5 Revenue Growth Tips for Staffing Firms

Can you believe we’re approaching June and 2013 is almost half over? It’s a scary thought when 34% of staffing agency owners, managers, directors, C-level executives, board members, and VPs predicted they would increase revenue by more than 25% this year, according to Bullhorn’s 2013 Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report. When recruiting agency leaders were asked if they were adding staff to their firms in 2013, 81.6% said yes. These are big growth expectations for 2013.

How’s it going? Is your firm on track to achieve your revenue growth goal for 2013? For those firms looking for revenue growth tips, here are a few:

• Keep a Close Eye On Your Placement Funnel: Your placement funnel data is perhaps the most interesting and potentially the highest ROI report you can run using your recruitment CRM data. “The Placement Funnel is a visual way of understanding the total number of Job Orders you start with that eventually become placements, with conversion rate for each step in your process.” In other words, this report can show you how efficient your firm really is at placing candidates so you can identify weak points in the conversion process. By monitoring this report on a weekly basis you can work to “improve your batting average,” as well as discover new opportunities for improvement.
• Identify Non Profitable Clients: Taking a detailed and analytical look at past performance data can help you identify the clients that aren’t profitable. This will allow you to focus your efforts towards clients that are profitable and help you build a more high quality sales pipeline. Business intelligence software can quickly generate reports for you to help analyze this data.
• Take Full Advantage of Social Media: Almost half (47%) of staffing professionals surveyed by Bullhorn recently reported that the biggest overall opportunity for staffing and recruiting professionals in 2013 was “increased access to passive candidates via social media.” While recruiters currently rely heavily on LinkedIn, the potential payoff for leveraging all of the “big three” (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) social networks to connect with passive candidates is extremely strong. Facebook, which is greatly underutilized by most recruiters, has almost five times more registered users than LinkedIn. While it’s still perceived as a personal network, Facebook has incredible targeting functionality (e.g. Friend Lists). The recruiters that take advantage of this network early and strategically will benefit.
• Don’t Underestimate the Power of Content: More often than not, the highly targeted candidates you are trying to recruit will not answer your phone calls and/or respond to your messages because they are busy and/or focused on a current project. Making a connection with them can be extremely challenging. One effective way to connect with high quality talent is to use compelling, informational content. Ask your experts to join online discussions and share strategic content that is going to generate leads. This method can require a great deal of subject-matter expertise, but it will create a more long-term steady flow of candidates that have the skills that you need.
• Increase Placements Using Job Portals: Posting job orders to either a company website or job portal is one way to increase placements and therefore drive revenue. Quite often, recruiting firms struggle with the problem of promoting job orders online. Keeping all job orders in a central repository makes it easier for recruiters to share them on social media or syndicate them on wide-reaching job boards. There are free tools available, like Bullhorn Reach, that can be used as a job portal and help you automate this process.

This Bullhorn Blog post was written by Ashley Healy.

Ashley Healy specializes in integrated marketing communications and a wide range of marketing activities including social media management, SEO copywriting, content marketing, promotional strategies and employment branding. She previously worked as Content Marketing Manager at Bullhorn and prior to that, as a copywriter and marketing coordinator at Verndale, a full-service digital agency.