Recruitment in the EU and UK specifically is having a bad time due to economic circumstances. I’ve even heard a recruiter say it’s worse than the 2000 & 2008 crisis. Perhaps now is a good time to reflect on what we actually offer to our clients, and how we can help them in the best way possible?

What are we trying to do as recruiters, we try to help companies hire the best talent or we try to help the best talent find the best company for them. Sometimes, a company requires our network or our services but can’t pay us because of whatever reason. Usually, we move over to the clients who are willing to pay.

Stop moving on to higher paying clients, offer something to each client. Build a service with different price points and always be of help to your client. Underneath you’ll find the business models I’ve successfully seen applied with recruitment agencies.

Jobboard

Rather than ask 30% of yearly salary for recruiting, create passive income for yourself by allowing your clients to post jobs for a smaller fee. Think:

• 1200 Euro a year

• 200 Euro for a one time placement

You have a big network in candidates and clients in the niche that you operate in (based on location, or jobtype). Use that network to build out a jobboard. I’ve seen one recruitment agency with 2 employees hit 20K Monthly recurring revenue whilst having a fully filled pipeline. By offering a cheaper option for your clients, you can always be in contact with them, you can even offer jobslots as a bargaining chip in negotiations for recruitment. Because you offer something different besides the jobboard.

Start small with nocode and grow. The knife cuts both ways, because next to offering clients cheaper ways of finding candidates, you offer candidates a niche place to put their resume. When they put up their resume, you know: They are in the market for another job. Win-Win. A successtory in this is a regional recruitment firm called Zuijdher with their jobboard which can be found here

Start small with no-code, or even set-up an Airtable, put some relevant jobs into it specific to your niche and share it. You’ll be amazed at the amount of traction this gets.

Community

As recruiters, we always say we know our candidates the best. When you create a community around a your niche, you’ll not only be in contact with the best candidates. You can also ask your clients to come on and share their knowledge. There are even a ton of ways to monetize your community

1. Paid subscriptions for candidates

2. Paid webinars/Courses

3. Jobboard postings from clients

4. Recruitment itself (your target candidates and clients are already present in the community)

We’ve seen multiple communities earn a hefty 6 figure income from anything other than recruitment and then triple that in recruitment fees (perm & interim) earning then a million euro’s+ per year (2 employees). A success story is a company called Qommunity who monetize in all 4 ways.

Running a community is content heavy though and works best when the recruiter themselves have experience in the sector so they know what to talk about in the community.

Subscription access to database

If you have a rocking database filled with great candidates, why not sell access to the database. Although it feels like we offer up our most valuable asset to our clients, we must realize that we are in full control. We offer clients with a smaller wallet a way of directly contacting candidates and if they can’t find any, they’ve already paid you meaning the jump to using your industry knowledge won’t be that high. Have clients that have high volume needs? Let them pay 300 Euro a month for access, if you can get 20 companies to buy in, there’s your base. and from experience I can say, some of those companies will need your services anyway.

Using a tool like Softr, you can easily build a candidate database. I’ve seen multiple tools hit 10.000 Euro Monthly Recurring Revenue (succes story: Honeypot)

In essence, what we try to do is: Offer different packages to your client. Rather than write them off if they’re not willing to pay you for recruitment right now, try and offer another service to help them out. Ensure that you are the niche expert they need every step of the way in finding new colleagues. You’ll be filled with recruitment assignments before you know it.

Always available for a chat around new business models, innovation and using growth hacking to grow your recruitment business! Feel free to respond to this email or find me on Linkedin here

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