Setting Up A New Recruitment Agency? Things To Remember

By Author: Krishna Yerra
Total Articles: 42
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India offers more than a billion jobs every year including both blue collar as well as white collar jobs. This makes service sector of India contributes 50% to the GDP annually. Such a huge demand of jobs means companies are growing day by day and they are in need of urgent staffing requirements.

Currently almost 60% companies in India use services of recruitment agencies/placement consultants/staffing solutions companies. The demand to hire could be anywhere from administrator to CEO of a company. The best part is the recruitment business can be started even with a very low startup cost.

Define your own Market
The very first rule of starting any recruitment business is to define and set the target audience. This could be categorised in terms of geography, industry or even employee strength of the client. The next thing to look at is whether to run the recruitment business as specialized in some particular categories or to serve them all.

A recommended practice is to start with few categories only. Learn and experience the working and as the staff grows along with their expertise, look to maximise ...
... the market reach. The bottom line is, corporate companies are realizing the necessity of a recruiter to have the knowledge and understanding of the industry and market they serve.

Get Clients on board
Getting the clients is what is going to define the marketing and branding strategy for the start-up agency. Hire a business development staff who is persuasive enough to connect with clients and can communicate daily regarding the progress of recruitment. As early relationship building is very important and so is the retention of clients.

A better way, to save cost and get easy access to unlimited clients across India, would be through Applicant Tracking System where they are connecting recruitment agencies and corporate companies at one place, where agencies can charge 8.33% of annual CTC as recruitment fees to the clients.

Methodology of recruitment
There could be many various methodologies to run a recruitment business, but some standard practices should not be ignored.
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(a) Team Size - Any decision on deciding the team size should be based on the type of requirements coming to the business, as well as the budget available. More important keep the hiring team connected on one platform for easy access to all the resources.

(b) Candidate Profiling – A detailed understanding and documentation of the sourced profiles is mandatory to keep a track of each applicant whenever required in future. This includes noting the personal details, experience, skills, industry details about the candidate who just dropped his/her resume. It is crucial for you not to indulge the team in any manual excel sheet for data storage/updation activity. Utilise the automated parsing and applicant tracking feature of an online recruitment management solution.

(c) Staffing requirement Advertising – Make apt use of the Job sites, Linkedin and Facebook. Choose the effective mediums based on an assessment which draws a line between time and money. You may not even need to spend extra bucks just through automated social recruiting and job posting features to save time and improve efficiency. For more Details visit us @ http://www.applicanttrackingsystem.co/Products/Online-Assessments.aspx

(d) Sourcing & Screening – Do not be in too much hurry to forward candidates for the selection process to clients. Working a little extra to filter out the right candidates is better than getting a reject email from the client. Choose appropriate filters to bring relevant data, it could be - experience, location or even skills of the candidates. Put them through HR Screening call or even online assessment tests if required.

(e) Feedback - Do not hesitate to go back to the client and collect the feedback about each applicant. This helps you to understand if the clients are meeting expectations or any further tune up is required while selecting the candidates.

Recruitment Fees
In this business, recruitment fees can be defined as the charges to be paid by the client for the services taken to fill the job positions. The fees is applicable only when a candidate joins the company. Though the structure may vary - based on per candidate or per time period. A general market standard is a fees of 8.33% of annual CTC offered to the candidate by the client. In most of the cases the clause comes with a free replacement if the candidate leaves the company within 3 months of joining date.

Retain the Clients
Retaining the clients is as important as finding a new client for the recruitment business. Make sure you are in constant touch with the clients and they prefer you as their preferred partner for hiring process. A recommended step would be to connect the client as well on the online recruiting software you are using to automate your hiring process. This way clients can easily share job openings and agencies can forward resumes in no time.