How to set business goals within your recruitment agency

Over recent years we have learned just how quickly things can completely change. One minute your firm can be going full steam ahead and hitting all its objectives, and the next it can be recognised as a total failure.

This is the nature of the world we live in today and the reality of running a business, regardless of its shape or size. As the world slowly starts returning back to normal, it is important to remember setting business goals within your agency can often be one of the key factors to finding long-term success.

If you have something to aim for as a firm, you can easily measure your success and track your progress as you move forward. With that being said, continue reading to uncover our top tips and recommendations on how to set business goals and achieve them as a recruitment agency.

There are so many reasons as to why setting goals can change your luck and turn your business around if that’s what you need to do.

Why do recruitment agencies need goals?

All recruitment agencies ultimately need strong business goals to aim for and follow. These objectives and aims will keep them on track if they start to veer away from what originally made them successful. Furthermore, business goals help to motivate recruitment agencies and give workers a reason to keep going when things start to become a little more difficult for them.

If a recruitment agency has nothing to aim for, it will ultimately fail. Set business goals and have multiple things you want to achieve ongoing all at once; beyond this, you can begin to share the work out between yourself and your employees to ensure you have a great chance of achieving everything you set out to at the start of the year.

Establish where you currently are 

Over the past year your business goals have likely been somewhat side-tracked by the Coronavirus pandemic, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t assess where you are as a business right now. Look at how you are doing and perform a self-analysis of everything that is going well, and all the things that aren’t going so well.

If you set yourself some goals and objectives a year ago, you need to look at how close you are to achieving those now. This can lead you on to asking yourself some further useful questions. Were they worth following? What would you change next time around? How those goals achievable, or too easy/difficult?

Remember your aims and objectives should be achievable and not completely out of your reach, or there is simply no point in setting them. Allow them to make you push yourself, but don’t allow them to become impossible; this would only get to you and your team and likely cause added tension between you all.

By revisiting your old and current goals, you can more easily set new one for the future and the betterment of your company.

Allow yourself enough time to set goals

The goal setting process can be a lengthy one (probably much longer than you’d initially think). This is due to the fact that it simply cannot be rushed, as avoiding mistakes is crucial here. Thus, you need to award yourself the right amount of time in order to ensure your goals are achievable, right for your agency and effective in many other different ways.

If you try to get through the goal setting process as quickly as possible, you are bound to take a few missteps and derail what may have potentially been the point where your company started to come into its own.

Take a look at your current outgoings

Are there ways you could decrease your outgoings over the next year? Maybe there are certain areas where you need to invest more money, in this case you can shuffle things around.

For instance, starting an agency and working from home may not have been something you would have considered over the past few years, but with everything that has gone off relating to COVID-19, perhaps you think differently now. If you can work as productively and save money on the office rent, then why not make that a permanent change?

It’s significant that you set your business up to be in a position where it can be agile and adapt to the constant changes of the market which it operates within. Watching how you spend money will really help with that, so look after the pennies and allow the pounds to look after themselves.

Ensure your goals are specific 

One of the most important aspects of setting any form of goal for your recruitment agency, is to ensure it is as specific as humanly possible. If you create aims that are too vague, you’ll likely fail to establish what it is you’re looking for. This will backfire on to your business venture and hold you back from achieving as much as you can.

You cannot afford to lack clarity when you are attempting to grow your agency, so don’t make things more complex than they need to be. Make sure your goals are clear and to the point; if you were to write your goals down and get someone to read them, they should be able to establish multiple things right away without any further questioning:

• What it is you hope to achieve as a recruitment agency
• What the time frame is for completing the goals
• The thing that would indicate that the goals have been achieved

Without being able to understand these three simple factors, you’ll likely struggle to achieve your goals. This is because even you may not fully understand what it is you’re searching for. Avoid this mistake by creating clear objectives with easily measurable successes.

Analyse your marketing spend

When running a recruitment agency, it is often wise to investigate your marketing activities and get a grasp of what you’re gaining from them in return. If you are pumping money into campaigns that are failing to work for you, perhaps it would be wise to shake things up a little bit. You need to realise what you have spent in total over the past year, as well as what you have received as a direct result of that money.

Once you have that information at your disposal, you can make decisions from there. You’ll have a clearer picture to analyse and hopefully a better grip on what your marketing department needs to deliver in the future. You can even set certain goals just for your marketing team and ask them to work on different things at different times.

