business client leads. So make sure that’s managing the spreadsheet for now, you don’t need to mess around with fancy CRM systems. Trust me I’ve been down that road. I spent months researching different CRM systems, trialing them etc, I must have tried on about seven or eight. You spend so much time being immersed adding the contacts, then you think ‘actually this one doesn’t work’. When you’re starting your own business particularly your lifestyle business to grow it, you don’t really need all of those systems straight away. You need to get back to basics so start with LinkedIn and a spreadsheet for any clients.

Number four I would build what I would call a dream 100 client list. So I mapped out the market and identified who’s hiring the most, who’s got the most candidates within my niche, I mapped out a dream 100 list. I outsourced to get the data, so we found two or three hiring managers point of contact so you’re either looking for a CEO, Managing Director, Co-Founder or Owner and then the hiring point of contact number two would be in your department’s so say for mine it was IT So that would be a CTO IT Director for example. Find their email addresses so again we can put that into auto pilot later to get the leads coming in. So I would build that dream 100 list so a had my target list of people over a course of time. If you set the intention up with that list, trust me, leads will suddenly come into your inbound because you’ve set that intention. You might meet someone at an event and think ‘actually you’re on my team 100 list and wanted to speak to you’. So make sure you build that dream 100 list so you have a clear vision of what you want to do in the next 12 months.

Number five would be, outsource as many things as possible. So, don’t get bogged down with bookkeeping, your website building, data entry, managing payroll etc and chasing things. Outsource as many things as possible so you can focus on what you’re good at which is either speaking to candidates over the phone, speaking to the clients and meet them – they are the money tasks. Rule number one is cash is King. One of the people that used to follow, James Carney used to always say cash is King. When I met him, what would have been over a year ago now when he wanted to invest in my business. He always mentioned to me the number one advice he would give when starting recruitment businesses is always look after the cash, because everything else will look after itself. Always keep an eye on the cash. So make sure that you’re focused on the money tasks. To be clear, I would say the money tasks are candidates and clients. Putting them together and taking everything else away from recruitment, shows that those are the simple things that you need to make sure you can manage. Everything else, the fun, cool and shiny things like CRM systems, building a website needs to be given to someone else to make sure at the start you’re bringing in revenue. One of the things that really differentiated me in the market when I built my successful recruitment business was that I sold myself. I went out there from day one and really ground it out. So I was out there meeting clients every day, always messaging them or trying to get in touch with them every day. I didn’t go out and call call. So, I always made sure I had a warm lead coming in, again- another strategy that I can discuss in another blog post about how I brought in inbound leads every day of the week. So I would go and meet clients, get my personality across, get across how much passion I had for starting my recruitment business, and how much i could promise them and that really differentiated me compared to other recruitment companies. I stood out by actually going out to meet the clients. So, that would be another one of my tips- to make sure you can really sell yourself first.

So, I hope you found this article insightful – if you’d like to hear more then check out the free webinar that I host on a Tuesday and Thursday by clicking here.

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