Starting a Recruiting business. Day 1: Reason for starting
The title isn’t completely accurate. I didn’t just think of starting my own recruiting company today, its actually been in the back of my mind for quite some time. Like most independent recruiters I started off my career with a well established agency. While I enjoyed wearing a suite and tie and working in the heart of the Financial District, too me it was just hype. I wanted more.
When I say “more” I’m not just referring to money (I’m not going to lie, I hated the idea that the company made thousands every time I closed a deal, but I’ll get to that later) What I wanted was more “ownership.” Recruiting is largely based on relationships. I wanted to own the relationships that I fostered. As an employee, the relationship you foster is largely owned by the company. The relationship you build for them is used many times over, long after you are gone.
As far as the money goes, its no secret how little overhead is involved with recruiting. (If you don’t know we’ll cover that at a later blog post) When I figured out the numbers I had a pretty good laugh at myself, that’s right I laughed at myself, it was that bad. In my first three months in the industry ( starting Aug 08) I realized I more than payed for my salary the whole year. Those may seem like simple (maybe even narrow) reasons to start a business hopefully its not a bad move.
So what made you guys want to be an independent recruiter? Everyone has their own reasons and motivations and I would love to hear about yours.
This blog will definitely cover the technical aspects of starting a business but I want to hear from you guys before we start talking about the “hard stuff.”
note: If you have any topic suggestions, let me know and I’ll make an effort to cover it.
Social Hack #1 : “Lists”
I joined an open networking group on LinkedIn a few back to build my contact list. You guys are probably familiar with the group called the LION’s (LinkedIn Open Networkers). While I was receiving a stead flow of invites it would have taken me months to expand my network to the point I was looking for. I would only receive about 10 invites a day plus anyone else I would manually invite, which wasn’t nearly enough to reach the levels of the top networkers.
Instead of soliciting people to send me invitations at the discussion board ( which is considered normal activity) , with the average message of : I accept all invites @ xyz.com. Instead decided to post this message:
Let’s create a list of people who want to recieve a huge amount of invites.
Although I had a slight idea of what I aiming with my word choice. I could have never imagined the results. Within a day my network grew 200 people. This was about 2 weeks ago. To this day people are still adding their name to that list. Wierd huh? I’m testing this out at other networks and hopefully I can put together some coherent thoughts on my findings.
keep wasting your time on linkedIn.. it makes business a lot easier for me
This will be one of the few time I include some “industry ramblings.” If your looking for instructions or statistics to help your recruiting business then you can skip this post.
The last couple days have been pretty busy for me. Mid-way through writing a post the other day I realized I was actually giving away one of my competitive advantages. While it isn’t the silver bullet of finding jobs and candidates, it is a facet of the industry that is surprisingly overlooked by both agencies and independent recruiters.
One reason it is ignored is because it’s a tedious task done behind the scenes. It’s an area that only Managers and independent recruiter need to worry about, so it isn’t discussed much on the recruiter networks. In fact, I’ve been lurking around recruiter forums for some time now and the subject has “NEVER” been touched on. I guess whats even more amusing is that a popular nationwide agency only recently decided to make a push in this “area,” to boost business. I’ve done research and it seems like the only people I’m competing against are the larger agencies. (which isn’t a bad thing, since there are hundreds of tremendously talented independent recruiters I don’t want to have to compete with)
I originally intended to share all of my methods and daily practices as a young independent recruiter, but I will hold out a bit longer in this “area” before I share it with you guys. Again, I apologize for such a vague post. I will however share at this point, what it doesn’t involve. It has nothing to do with building a “huge” Linked-in network. It has nothing to do with having a thousand followers on twitter. I actually secretly hope that recruiters continue to waste their time with these things. It makes life a whole lot easier for me.
10 great topics that will be covered on this blog
So I’ve been getting a lot of email with suggestions of what to write about. All of them are good ideas and surprisingly most of them I have already made plans to write about. Here are a couple topics you can expect to be addressed in the future:
10. Bounty Jobs and how they may be dangerous to the recruiting industry
9. Non-compete contracts (recruiters going from an agency to independent recruiting)
8. The “Cost” of doing recruiting
7. What does a fair salary and commission split look like?
6. Applying the “Bounty Jobs” model to your own desk ( you don’t want to miss this)
5. Comprehensive list of recruiting “No No’s”
4. Using Skype for “Instant Interviews”
3. How low will we go “recruiting fee’s”
2. Is the recruiting industry stale? (innovative recruiting models)
1. Training your virtual team
So you don’t miss your favorite topic make sure you subscribe to our e-mail list. If you want to write a “guest post” feel free to contact us and let us know, we’d love to hear from you.
Job Board Coming Soon
I’m currently running a couple niche job boards and I’ve been thinking of implementing a job board onto this site just to add a bit more value. The majority of this sites visitors are recruiters, so by nature the job board will filled with opportunities for split deals. There are still a few details I have to work out, but for now you can take a sneak peak into what the job board will look like.
I won’t disclose what those job boards are since I don’t want that niche to be oversaturated, but I will tell you that it has helped tremendously in cutting my cost down. I will likely share in a future post how I use my own job boards to find candidates.
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