8 traits and skills that all recruiting agencies should work to improve

Recruiting agencies can operate in fairly hectic environments like call centers

Managing a recruiting agency comes with a unique set of challenges that aren’t encountered in any other business model because you’re responsible for sourcing prospective employees for other companies.

When you’re entrusted with not only keeping companies supplied with an adequate supply of workers but also choosing the most qualified candidates to pursue for each position, the individual tasks and maintenance procedures that go into making all of that happen can often seem like secondary considerations behind the primary goal of meeting your main recruiting objectives.

However, by optimizing every little step along the way, and ensuring that each of your recruiters are following a predefined system that is conducive to efficiency, you can reliably generate optimal results while achieving optimal productivity, profitability, and efficiency. If that sounds like an outcome that you’d like to facilitate for your recruiting agency, try working to improve the following 8 traits:

1. Operations Management

Recruiting agencies can operate in fairly hectic environments like call centers where there is a lot going on around the recruiters and customer service agents. With so much happening on a daily basis, it is absolutely imperative for a bustling agency to have a solid grasp on operations management.

This is a field of study that can be applied to any business model for the sake of facilitating improvements in various processes within the context of an overall corporate workflow. If none of your recruiters or managerial employees currently specialize in this field, you may want to look into operations management degrees from an online learning institution like Kettering University.

2. Sustainable Scheduling

Having a well-devised schedule can help you avoid a lot of problems that are commonly encountered by rapidly expanding recruiting agencies. On the other hand, a poorly managed schedule could lead to mishaps that create shortages and stress for recruiters and other shift members who have to make up for the lapses. Ensuring that your team is adequately staffed should be a top priority of the manager of any recruiting agency because human resources are by far the most valuable asset in this industry.

3. Process Mapping

Every recruiting agency manager can benefit from developing a detailed understanding of workflow process mapping. There are a lot of steps involved in meeting recruiting deadlines, so it helps to have a collection of predefined procedures that govern how each process is carried out. Process mapping allows you to create and complete incredibly complex corporate projects with ease because you’ll always have a simplified, visual representation of each individual process and task that will be encountered along the way.

4. Brainstorming

As you know, recruiting is a mental game that typically involves convincing a prospective employee that they should choose to work for the company you’re representing. There are so many ways to approach that proposition, so it can help to hold routine brainstorming meetings that will help your recruiters develop and share ideas and angles that could make their pitches and spiels more effective. Ideally, you should hold an idea-sharing or brainstorming meeting or virtual conference at least once every two weeks or every time a unique client, project, or other team challenge is encountered.

5. Motivation & Inspiration

Maintaining a high level of employee morale is another effort that the managers of recruiting agencies should make on an ongoing basis. Keeping people properly incentivized to put forth their best possible effort in every phone call and email will give your agency the boost that it needs to confidently operate in the big leagues.

Many high-level recruiting agencies invite guest speakers, mentors, and coaches to deliver presentations that help to provide perspective motivation, and inspiration. In an industry where energy and intent are paramount, having a fully motivated and ambitious team is clearly a mandatory prerequisite if you want to facilitate optimal expansion.

6. Communication & Delivery

Recruiting agents need to know how to communicate professionally and effectively. Unfortunately, when an agency is scaling up it can be tempting to hire the first qualified applicants regardless of whether they’re excellent speakers. Thus, it helps to practice employee monitoring and review each agent’s conversations to see if there are any team members who might need to work on their communication skills. Recognizing these shortcomings and having comprehensive training systems in place to correct them will keep your team performing in a competitive manner.

7. Research & Analysis

If you’re not researching the industries in which your company is conducting recruiting asks, all of your efforts are probably being severely hurt. You’ll notice that all the top recruiting agencies utilize advanced software suites to keep track of every piece of correspondence and every transaction. By analyzing your agency’s progress in retrospect, you can often find weaknesses that need to be worked on, or spot strengths that can be expounded upon further.

8. Optimal Goal-setting

Setting realistic goals sounds like the best approach, but that doesn’t make sense when you’re trying to push the limits of what is possible. Every agency should have that one manager who is serious about expecting the best from everyone, and that’s the person who should be setting your daily and weekly deadlines. Aiming for fully optimistic goals ensures that even if you fall short of the target, you will still have made a fair amount of progress.

The Top Recruiting Agencies are Always Busy

Recruiting is one of those business models in which there is a snowball effect in terms of how much work is on the table at any given moment. By putting forth a concerted and organized effort on a daily basis, a recruiting agency will inevitably earn a fair amount of clients, and with that achievement will come the burden of fulfilling those clients’ needs.

However, while each new contract and client represents another source of revenue and another reason for your workforce to stay busy, they also represent the need to place additional emphasis on all of the aforementioned traits in order to avoid mishaps and shortcomings caused by the sheer chaos of managing an intensive workload.

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The British Institute of Recruiters is the Professional Body operating The Recruitment Certification Scheme

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