8 ways to grow your recruitment agency. If you are an agency owner looking for ways to grow your recruitment business, you are in the right place! I decided to share my experiences in my expansion journey with you.

 8 ways to grow recruitment agency!

In this article, I will tell you about different ways I stumbled upon in my career that resulted in growing my / our recruitment business. And in this case, I assume that you own a recruitment agency and you want to expand this business. And when you want to start your agency, let’s say I will owe you that article!

Be amazing at sales

You must be a great salesperson. If you are not great at sales, you should stop immediately as you can´t be a business owner and even grow a recruitment agency if you are bad at sales.

Find great partners

Expand your recruitment business with partners!

Finding great partners is essential because, on your own, it is difficult to make it work. It is not impossible, but it is simply how you see yourself in the future. There is a reason that you searched and found this article, and that is because you want to grow your agency.

Our first recruitment agency, I started together with two friends in Slovakia. We already worked together at my previous job where we three were responsible for sky-high sales. We got the idea to start a recruitment agency in Slovakia. Because the market conditions were exciting. Slovakia was an emerging market, the labor costs were low, many big car manufacturers and other manufacturers started building factories there, and they needed many production workers. We were a great team, and we worked our asses off to grow our recruitment agency.

Also, in other countries, I found great partners. You usually stumble upon them. In the beginning we had little money, and we could not invest anything! But still, a great salesperson convinced me to buy an advertisement I did not need. I was impressed by her sales skills and I asked her to start Lugera in Romania, if she would, one day, return. And she did. She built one of the biggest recruitment agency in Romania, which was an amazing journey.

In every country, we have great partners and Country Managers. Some worked their way up from junior recruiter (like in Slovakia) to Country Manager and Partner. Some grew from sales to COO. The way up in our organization we have always made achievable for anyone in our organization who was ready for the next challenge. Our Russian CEO was 30 when he took the job.

Finding people is necessary; next to that, you need to trust them. And you can’t afford to get mad anytime someone makes mistakes. When you work with people, mistakes will be made, always and everywhere. So I celebrate mistakes, take people as they are, and love people for who they are.

Implement Recruitment Software

At the start of our recruitment agency, we were already growing big time. But we were not very well organized. We worked in spreadsheets, and because recruitment is a very hectic job, many people disappeared in our process. I realized we had to structure our work better to be able to succeed even more.

At that time, I heard that some companies were selling recruitment software. And when you would work with that, the software stored all your information in a very organized way. With this recruitment software, you could find people, companies, and a lot of information easily.

I really wanted that. But we had the problem that most recruitment software developers only sold it at a crazy expensive price, or they did not want to sell to a small East-European agency! So we decided to make it ourselves. Well, not exactly us, because we had to run a company, but we found some clever IT guys who created it, and the smartest person still works at our company.

This software made us even better. We had to get used to a new way of working, more structured and data-driven. And this worked out great for us.

Within 3 years we were the biggest permanent staffing agency in Slovakia!

You probably understand why I am still grateful we made this decision and followed through.

In 2016 we again started building recruitment software for our company, and other companies can benefit from it too! We created a Sales & Talent Acquisition Application which helps recruiters and salespeople perform better. Recruiters can perform better and faster, because of automated matching, and faster communication with their clients and candidates. And the productivity of salespeople gets a boost because they can send specified offers to different target groups, and the software generates many leads automatically. 

Now during Covid-19 times we took the recruitment software life in Ukraine and guess what: we have too many orders from new clients that we have to hire extra recruiters! Which makes me very happy of course;)

Make your agency independent from yourself

Expand your recruitment business by making your agency independent from yourself!

When you want to grow your recruitment agency, you need to take something practical into account. Your time. Make sure that you free up time to do that, and build up your business in a way that it does not depend on you personally. As some business owners love the feeling to be needed and be the person who can rescue any situation.

But that is a big expansion-blocker.

Because this way, you make everyone in your business dependant on you personally, and they will be terrified when you’re gone.

Therefore you need to empower people, make them comfortable with taking risks, and making mistakes. I definitely made some expensive mistakes, and cost the company millions. However, I learned from these mistakes, and in return, I compensated for them with multiple earnings due to lots of great achievements.

Next to that an extra tip: make sure you don’t bombard them with crazy rules and never over-control people.

Just think of it like this. (And I’m just painting a picture here, I don’t view my employees as children!) This might be a very familiar thing we all probably know. When people have children. Some parents believe they can’t do any chores right or the way they like things to be done, they don’t let them do anything.

Therefore children will never learn, and the parents will eventually be the only one doing those chores because they are the best at them!

Make sure you are not a key figure in your business, and people can run the company themselves. And another way to help employees to become independent and super skilled themselves is written in the following chapter.

Train recruitment business

Expand your recruitment business by training people!

In creating an independent company, you need to invest in people. Do it yourself, or find great people who can coach the employees in your business to achieve more. And when they achieve more, your recruitment business will expand. I love to see other people succeed because that makes me feel like I did a great job, making them feel empowered!

Usually, I train people myself. I love to train everyone because that way, I can build a personal relationship with them. Which I find very important and a lot of fun! I want to know people by name (as far as I’m capable of that), and I love to invest time in all the businesses.

But, when I’m working on too many projects, I can not always find the time to train people myself. And luckily, there are many great coaches out there. Right now, I am working together with a great recruitment coach, who is coaching a couple of managers to perform even better! So they can grow the recruitment business by becoming more productive.

And after you have done this, you can…

Grow your recruitment agency abroad

Expand your recruitment business abroad!

You can grow in many ways, but for me, foreign countries always fascinated me. Different people, with different cultural backgrounds, in different cities… I love that so much! Therefore my favorite way of expanding is abroad.

My first ways of expanding business abroad were starting an office myself, or one of my partners would lead the expansion. This did not always work and cost us too much time. Because when you start a company from scratch, you have to set up everything!

So we stopped doing that and thought up another way. We figured to find a manager who can do that for us. But this always ended up with nothing. One manager even made us believe that he created a profitable business, but he ‘forgot’ to pay taxes, which created a whole new problem.

I realized my partners or I had to do this ourselves; otherwise, it would not work. So this was the usual practice until we found a way that suited us better. And this way is…

Grow by buying recruitment agencies

Expand by buying other recruitment businesses!

In our previous expansion strategy, we wanted to open other offices in other countries. But our usual way was doing it ourselves, which cost my partners and me a lot of time we could spend on our existing offices. Next to that, we would have to spend a lot of time abroad and away from our families. So, we would find someone in another country, to start up the whole business there. Which usually failed.

Eventually, we found another way. A much easier way. And that is to buy agencies, that already have clients, staff, the infrastructure, workflows, administration in place, which is great because you don’t have to arrange anything anymore. The only thing you need to do is get there and make it work even better.

However, this is not as easy as it may sound. I won’t go much deeper on this subject, but if you decide to buy another agency, make sure you handle especially the people carefully. We always entered in a friendly way, and we never tried to change too much. We would change some little things, but we would never fire people because you need to make sure all your new employees keep feeling safe, especially when there is a new owner.

Take part in a venture

Expand your recruitment business by taking part in a venture!

Another possibility to grow your agency is taking part in a venture! Our STAA partnership for example. You can become a partner to sell recruitment software to other agencies, and earn a crazy good income out of that while growing your recruitment agency.

Seize the opportunity to partner with us now and grow your recruitment business! For the launch of our intelligent Sales and Talent Acquisition software, we are looking for partners worldwide.

Schedule a meeting with our Founder Gerard Koolen to understand how he can help you grow your recruitment agency.