The ultimate goal of every staffing business worldwide is to generate profits. For a long time, the common standard was to make your business grow, which needed money, time, and resources. Now, there is a new concept in town: to scale your staffing business. But, how can you do it?
In this article, we will tell you how you can scale your staffing business. Here, we will explain what a staffing business is and what it means to scale it.
1. What is a staffing business?
Most companies worldwide have found out that the whole process of finding, recruiting, and hiring potential candidates can be time-consuming. Furthermore, performing it without the proper experience in the field involves potential risks, such as choosing the wrong candidates.
Here is where a staffing business comes to help you. Its primary function is to perform the finding, recruiting, and hiring processes for you, applying their expertise in the matter. In essence, working with one of them can lead you to save money and have a more flexible workforce.
You can protect your company against the legal and financial risks related to choosing inadequate candidates. Moreover, working with a staffing business can also allow you to save time. Their expertise in the matter reaches ways of making sourcing and recruitment processes faster and more efficient. Thus, you will receive qualified new employees quickly. Most importantly, a staffing business can help you with the recruitment process of all kinds of employees. Therefore, you can use it for filling full-time positions, and also for hiring contract staffing for your company.
2. What does it mean to scale your staffing business?
You probably spent several years hearing the same premise: you must find ways to make your business grow. Thus, you spent time thinking about where to invest money and resource to achieve such growth. Nevertheless, there is a new premise that is gaining popularity among business owners worldwide: I want to scale my business.
In the staffing industry, scaling your business is very difficult, and you will find out here why. Scaling is defined as the increase of a business’ revenue without the need for more resources. In other words, when you scale your business, you seek higher profits with the same resources you had before.
Indeed, it is an appealing idea because it involves gaining more money without any additional costs. But, in your staffing business so far, the only way you have found to increase revenue is by adding more staff. This way, you have been able to handle more clients. This is because scaling is not appropriate for a services business, in which more work usually means more staff. Hence, scaling a staffing business requires creative thinking, and using the available tools at your disposal. In conclusion, scaling will remain in the future of the staffing business.
3. Which methods can you use to scale your staffing business?
We know we said that scaling is not appropriate for staffing businesses, but we did not say it is impossible. Certainly, the idea of gaining higher revenue with the same workforce is very persuasive. Most staffing agencies think the same way about it. Hence, they have spent time studying manners of performing more tasks without it turning into a higher workload.
Here, the current technological advances play a big role. In essence, connectivity has made it possible for staffing businesses to recruit candidates faster. As a result, they can handle more staffing processes with the same personnel. Some staffing businesses have applied more methods than others. But, in general, there are six methods you can use to scale your staffing business. They are available to you regardless of your location or business size.
On the other hand, staffing agencies managed to speed up their processes by using staffing and recruitment software. Undoubtedly, the market for such software has grown substantially over the last decade and is going to continue growing. Thus, it is correct to say that it is a big market.
Let us now show you in detail the methods you can use to scale your staffing business:
3.1 Remote workflows
One of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an increased demand for remote work. Indeed, many companies had to shift to a work-from-home standard to stay operational during the worst months of the pandemic. Staffing businesses were not exempt from this. Therefore, they needed to build remote workflows that resembled their normal productivity levels. However, it also came with an unexpected advantage: COVID-19 taught them that a physical workplace is not essential for a business.
As a result, many staffing companies started using this practice regularly. Indeed, eliminating the workplace from the equation reduced their costs substantially. Furthermore, they also can handle more candidates remotely because of the advantages of video calls and networking platforms.
In other words, staffing agencies had managed to scale their business by using remote workflow. Moreover, following this practice also requires a better understanding of remote management. Thus, you must know how you can manage your staffing business remotely.
3.2 Following emerging industries
Focusing on a single successful industry can get you great revenue. Nevertheless, as the recent pandemic taught us, any industry can be ruined in an instant. Therefore, you must diversify your clients to protect your business from any market disruption. Now, a good way of diversifying your clients properly is by keeping an eye on emerging industries. Indeed, you will have competitive leverage by working with companies taking advantage of the available workforce the pandemic left.
