Choosing a career path as a self-employed recruitment consultant requires putting significant efforts into generating enough quality leads, converting those leads at a high rate, applying a well-thought-out strategy and delivering a quality service to both candidates and clients at the same time.
You might be thinking that to improve the number of placements you need to spend more money or work twice as hard, pouring in long hours that keep you away from your family and friends, but in reality, generating more new business is a process of consistency and strategy.
By identifying the right niche, clients, pitching them the right services, more and more clients will eventually come to you.
As opposed to other hiring positions, an independent recruiter’s job typically covers more than recruitment, with specialties like sales, marketing, customer service or even design adding to the requirements of the most successful solo recruiters.
So if you want to make the most of your workdays and increase your billings as a freelance recruitment consultant, here are 5 insights to guide your success around.
Before you do anything, consider taking a step back to see how you compare to the industry benchmark. Is it more leads you’re after? Or perhaps a better conversion rate, higher fees, and a good profit margin calculated based on the cost of your work.
Having a clear perspective over these can help you spot the problem and act accordingly. Whether it is decreasing costs, increasing your prices, generating more qualified leads, knowing where you stand and making an objective assessment of your efforts and how these turn into revenue is a good place to start.
Contingency recruitment is where most independent recruiters start. It’s a way to get traction, even make a name for yourself but the future belongs to retained, on-going recruitment services. A business model that will give you fewer headaches, the freedom to deliver based on quality, not speed and the recognition (and remuneration) you deserve for your work.
For roles that require less experience, contingency recruitment can work well whereas, for the highest paid jobs, the retained model will often give you more flexibility to deliver superior results.
In addition to giving you the time and space to deliver an exceptional service to your clients, it sets clear expectations in return for your effort. This is key for your financial and moral well being as an independent recruitment consultant.
This can’t be said too many times, no matter what stage of your career you are at. As frightening as it may seem at the beginning to attend events and put yourself out there, your independent recruiter career advancement depends on your ability to get out of your comfort zone, marketing your services, networking and building reliable business connections. Working on a purely transactional basis and not building authentic relationships with other like-minded people will lead to a slow but imminent failure, often burnout for a freelance recruitment consultant.
It’s easy to go through a day’s worth of work overlooking how important it is to stay in touch with your clients. A good self-employed recruitment consultant always makes sure that candidates, as well as clients, have a solid grasp of his brand. And reinforce the belief that they made a smart decision by choosing him or her to work with and trust.
Also, developing a proactive helpful attitude plays a key role in helping you keep quality contracts and bring in new ones. Your attitude is the first aspect customers notice and comes in contact with and constantly working on it is bound to get you rewarding results in the long run. This strategy will lead to more leads and referrals since more people will hear about your professional approach and want to work with you. Another thing you could try is to respectfully ask for some testimonials from clients you previously worked with or currently do, to further support your service quality. It’s all very well you shouting from the rooftops about how great your brand is but it’s all the more powerful when clients do it for you!
Rarely can we accurately predict what will happen once we take on a certain responsibility, but if you want to skyrocket your billings as an independent recruiter, it’s important to consider and embrace current trends for the sake of reaching your goals and differentiating yourself from other self-employed recruitment consultants.
So if you want to jump on the bandwagon and skyrocket your billings as an independent recruiter, understand current trends in your niche and choose to embrace them to differentiate yourself.
Especially since finding and matching the best candidates is becoming increasingly difficult as a result of the war on talent.
It’s important to look beyond the conventional skill set of candidates and focus on emotional and social values such as adaptability, critical thinking, agility, collaboration, teamwork, and proactivity as well.
Thanks to automation and technology, job roles will be constantly changing while a creative, curious employee will be able to take on new responsibilities and thus become a valuable component to the company’s overall growth.
So, recruiters should focus on getting the best of both worlds for their clients, identifying candidates with technical skills as well as soft skills, as there won’t be any large-scale recruiting success without them.
If you have been recruiting for a while, chances are you have already fine-tuned some practices and gained enough knowledge on how to stand out among your competitors. Consider further expanding your skillset with some recruitment training and coaching, selling and negotiation courses or even a one-on-one call with our industry experts that deliver valuable information that would help you better position yourself. Sometimes the most valuable insights come from unexpected places, so try to keep an open mind about this. Recruitment consultants are a rare breed, with great people skills and an ability to see beyond a piece of paper, so use that to your advantage.
Building your own recruitment consultancy is an attractive opportunity for many recruiters interested in pursuing the path of entrepreneurship.
Armed with passion, motivation, and desire to succeed and the right knowledge and connections, those who made it big credit their success to a series of strategies, well-thought-out decisions, and connections.
But improving your billings is a process that takes time and commitment on your part.
You could skip a few steps by getting in touch with a recruitment expert and business consultant that has already gone through the same challenges and can potentially offer you some key insights that bring you a step closer to success.