The 5 Most Important Things To Focus On To Grow Your Staffing Business In 2020

https://www.tracker-rms.com/staffing-industry-trends-and-challenges/The hunt for good talent is never-ending in the Staffing Business, but competition is particularly fierce right now. With a low unemployment rate and a shortage of qualified candidates, it may seem like just holding steady will be a major challenge in the coming year.

In spite of these difficulties, your staffing business can still see growth in 2020. It will just require concentration on some new areas that your business may not have fully embraced yet. After all, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get the results you’ve always gotten.”

So here are the five most important things you should focus on in 2020 to build your staffing business.

1. Building your recruiters’ personal brands

You’ve probably invested considerable time and money into building your agency brand. But what about the personal brands of your recruiters? Keep in mind, your clients and candidates are probably only working with one or two key people at your company. So while the agency brand is important, it could be equally important for the individual recruiters to be seen as top-of-field authorities in their niche.

Do you have a marketing expert on staff or an outside marketing firm that you work with? Ask them to spend a little time with your recruiters to build a branding strategy. And make sure each recruiter has space in their schedules each week to build their network and work on blogging, podcasting, or making videos.

Fostering the personal growth of your top recruiters will be good for employee morale and will build the overall clout of your agency.

2. Specialization

With today’s global reach, focusing on a specific niche and benefit to customers is more important than ever.

Why should people work with your staffing business instead of another? Are you the staffing business for the restaurant industry or high-tech world? Do you provide the best customer service? Top of the line technology for a streamlined process? Can you meet huge staffing needs for a major corporation? Or are you better able to dig deep and find the perfect candidate for a boutique operation?

People don’t want to work with a jack-of-all-trades staffing agency. They want the company that can best address the pain points in their particular field. You have to define your specialty in order to stand out among the competition and grow your business.

3. Outsourcing so you can scale

What are the biggest barriers to business growth? It can usually be boiled down to lack of time and lack of resources. As you try to scale, you give more and more projects and responsibilities to your team. But eventually, they will become overloaded and unable to perform at their best. And yet, you may not have the resources available to bring on another employee.

Instead, outsource your non-revenue-generating tasks to freelancers and gig-workers as you start to grow. By hiring on a per-project basis to help handle some of the extra work, you’ll be able to avoid the big salary hit that you’d take on by hiring a new employee. What’s more, you can increase or decrease a freelancer’s workload month-to-month, and therefore increase or decrease your financial responsibility.

When your needs start to approach full-time, then you can bring on an in-person or remote employee.

4. Investing in technology

Technological advances in the staffing industry can save you major time and money, letting your team focus on networking, outreach, and other tasks that require a personal touch.

To start, make sure you have a great relationship management system to streamline your job postings, candidate sourcing, and applicant tracking. An efficient system can save hours of time each week, letting your recruiters focus on other parts of the process.

You can also use chatbots or AI to do some of your initial fact-finding and answer FAQs. After the initial setup, these programs can do a skills assessment and gather employment data for you. By pulling these repetitive tasks from your skilled employees, you’ll free them up to do more difficult (and more profitable) work.

5. Using people analytics

People analytics, or talent analytics, involves collecting and analyzing data about the people, projects, and performance of a company’s talent.

By tracking and understanding these metrics, your staffing business can reduce time to hire, improve the quality of those hires, and help your clients to bring in more revenue. One survey showed that staffing businesses that use people analytics well are making as much as 82% more in profit over 3 years than those who don’t use these analytical tools.

Instead of selecting candidates based on “intuition” or a resume, you can build a data-driven approach to the interview process and placements. Analytics can also help to predict the best times to hire or when you should ease up on hiring.

In order to grow in 2020, staffing businesses will need streamlined processes and a data-driven approach. With over 20 years of industry experience, TrackerRMS can help you to implement these systems so you can maximize your growth in the coming year and beyond.

-David Alonso

About TrackerRMS

TrackerRMS is a leading recruitment and applicant tracking software designed for the SMB Staffing Company. Our industry-leading onboarding and analytics technology will improve both your recruitment speed and quality. With over 20 years of experience, our ATS System is built with you, the staffing professional, in mind.

CEO of Tracker for over 12 years with an overall 25+ years in business process, IT strategy, and management

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