Home › Blog › The Key to Staffing Agency Growth: Building Stronger Relationships

The Key to Staffing Agency Growth: Building Stronger Relationships

Successful, fast-growing recruitment businesses prioritize building and maintaining trusting relationships with candidates, clients, and internally between colleagues within teams.   

The simple fact is this – no number of efficient processes and well-thought-out strategies will lead to lasting business success if the relationships that matter aren’t nurtured.

Learn how the fastest-growing agencies do this effectively. 

Why is relationship building so vital in recruitment?

Relationship building is the cornerstone of success in the recruitment industry. It’s about more than just filling roles; it’s about creating meaningful connections with both candidates and clients. These connections are the foundation of a thriving business, fostering trust, loyalty, and long-term partnerships. 

Strong relationships lead to a more personalized and engaging experience for everyone involved. Candidates feel valued and understood, while clients appreciate the tailored approach to their hiring needs. This translates to better candidate engagement, higher client retention, and ultimately, sustained growth for the recruitment agency. It‘s no wonder that industry leaders prioritize relationship-building as a key attribute for recruiters, recognizing its significant impact on overall success.

Fast-growth agencies are 60% more likely to prioritize relationship orientation than goal orientation.

-Staffing Hub’s State of Staffing Report 2024 

Here’s why: 

Trust: A recruiter’s relationship with candidates is the stand-out factor for winning candidates over. Developing a candidate’s confidence and belief in the recruiter is essential for preventing dropouts and building a robust talent pipeline. 

Fast-growth staffing firms understand that every touchpoint with a candidate is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship and build trust. 

This also applies to the relationships recruiters develop with clients. A successful recruiter-client relationship thrives on openness, honesty, and trust. But this doesn’t happen overnight. It must be worked at and earned. 

Knowledge: The more insights you have about your candidates and clients, the more effective you can be in matching them. Putting in time and effort to learn about your clients’ or candidates’ backgrounds can bring the insights you need to take your quality of hire from average to exceptional. 

Skills-based hiring: There’s a renewed interest in spotting hidden potential in recruitment. It’s not new, but there is a significant shift from credential-based to skills-based hiring as employers seek skills over education and previous experience. 

The uncomfortable truth about skills-based hiring is that a lot could go wrong. How do you know how skilled or capable a candidate is? A recruiter needs to understand a person’s core strengths and capabilities to be effective, which will only come to light through optimal engagement and a rounded relationship. 

Loyalty: At the heart of any successful recruitment business is loyalty. This means building a reputation that impresses, so that people – clients and candidates – will want to come back to you and are happy to recommend and refer you. 

Top tips for improving loyalty:

• • Make your first encounter different – candidates and clients have preconceived ideas about recruiters, so explain why you are different from the outset 
  • Communicate clearly at every touchpoint 
  • Manage expectations and set realistic timelines – don’t promise anything you can’t deliver on 
  • Give your candidates an experience, not just a job, and your clients an experience, not just a hire 
  • Be proactive, transparent, and responsive 

Retention and team collaboration: The relationships inside your business are as meaningful as those outside. Firstly, staffing firms aren’t immune to the big reshuffle. You want to keep your great people. All the excellent work you put into building relationships with candidates and clients should also be reflected in your teams. 

Recruitment challenges are inevitable but creative problem-solving is more easily achieved when the team works together. Setting team-focused primary goals and objectives can help everyone to reach targets and stay on the same page. 

Top tips for fostering great team collaboration:

• • Streamline information sharing 
  • Adopt a collaborative hiring approach to unite the team – share the workload and bring team members together to share expertise 
  • Utilize practical communication tools, such as messaging apps and shared digital calendars – Tracker’s collaboration tools, for example, ensure teams can work smarter together 
  • Make use of video interviewing for a more comprehensive evaluation and to incorporate diverse perspectives from within the team 
  • Embrace data to understand sourcing effectiveness and recruitment funnel efficiency and identify areas for improvement

We use tracker for the ATS but also the CRM side. They make it easier to communicate updates and notes between our sales team and our recruiters. It also helps us automate our sales marketing. It has been beneficial in creating better relationships with our candidates and our clients.

-Rachel J (Tracker client)

How to foster relationships as a recruiter 

Emotional intelligence 

Recruitment involves continuous interaction, from candidates and clients to peers in the industry and workplace colleagues. At the heart of this is emotional intelligence. 

It’s this ability to perceive, express, and regulate emotions that enables recruiters to navigate interactions with empathy and authenticity and to establish deeper connections. When people feel understood and valued, they are more likely to stay in the process and go the extra mile. 

Emotional intelligence isn’t defined by personality. While some people may be naturally more adept at developing relationships, all kinds of personalities can develop and enhance emotional intelligence through practice. 

Ways to practice emotional intelligence include:

• • Self-awareness – to develop an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses and understand how your behavior affects others 
  • Empathy for others – understanding not just your own emotional needs but being able to recognize how others feel and understanding the needs of those around you 
  • Active listening – taking the time to listen to others is the basis of respect and forms the foundation for a healthy relationship. Attentive listening also helps recruiters build a picture of wants, needs and circumstances 
  • Clear communication – authenticity and transparency in words support the development of trust and functional relationships 

Purposeful and personalized communications 

How a recruiter and sales rep communicate with candidates and clients speaks volumes, so the required level of care cannot be overstated. Clear and consistent communication ensures everyone is on the same page throughout the entire process and reduces unnecessary back-and-forth and misunderstandings. 

The ability to tailor communication to individuals helps build rapport and understanding. This can be done one-by-one or through automation.  

Honesty and transparency 

Even tough conversations can help to build relationships if handled sensitively. Since relationships are primarily strengthened through transparency, hiding information will only backfire. For example, don’t put candidates forward for roles without a career path if they have expressed an interest in fast-tracked development opportunities. 

The right technology 

While hiring deadlines can pressure recruiters to rush, technology can help balance efficiency with building genuine relationships. Outdated systems can hinder productivity, so using modern tools like ATSs and CRMs is crucial. However, relying solely on automation can lead to impersonal interactions. Technology should streamline tasks, allowing recruiters to focus on personal engagement with candidates and clients.

Share feedback 

Feedback works both ways. As a recruiter, the feedback you collect from candidates and clients about your process is critical for improvements. It also shows you are listening. 

Giving feedback to candidates shows you are interested in and value them, even if they didn’t make the grade this time. 

Feedback can have a positive impact and prepare candidates for their next application and interview. If there’s something a candidate could improve upon, they will want to know about it. Such information should be delivered candidly but also with sensitivity. 

Growth and return on relationships

The data geniuses and number crunchers in recruitment shouldn’t just look at the return on investment (ROI) across activities but also return on relationships. CFOs must understand what connects building relationships with growth and decipher the best way to measure it.

Choose Tracker: Build better relationships and get the data you need 

At Tracker, we fully understand the importance of relationships in recruitment. Our software has been built and developed by recruiters for recruiters. 

Relationship building is central to every feature, from our ATS’s recruitment and applicant tracking, automation, and collaborative tools to our sales software, CRM, and user-friendly reporting. 

Tracker gives you everything you need to build stronger relationships and achieve your full potential. It allows you to manage the entire recruitment workflow with ease, giving your team back time. 

Build better relationships with Tracker. Find out how. Get a Demo. Or speak with our experts. We’d love to help you grow.