Be aware that your marketing should always be boosting your business growth, getting your agency seen by more people and boosting engagement levels across your social media platforms. If it is failing to do so, you should consider implementing some goals and working towards a better future for your company.

Have long term and short term goals

When you are creating goals, try not to only think of the long-term effects they may be able to have on your agency. Instead, opt to set both long term and short-term business goals for your company. This will allow you to aim for different things at the same time and break up your workers into groups that are chasing down opposing objectives.

Short-term goals can play a key part in measuring our progress over a timeline and letting you know how close you are to achieving your long-term successes. You may have a specific overall achievement you want to build towards; shorter termed missions can help you to stay motivated and feel like you are accomplishing things while you are on the way to your main reward.

Review your outgoings

You should always be on the lookout for ways of reducing your outgoings throughout the year. If you are spending big in areas that simply don’t need it, have a reshuffle and think of ways to and this issue.

For instance, you may have discovered that remote working has been a huge money saver for you during lockdown, so you could keep it going long into the future. Changes like this are examples of people learning lessons from the global pandemic situation and putting them into action for the betterment of their recruitment agencies.

By being adaptive and able to save on costs when they are becoming too much is all a part of running a modern-day recruitment agency and being a great leader of a business to your employees.

Assess your relationships

After the year we have all been through, it is a great time to come back and less the relationships we (and our recruitment agencies) currently have. You should look at checking up on clients and getting a better grasp on what their needs currently are.

Try to get an idea of the business your clients require throughout the next year and advise them on where you could step in and help them. Have a sensitive approach if you can, considering what has been a very difficult year for everyone, especially those that run a business.

External analysis (market research)

It’s urgent to have a solid comprehension of your market prior to defining any business objectives. It will assist you with perceiving openings for your organisation to profit by and recognise dangers before they can harm your business.

Ensure you know the competition. What will make you stand apart from them? This is something you need to know so you can inform your cliental.

To define the correct business objectives for your agency you’ll have to investigate your objective market, and how you’ll draw in them over the rivalry. You should attempt to make this as definite as possible conceivable, with the goal that financial backers can see the focal point of your company. Being too dubious may lead likely supporters to trust you haven’t put a lot of thought into it.

Who will utilise your recruitment agency? (your target market)

It is safe to say that you will zero in on selecting in one specific industry? Or then again maybe you will spend significant time in junior or graduate jobs? You need to know who your customers will be so you can tailor your promoting and marking to suit them.

A few things that you should consider include:

• How might you stand out enough to be noticed of customers?
• What amount will you charge your customers?
• What will cause them to pick you over competitors?
• How might you acquire their dependability?

To draw in business, you’ll need to stand apart from other enrolment firms that work in a similar area. How would you intend to isolate yourself from your opposition? Financial backers may be worried about market immersion, and you need to demonstrate to them that your office has more to bring to the table than some other around you.

A few things you can consider:

• What amount do you think about your rivals?
• What number of enormous enlistment offices work around there?
• What are the normal expenses of running a recruitment agency?
• Do they work in a specific industry?
• How does this contrast and your own business?

Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal client. What will cause them to pick you over another organisation?

(This next part needs to go directly after the long- and short-term goals section)

Firmly establish those short-, medium- and long-term goals

Yes, having different business goals over different periods of time is very important to the development of your recruitment agency. If you only have long term goals, for example, you will struggle to judge your success over smaller periods of time and likely fail to spot mistakes before it is too late.

Break down your longer goals into shorter ones and set unique targets for you to aim for along the way. This is certainly an effective way of progressing and making sure you are an adaptable venture, which is something that your clients will undoubtedly appreciate.

What do your goals look like when broken down monthly, weekly, daily? What will you need to do to achieve your targets? What are the KPIs that will ensure you’ll be on track to hit short-, medium- and long-term goals?

You can even go one step further and create strategies for every single goal you set. Although, this can end up being a rather time-consuming method, so think carefully about whether you need to do it or not.

The future feels completely unknown at the moment but get a plan in place and it’ll be in your hands, while also keeping you one step ahead of your competition.

How can we help you?

Recruitment invoice factoring is a type of business finance which releases cash currently tied up in outstanding customer invoices. This business solution is ideal for helping fund expansion plans, improving your cashflow and collecting payment from your customers.

This sort of finance solution is matched with recruitment agencies of all shapes and sizes perfectly.

By utilising our services, you can free up more cash to allow yourself to set more expansive business goals, and more importantly, ensure that you achieve them.