Growing Your Agency

By Expert Recruiter and Consultant Graham Jenkins, MRSCA

Are the people on your team the ones who'll take your business where you want it to go? Long-time recruiter Graham Jenkins shares his 12 keys to building a successful recruitment business. 

1. Get the timing right
It is possible to build a business in a weak market but so much easier in boom times.
Right now is a golden age for recruitment and no doubt a few more recruitment millionaires have been created in the last few years. However, the money is not evenly spread around. Some states are performing more strongly and recruiters working in the wrong market, or who don't have the right experience, are reaping fewer benefits.

2. Plan, invest and ramp up
My strategy with Trinity was to buy a business with a candidate database and a track record in IT, and avoid taking on debt, or taking too many risks. Building the business through the 1990s was tougher than I expected, but we grew faster when I made the crucial decision to work on the business instead of in it. Instead of billing myself I worked on finding and recruiting the right people.

Mine was an entirely different path from that taken by Ambition, for example, which was started by two ex-Michael Page recruiters and was floated before they had built the business. Ambition used the money from an IPO to hire staff and since then it has progressively grown.

3. Find talented people
Start-up companies have trouble hiring good, experienced recruiters because they are wary of working for a firm with no established brand or database.  The owner's personal values are critical here because good people like to work for good people. 

Your ethics and integrity have to be of the highest standard, because if they're not, people will find you out.  Inevitably you have to make some compromises if you can't find the perfect person, and you may need to back your judgment by hiring trainees that fit.

4. Exercise leadership
The key to becoming a better leader I believe is to find leaders that you can use as role models.  Remember too that you are a role model for your employees; keep in mind that you are being watched and your staff are likely to mirror your behaviour.

5. Be constantly in marketing mode
In recruitment, word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly powerful. Clients talk to each other about us, and we know candidates talk to other candidates about the best recruiters to use.  Our staff do not always remember the impact they have on others so it is up to us to remind them.

Clients will make a judgment about your business based on the quality of interaction they have with it, and the quality of the work done, how quickly we return phone calls, take job briefs, prepare reports and treat candidates. Remember that clients ask candidates about us. You are capable of influencing every stage of that cycle.

6. Keep training
Keep training both your team and yourself. Know the skills you want each person in your team to have and spend time with them in interviews, with clients and in one-on-one coaching.  Keep training yourself by attending courses and joining mentoring groups like The Executive Connection.

7. Strategic focus
Strategic focus, or specialisation, is an important key to successfully building a business.  I recommend a book by Jim Collins called Good to Great, which suggests the importance of working on something that you're deeply passionate about, which makes you money, and which you can be very good at.

8. Processes and systems
Processes and systems are crucial to achieving consistent results. Decide the best way to do things, draw up the process and train people to do it that way in your business. When you have a process, you can manage it. You can follow up with staff that they are doing things the way you want them done.

9. Management
One piece of learning that has stood me in good stead centres on a matrix coaching model. This provides that staff with low skills and low motivation need direction. Employees with low skills and high motivation need coaching; you have to motivate those with high skills and low motivation - as we sometimes see when consultants have relationship crises. Finally, you can delegate and give more responsibility to staff with both high skills and high motivation.

I believe that the process for coaching high and low achievers is very similar; both need goals and recognition but high achievers will need less involvement from you.

10. Keep the winners
Winners like to work with other winners. If you only have one winner you may be vulnerable; you need more in the business. Winners not only make your business successful but they attract others.

11. Coach and mentor
Not only is it important to coach and mentor those in our business but if you are running a business, it helps if you've got a business mentor as well. Good mentors are found by asking around and by googling. Most State governments provide a free business mentoring service. A mentor can help you turn thought bubbles into strategies, and help you think through your decisions.

12. Check what's going on
Stay involved, "manage by walking around", ask clients and candidates and survey staff.

Being a recruitment consultant is a different job to being a manager, and being a manager is a different job from being a leader. If you're going to successfully build your recruitment business, you have to be capable of being all of those things. If you aren't, then you have to find people to join you with the skills you need.

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About the author - Graham Jenkins
Graham Jenkins is a key advisor to Recruitment Systems. Graham built the recruitment firm the Trinity Group and successfully sold the business. Graham is now an executive search consultant and recruitment strategist spending some of his time chairing a group of The Executive Connection (TEC).