Growth Mode in 2022 - The Importance Of Creating A Lean Process In Recruitment
Imagine you were a one-person recruitment agency. The mix of your unique understanding of your market, your clients’ needs, your network, and your ability to do the dirty work in the trenches constitute your intellectual property. Build that out, and you have 50 versions of you doing the same thing, in multiple locations or sectors. On paper, it’s that simple. But if you don’t get your operational set up right before you hit an inflection point, duplication and wastefulness will compound and hold you back.
Proactive Planning
IT support and efficient operations will be needed to keep this machine running at full capacity. The structures you put in place now, you will need to rely on to get you through at least the short to medium term. If you’re expecting considerable growth during this period, they will need to scale in a way that is cost-effective and allows you to be agile and able to adjust to market demands. Upfront planning at this juncture is crucial.
Cost
The days of throwing money and headcount at problems are long gone. As you try to cope with increasing demands in the short term, this may seem like the easiest solution. But hiring to plug gaps without careful thought leads to an inflated wage bill and an imbalance in the drive to realize the company’s vision.
The majority of people on your payroll should be actively producing – those who have revenue targets or KPIs to hit. The support functions equally need to take ownership and accountability for the processes they manage. This is the nature of a data-driven organization.
Recruitment operations don’t need to be Henry Ford-Esque human-powered assembly lines. What we need are administrators – people who implement and refine processes and systems that support and help the business to thrive. Automating where it makes sense and leveraging innovative tools that are fit for purpose will enable you to grow exponentially with a predictable cost structure. It will speed up your route to hitting your top-line revenue targets AND a handsome profit.
Adaptability
The opportunities in staffing in 2022 are everywhere. The way in which we do business with each other, the way in which we consume content, order our groceries…. every industry and type of business is being disrupted all around us. New skill requirements and needs to serve are appearing everywhere. As a recruitment agency, you need to be able to reallocate resources or hire the right people at the right time to capitalize on these market shifts. To do this, it’s critical to ensure you won’t be financially hamstrung down the line by impulsive hiring decisions made during a spike in business activity.
The ability to react to changing demand has never been more important. While the pandemic caught us all off guard, many staffing agencies were equally unprepared for the rapid growth that came in 2021. The result is now that many have inflated teams doing data entry, passing information back and forth.
Team Empowerment
Panic hiring – reactively adding more support staff can make your team less open to pivoting and embracing change. This is what makes a business rigid and slow. You will need to revisit and unpick these processes in years to come, hence the abundance of process improvement professionals in the industry.
If you are in the early stages of your agency’s journey, you have a significant advantage. It’s much easier in the long run if you take the time to get things right the first time. By implementing the right tools and structures, you can hire people straight off the bat who are hungry, willing, and able to help you figure out and apply the best operational strategy for you. Those who have a desire to take ownership of their job functions, and provide thought leadership will naturally add net new value to the company. In this way, you won’t have to hire reams of people to simply carry out orders. The effects of this will grow and help you achieve exponential value creation as you expand.
In short, set out your vision, hire the people who can implement it, and automate everything else.
