5 Things to Avoid in The First Year of Your Recruitment Agency

Launching a recruitment agency can be an incredibly fruitful, but also an incredibly stressful experience. You stand to gain a lot from your endeavours, but there are also plenty of common pitfalls and setbacks that can impact your success.

Sometimes, the key to navigating that first busy year of growing your recruitment agency is not only knowing what to do, but also knowing what NOT to do. Avoiding certain scenarios or mistakes can save you a lot of time and resources, and potentially be the thing that helps you ensure your business survives and thrives for years to come.

In this article, we take you through five of the key things to avoid in the first year of launching your recruitment business, to help you be aware of what you need to keep an eye on. 

Vague, Directionless Marketing

The first thing that you really need to avoid when starting out is vague advertising material and campaigns. It can be tempting at the beginning to just get any branded marketing content out there and aim to refine it in the future, but it’s really worth dedicating the time at the beginning to ensure you have a clear plan for your advertising strategy.

A key part of this is making sure that you identify your target audience and also the unique selling point (USP) that your recruitment agency offers. These two things should be incorporated into every piece of marketing material, helping to prevent directionless content that isn’t really aimed at anyone or targeting a particular problem.

You should start your recruitment agency journey with a clear brand image and understanding of your offering and how to market it. If you don’t have time to properly apply this to your marketing strategy, you’re actually better off waiting until you have the time to create a more detailed and targeted plan.

Rushed Internal Hiring

Another mistake that can lead to plenty of problems down the line is rushing your internal hiring process and hiring either too many employees or the wrong kinds of employees for your agency. You want to avoid this and be sure to have a strategic plan for hiring and growing your team.

Expanding your team too quickly can be an issue because you might end up with more staff than you need for the amount of work you’ve taken on, which can be a significant drain on your profits. It’s always better to hire one employee at a time and scale up slowly, potentially using contract workers to fill capacity gaps instead of hiring another full-time recruiter.

When it comes to hiring for your recruitment agency, you also need to make sure that you don’t rush the process and take the time to find an employee who has the right skills and is a good cultural fit. Hiring team members who aren’t actually suitable for the role can be another incredibly costly mistake, and it’s worth taking the time in the screening process and when putting together a job advert to ensure you attract the right candidates.

Wasting Time on Admin

A key thing that we recommend avoiding from the start of setting up a recruitment agency is watching your admin on administrative tasks. Not only can this be a real drain on your time and energy when you need to be focused on growing and stabilising your agency, but it can also mean you miss out on finding ways to easily automate or outsource these tasks from the start.

When you’re a small business, it’s understandable that operational tasks fall to your existing employees, but it’s worth noting that most of these can probably be taken over by software. Invoicing, timesheets, emails and processing can typically be managed by specialist software, freeing you and your staff to spend more time on recruitment and client relationships.

These tools may have a subscription fee, but it’s definitely worth paying for them in order to establish a system that takes care of your admin and operational tasks where possible, so you can be certain that your time is only going where it is really needed. We’re at a point in time where AI tools are also being increasingly utilised, which is definitely worth investigating. 

Unequal Client Management

Avoiding unequal client management as a recruitment agency means two things. Firstly, you need to make sure that you’re dedicating time to nurturing your client relationships so that they are long-lasting and ideally lead to referrals, and secondly, you need to avoid placing too much emphasis on just a few big clients.

Managing your client time equally means ensuring that you’re giving the same level of care and attention to each of your clients, whether they’re new or existing. It’s a tough balance to strike, but you want to ensure that you retain your existing clients as well as impressing the new ones, requiring careful time management.

The other key thing to avoid is getting overexcited if you have a big client coming in with multiple roles to fill and potentially neglecting smaller clients or dialling down your search for new business. Big clients are great, but you want to avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket in case this business goes away, and then you’re left with very little else to bring in money.

Tax Mishaps

Finally, something you really want to avoid in your first year of business as a recruitment agency is any tax mishaps. When you’re handling everything yourself, it can be easy to make mistakes and forget simple things, but these small mistakes could land you in big legal or financial trouble.

One of the best ways to make sure that you don’t run into any tax mishaps is to work with a specialist agency that offers advanced tax planning services, which will be able to handle the technicalities and ensure that you’re compliant. It’s an expense that can be incredibly valuable at the start of your business journey, even if you decide to stop working with them in the future, and also gives you peace of mind that everything tax-related will be covered by an expert. 

Summary

Making it through the first year of business as a new recruitment agency is an incredible achievement. By avoiding the mistakes that we’ve listed in this article, you’ll hopefully have a successful journey and be ready to tackle the next years of growing your business.