How to run a successful recruitment business: start with your back office

It’s been a demanding year for every sector, and the recruitment industry has been hard hit. Furlough, redundancies and hiring freezes made life challenging for agencies in 2020 – but there’s no reason that your business can’t bounce back in 2021.

Whether you’re launching your own recruitment company, recovering from a tough twelve months, or just eyeing future growth, everyone wants to know the secret to running a successful recruitment business. And there’s thousands of articles about finding the right niche and marketing to new clients. But relationships alone won’t secure your long-term prospects.

To build a robust, scalable recruitment agency, you need to take an inside-out approach – investing in your internal systems and processes as a matter of priority. Practicing business self-care will enable you to run a smart, efficient operation, so you can focus on high value activities while driving more time and money into client-facing opportunities.

The hidden burden on recruiters  

Many recruitment agencies lose valuable time and money on a daily basis through one simple mistake: spending far too much time on admin.

Paperwork needs to be done, but it shouldn’t be the majority of your workload. As a business owner, your ideal scenario is to get back office tasks running like a well-oiled machine, with minimal manual intervention required.

The easiest place to start is by looking at which jobs currently take up most of your day or week, and consider how they can be streamlined. For example:

• Are you constantly having to chase contract workers who’ve forgotten to submit their timesheets?
• Are the timesheets you do receive in different formats, so your team has to collate them in order to invoice clients?
• When a candidate lands a job, does the onboarding process involve lots of documentation that can easily get lost in inboxes?
• Is it difficult to find where contractors’ ID and other assets are saved on your system whenever you need to prepare paperwork for a new role?
• Are your invoices calculated individually, so figures need to be double checked before they go to the client?
• Do you frequently need to chase payments – despite improvements to the Prompt Payment Code – which impacts your business cash flow?

Much of this everyday admin burden is caused by recruiters relying on manual working processes. Doing everything by hand slows down essential processes and leaves your company vulnerable to mistakes and inaccuracies. Plus, most admin tasks are boring!

How to become a better run business

To enable long-term success, the biggest single improvement you can make to your internal processes is onboarding recruitment back office software.

The more admin tasks you automate and streamline, the less time your team will spend on mundane, repetitive jobs – and the more time they’ll have to nurture client relationships.

For simplicity and cost-effectiveness, look for technology that can manage every aspect of running your recruitment business through one platform, rather than investing in multiple solutions.

Ideally, one piece of software should be able to do all these things:

• Integrate and format timesheets, to process contractor hours in the layout requested by your clients
• Instantly calculate invoices based on the hours submitted, so you can email them to your clients in one click (with timesheets attached)
• Automatically chase overdue timesheets, paperwork and invoice payments, cutting back on follow-up emails and phone calls
• Enable candidates to sign contracts online and upload documents to one easy-to-access, web-based portal
• Get a real-time overview of all back office activities and transactions, so you can monitor cash flow and optimise performance

Keep costs down with a tightly-run ship

As the saying goes, change starts from within, and that’s certainly the case for recruiters. The more you can maximise operational efficiency and productivity, the easier you’ll find it to focus on attracting clients and expanding your agency.

Back office technology isn’t the most exciting of subjects, but the difference it makes to your business development strategy is significant.

Even when the market isn’t moving in your favour, a tightly-run ship will keep costs down, and empower you to capture the new opportunities that do come along. This will help you to survive lean moments – and be in the best possible shape to accelerate growth when the landscape is looking greener.

ETZ back office software significantly reduces the time recruiters spend on admin, cutting agency costs by up to 85%. Book your free demo to find out more.