The New Year is underway. Clients are ramping up their efforts to meet their business goals for 2016. Some of those clients are going to need additional personnel to meet those goals. And they are going to be calling on your agency for help. Your agency needs to be prepared to grow fast, right alongside them in the coming year.
How can you prepare your staffing agency for rapid growth in 2016?
Getting Your Staffing Agency Ready for Growth in the New Year
Streamline and optimize your recruiting process. If you have been in business for more than a few months, it is time to examine your recruiting process. You need to make sure you are using the best recruiting techniques for your particular niche. Are you hiring the best candidates, or just adequate ones that fit the client's basic needs? Ensure your current recruiting techniques are going to keep up as your grow from 100 clients to 1000 clients.
Measure everything. The more information you have, the better you can tell how well your agency is really doing. You need to set-up solid metrics that you can monitor on a regular basis. Your staffing software should have metric reporting built in. Some metrics to monitor include placement ratio, average engagement length, number of candidate interviews per job, new customer per quarter, and turnover ratio.
Keep your data up to date. The metrics you are monitoring are only as good as the data behind them. If you are not keeping your staffing software up to date, the metrics are going to be no good. For example, when you place an employee in a client's open position, you need to update the system to reflect that.
Reconsider your technology. Many staffing agencies start out with spreadsheets, basic accounting software, and paper time sheets. That might work if you are dealing with 100 employees. But, when you are hitting 500 or more, you are likely going to be drowning in paper. Is it time to invest in a more sophisticated staffing software solution? Should you switch to electronic time sheets?
Prepare your team. You cannot grow your agency effectively without your team being on-board with the idea. You need to communicate your goals to your team. Each department needs to have distinct plans that feed into the overall goals. And everyone in the staffing agency needs to buy into the plan.
Make sure your cash flows are healthy. If you are planning rapid growth in 2016, you will the cash to make it happen. Talk with your accountant about your available cash reserves. If you don't enough cash, consider factoring your open invoices to free up the cash you need to recruit new staff or gain new clients. It can give you the cash boost you need to make 2016 a record growth year.
Reach out to your clients now, not later. Clients may or may not be ready to hire right away. No matter where they are in the process, you want to ensure your agency is at the forefront of their thinking when they are ready to hire. A simple phone call to your client contact will pave the way. You can see what the client's plans might be and even how you could help them make the process easier and faster.
Outsource what you can, if you can. Growth generally does not happen in a straight line. It is usually a progression of ups and downs. As your agency grows, you are going to have to add additional people in the back office to handle the day-to-day operations. If you outsource some of those positions, you can move a fixed cost to a variable cost. Hiring a new person to handle your accounts receivable is a fixed cost. Having a factoring agency manage your A/R ledger is a variable cost.
If you take action now, right after the start of the New Year, your agency will be in the best position possible for rapid growth in 2016. What can you do today to get your agency's growth on track?