Certainly, you will be scaling your staffing business in this manner. Thus, you must be agile to follow and use emerging industries in your favor. It is a higher revenue scenario where all you need to do is attract new customers from different industries. However, following emerging industries is one thing, but getting such industries to work with you is another topic. Here, a practice you can use to ensure your staffing business is attractive to companies is content marketing. Hence, you must know the latest content marketing trends to apply them.
3.3 Social media
Today, staffing agencies are now using social media platforms to recruit new talent or post job offers. In essence, they discovered that young adults use social media to find information about companies where they want to work. As a result, staffing companies have increased their presence and influence on social media to improve recruitment. Indeed, you will find billions of potential candidates on such platforms. It is a gold mine for a passive recruitment approach. Most importantly, using social media involves reviewing and having a presence on several platforms. You must search for candidates on other platforms besides LinkedIn, such as Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram.
In other words, you will be scaling your Staffing Business by increasing the number of qualified candidates you can reach. All of this, while using the same workforce and infrastructure. You can even do this with your employees working from home. Now, on social media platforms, we all want to know the latest trends. But, you must be too aware of the trends related to the staffing business. Therefore, we recommend that you know about the global staffing trends in 2022.
3.4 Embracing new technologies
Besides social media platforms, you can also use new technologies to save time and money while getting better results. Now, you may think that embracing new technologies involves big investments, but some of them have a relatively low cost. Scaling with this method can be challenging at first. In essence, most staffing business recruiters do not embrace change easily, especially successful ones.
Hence, you must demonstrate to your team the financial and operational advantages of using new technologies. Moreover, the most attractive new technology you can use in your staffing business is an Applicants Tracking System (ATS). It works by running keyword searches on resumes submitted online to their database when your client has an open role.
On the other hand, an ATS works better when candidates upload resumes with content that closely matches the job description. This way, they can ensure the ATS will rank among the top contenders for the available role. Furthermore, it is another example of an area where remote work can be applied. Indeed, there are a high number of reasons why hiring a contract staffing agency can help companies with remote employees.
3.5 Better negotiations
Most staffing businesses rely on their recruiters to negotiate fees with their customers. However, the traditional ones have a standard fee already defined, so, the recruiters cannot do much to help. Now, the most innovative staffing agencies are changing their perspective on this. They have found many advantages in training their recruiters for better negotiations with their clients. In his way, recruiters can be smarter at the time of defining fees with their customers, increasing revenue in the process.
Nevertheless, knowing what to teach recruiters for negotiations depends on the industry you staff for. However, there are common practices they can use, such as negotiating fee discounts and giving clients want they want. Indeed, many recruiters wrongly used to negotiate based on what they think clients needed. You can also evaluate your recruiters’ performance regularly to discover any aspect that needs additional training. Similarly, companies are also wondering if it is a good idea to evaluate their temporary employees’ performance.
3.6 Scaling your Workforce
We covered several tools and strategies you can use to scale your staffing business. However, one key method we need to cover to finish is scaling your workforce. In other words, you can find ways to make your current personnel work more efficiently without adding new employees.
There are two approaches to this matter. The first one is to train your workforce to increase their skills at a low cost. This way, they will be more productive without the need of making big investments in new staff or better infrastructure. Finally, the other approach is scaling your workforce through its costs. It involves negotiating with them about wages and productivity bonuses, giving them the chance of increasing their revenue. Thus, you will have a motivated workforce, delivering you better results that will need higher fees from clients. Therefore, it is a win-win scenario that you can use to increase your staffing business revenue without major costs involved.
4. Where can I find more information about staffing businesses?
Choosing the right Staffing Agency is paramount to scaling your business properly and without problems. Indeed, it takes proper knowledge to apply the methods posted here. On Connect Staff, we believe in doing meaningful work for you, by providing the scaled staffing services you need. We can help you hire administrative support staff for your business as well as in-store assistants for your business.
Do you have some questions about staffing services? Do not hesitate and contact us to obtain more information about how we can help your business, by calling us at +971 43 316 688. You can also email us at contact@connectstaff.ae, to talk with one of our representatives.
