Staffing companies considering a digital growth strategy cannot go forward blindly with guesswork and speculation. That’s a recipe for disaster and will waste considerable time, money, and other resources. This blog post is the first in a series to help staffing business owners and marketing managers efficiently create a framework for tactical lead (client or candidate) acquisition. Learn how to avoid destructive efforts and implement sound best practices to make informed decisions through the process.
Why double down on candidate acquisition in the first place? Obviously, it’s to make your company stronger but define ‘why’ in clear specifics about your business.
Are you considering any M&A events?
Strategic allocation of investment capital towards creating or cementing an indefensible and categorically scalable approach to decreasing cost-per-placement is a conversation that should be held monthly, if not weekly.
If you are buyer-side, consider bringing in consulting groups to appropriately assess the key behavior of web visitors and understand the website’s capacity to consistently and adequately yield candidate and client contacts turned contracts. Without a third-party assessment to gain perspective on realistic projections and opportunities for improvement, you may rely on the first impressions of the web analytics and pay-per-click campaigns set up by other agencies.
If you are seller-side, don’t start anything and keep conversations closed until you have an aggressive yet understanding control over the cost of your return on advertising and marketing spend. This is especially true if you have only managed your marketing internally.
Are you considering adding new service offerings?
If you rely on your website for any degree of reasons to sustain the profitability of your business, you need to understand that it can take up to three months for updates to your website – new service pages, blog posts, or landing pages – to be indexed fully. Indexing is the second phase of the use of Googlebot. Googlebot is the processing engine that initially crawls, or copies, versions of every website on the internet. Since Google is processing more than five billion queries per day, Googlebot has less bandwidth and therefore can create a pause between when you publish a page and when Googlebot receives an updated copy to index. Indexing is the processing of using natural language processing to dissect words and phrase groups, create ontological parsing and linguistic analysis of the text segment. It boils down to a weighted probability of recency, frequency, and reach.
Recency – how new is the content on your website? If you’re new to the web, it will take you longer to create organic search rankings competitive to a firm that has historically performed well on existing keywords.
Frequency – how often are you adding (ontologically) relevant keywords in bulk formats to your site examples include blog posts and landing pages.
Reach – Once you understand the importance of recency and frequency, reach is most correctly considered to be a result of affirmative user behavior in historical visits to your website.
For example, you might be strong in per diem healthcare and want to expand into travel nursing. If you want clients and candidates to find you, it’s important to forget that getting and keeping rankings in Google is a full-time job.
Are you looking into geographic expansion?
Do you have a really strong footprint in your region and want to establish new offices?
Look for opportunity in other states or regions in close proximity. Through analyzing your business you may have discovered some client concentration issues. Capturing new candidates or clients may allow you to grow at a quicker pace in the market. In every case, you really want to hone in on reasons that are going to work for you and engage your team to encourage the process.
Have you seen similar companies to yours grow faster?
The green-eyed monsters rear their heads from time to time, and the competitive spirit is highly sought after in staffing firms with deep market knowledge. Small steps towards increasing your market share – whether by service, specialty, or locale – all add up. If you’re forward thinking in your approach to business development, you’ve already thought through the competitive advantages and disadvantages in place. Some staffing companies are client heavy and candidate weak. Regardless, our opinion remains firm: Leverage digital acquisition and hire the most talented recruiters and account managers you can find.
We discussed this in a conversation with Justin Allison from ERO Staffing. Justin embraces the opportunity digital marketing allows for, and gave us some insight into the best recruiter he’s ever worked with, and hired. Read below to catch a snippet from our conversation.
Justin Allison, Director of Locum Tenens Recruitment and Marketing
ERO Workforce Solutions
From a recruiter standpoint, and this is a recruiter that I hired and that’s not why I’m going to say, “She’s the best,” just because I hired her because frankly it had nothing to do with me, it’s all about her. This individual is absolutely exceptional. We knew it from the very moment she stepped in our office for an interview there was something special about this girl.
She comes from an extremely good family background of core values. Work ethic is insane. That’s so important, work ethic. She’s a former D1 college basketball player. I personally have hired a lot of former student athletes because there’s a lot of parallels in recruiting as in with athletics, team sports. It’s a good transition for new recruiters that have played sports throughout high school and or throughout college.
You could just tell from the get go, from the phone interview to then the in-person interview to the second one. And then what literally sealed it, to give you a little bit of insight on this individual and how she grew up and just her foundation of who she is, she’s from Iowa. In the summers, she would work in the corn fields husking up and down. One of her athletic directors told me this about how dedicated she was to her sport:
Her dad would take her to the golf course and he would tee off on the tee 300 yards and make her do these sprints over and over and over again.
I already knew she was going to kill it once she got trained. She was obviously very green and took time to train her, get her up to speed, but she’s unstoppable and she’s the best in my opinion. She is the number one recruiter in the game right now for healthcare staffing.
She’s currently in a director role. She actually took over my position after I left. She’s going to be a CEO one day if she wants to. She can do frankly whatever she wants, she’s unstoppable. Period.”