If your recruitment business development is unorganised, unplanned or irregular then it’s time to rethink how you approach business development.
Recruiters and recruitment leaders often struggle to adopt and maintain sustainable and successful business development strategies, which can often lead to significant dips in revenue.
Chris English is a Product Manager at JobAdder and recently led the development of the Opportunity Pipeline module, which allows our agency customers to capture and manage all of their business development opportunities in JobAdder.
To celebrate the launch, we spoke to Chris about how recruiters can transform their recruitment business development and the key challenges holding them back.
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What are the biggest pain points or challenges you see with business development for recruiters?
Chris: Recruiters are screaming out for automation, smart suggestions and reminders.
Recruiters are storing and recording business development activity in different locations and tech tools. This means it’s hard to see a top-level view of all their prospects, where they sit in the funnel and who they are, so they know what tasks need actioning to progress leads.
Recruiters need a means of tracking every interaction with a lead across different touchpoints, whether it’s via email or phone or other channels. This information needs to be easily accessible and compiled in an accurate and automated way.
What are the most important considerations when recruiters are transforming their business development?
Chris: In our research, we found that a staggering 60% of our agency users were managing all of their business development outside of the JobAdder platform.
Additionally, compared to the rest of the recruitment workflow, business development was where our agency users felt unhappiest.
When examining how to transform recruitment business development, we really wanted to address three key considerations:
- Recruiters need to be able to oversee their business development pipeline and accurately forecast revenue
- Recruitment leaders need to optimise the business development capability of their team
- Recruiters need to be able to capture and manage all of their opportunities in one place
We kept these considerations in mind when developing our new product feature, the Opportunity Pipeline module, which allows recruiters to boost their business development efforts and empowers them to do all of the above.
What advice would you give to recruiters or recruitment leaders who see frequent dips in revenue due to unsustainable business development?
Chris: We recently did a blog on this and one of our clients, Iain MacGibbon, Managing Director of Farrow Jamieson, said something really interesting: “Watch out for the biggest biller this quarter. If they have been so busy delivering this quarter you can probably guarantee that they will dip next quarter because they forgot to do the basics like keeping in touch with clients and following up on placements.”
Recruiters are so time-poor and have a million tasks to do every day. As a result, it’s so easy for business development and long-term planning to be put on the back burner. Recruiters need to be able to track their current active jobs while also setting themselves up for success with future clients and placements.
Being able to invest in that long-term view and tracking how you’re progressing is crucial, as that will tell you when you can expect to see dips in revenue. Once you have that insight, it will be a lot easier to avoid any dips in the future.
Learn more about the Opportunity Pipeline module here.
Ready to take your recruitment agency’s business development to the next level?
