The Five Pillars Of A Successful Recruitment Business

Thank you all for joining me. I know there's loads of great talks that you can be at, so I appreciate your time. My goal with this talk is just to try and give you as much value as possible. I know it can be hard to take in so much information at these events and then not know what to implement, how to implement things. So if you do stay at the end, you'll be able to scan a QR code. You won't have to put in your email address, and I've put together some really actionable points from this talk that you can take into your business. So I've got that at the end. So up to you if you want to take notes, but I've tried to distil it down at the end. If you could just help me out, could you put your hand up if you have your own recruitment business or you're in like a director position, just so I can get a context? Okay, cool. A lot of you. Sweet. Right. So let's, let's get into this. So today I'm talking about the 5 pillars of a successful recruitment business. Just a heads up, none of these pillars has AI. Just, just to let you know. Okay. Just a bit of context about me, why I'm quite well positioned to talk about what I'm talking about today, but how I got to this point. So 2012, finished college, had no fucking clue what I wanted to do in my life. Discovered sales could be a career. I didn't know that. Fell into a sales job, and then I found myself working in insurance sales. It's quite transactional, high-volume call centre. But by this point, I was really obsessed with just learning how to be great at sales, personal development. And then I got sold the recruitment dream. I don't know if any of you can relate to this, but one of my friends went from insurance sales to recruitment and he said, Hishem, you have to try this recruitment thing out, mate. It's— you can earn very good money. I'm talking at least 100K in your first year. So I don't know if any of you got sold that dream. I certainly did. It didn't quite play out like that for me, being honest with you, but I did get into recruitment, insurance recruitment specifically. I had a really challenging first year. I was in a small business outside of London. It was 8 people, and the people that I learned most from was my peers, my colleagues. And at this point, I had to commute an hour to work every day, and I'd use that time to listen to podcasts. I I religiously listened to the Joe Rogan podcast, and I looked for a recruitment podcast. It didn't really exist. There wasn't many out there. There's obviously a lot more out there now. So I decided to scratch my own itch and started a podcast over 6 years ago called the Recruitment Mentors Podcast. And then things have sort of organically evolved from there. I then moved to London to join a startup in a business called Hawkside Media, where I then found myself selling marketing services to recruitment agencies, still having the podcast, but now my sort of world was the recruitment industry. And then in 2020, I started my own business. Again, sort of the idea came from the podcast called Hector, which is an all-in-one training platform. And our mission really simply is to help thousands of recruiters achieve their potential by providing world-class training delivered by today's top performers. And because of this, this is the point of view I'm talking from today. So just to be really upfront with you guys, I haven't run a successful recruitment business. So what I'm trying to do here is distill down what I've learned from interviewing over 500 recruiters, recruiting entrepreneurs over the last 6 years. And over the last 3 or 4 years, I've worked with over 100 recruitment companies on the training side. So what I've tried to do is distill down what these companies have in common. So why pillars? Just to define that to start, I think what's more helpful is just to understand like principles, first principles that you can implement in your business that hopefully over time should mean that you will be successful. So just to define pillars here, core areas of a business that a company believes maximises its chances for success. So that's what I want to talk about today. I'm going to go through 5 of them, which for me have been the most common things that I've seen in a recruitment business that have been successful over the last 5, 6 years. So Pillar number 1, they're solution-focused, not vacancy-focused, and you can absolutely achieve that by having a sales-led culture. So this is the first thing that I want to talk about. So for me, the best recruiters that I've interviewed, I've met, they do not fill jobs. That isn't how they perceive their job. What they actually do is solve problems for their clients, and they provide solutions. That is how they would talk about their job, their career. They're solution-focused. This is always a soundbite that I'll always remember that Amber shared in one of our training sessions. The moment she stopped chasing vacancies and she started chasing problems, she went from billing $500K a year as a perm biller to billing $800K a year. There's a slight nuance, there's a slight change when you're focusing on vacancies, filling jobs, compared to chasing problems. So what does that actually look like? Vacancy-focused recruiter. These are the things that you might hear and think about. So their clients will spend less money with them over 12 months. Spot business, common term. Ones and twos. They struggle to get commitment from their clients. They struggle to get respect from their clients. You know, those really annoying clients just won't listen to you, that you know their interview process is too long. Their expectations are unrealistic, but they won't listen, and they're very reliant on live vacancies, reactive BD, and speccing out candidates to win business. Solution-focused recruiters, what we'll hear more of is their clients will spend way more with them over 12 months. They place multiple people with an organisation. They're doing 3, 4, 5 hires. They're doing hiring projects. They're talking about This is where you are today. Where do you want to get to? They have way more repeat customers. And when you're thinking about solutions and not just filling jobs, you start productising your service and you start talking to your clients about the other problems that you know that they have, like marketing, market mapping their competition, helping them understand what is a good culture fit for their business. You might sell a retain service where you do the first stage interview for them by using video interview software. You might advise them on your hiring process is too long, there's too many people involved, you need to do it this way, this is what we've seen the best success for. Or you might even do video job specs. You might go on site, help them build their employer brand, make them a more, you know, exciting brand to work for. These are all solutions that you can provide as a recruitment business when you start talking about problems and challenges that you know your clients face. And they absolutely have a different sales process. So they don't just focus on talking about requirements, they really try and discover problems and challenges that these companies they work with have. And I think a lot of companies that we worked with, I've spoken to, you know, struggle with this. I don't know how all of your businesses are doing or have performed over the last year or two, but I think there's this sort of misconception that you can't have this focus at the same time really building a sales culture and having a sales-focused team. I think a lot of people over the last, you know, when things were doing really well, you had so many people in your business that were just focused on service and delivery. And then, you know, shit hits the fan and you look around and you're like, right guys, you need to go get some more jobs. And they're like, don't look at me, you give me the jobs. So the best companies that I've found to consistently perform even in downturns had a sales culture. A lot of their people were able to win business, and I think you can absolutely build that with a solution-focused recruitment team and not just a service delivery focused team. Pillar number 2: they obsess over the important metrics that drive the correct behaviors in their organization. Without fail, the most successful recruitment companies I have met have KPIs. 100%. They don't just measure outcomes. They don't just leave it entirely up to the recruiter to figure it out. We'll just, you know, your target's this. If you don't hit it, we'll figure it out, but how you get there, I'm not bothered at all. So for me, when you say you don't work to KPIs, I don't think that's an employee benefit. Like, I see a lot of recruitment companies just really sell. They're like, we're not a KPI-orientated environment. Like, I don't think that helps your people. I think that actually holds your people back. And the reason for that is, let's be honest, like, KPIs have been ruined by shit managers. And, you know, no one enjoys like a pointless KPI. Like, why are you tracking the number of calls that I'm making? Like, why does that matter? Why does that impact me being successful? So KPIs done correctly, they absolutely encourage the positive habits. Like, if you have the right KPIs in your business and you're obsessed with improving them, the net positive of that is people delivering a good service, thinking about how they can improve the experience with their clients and candidates. And absolutely, I haven't met a recruiter that doesn't want to understand how to be successful. Like, having KPIs that help them understand the science of on how they become a 3, 4, 500K biller is absolutely something that recruiters want. So these, for me, from all the companies that I've interviewed, I think these should be your north star metrics. So if you're not measuring these, I would absolutely look at these. So, and you might agree or disagree with some of these, but CV to interview ratio, job to fill ratio, your net promoter score, number of referrals, clients, candidates. If you obsess with improving the job to fill ratio, Downstream from that is better job qualification, better candidate qualification, advising on a better interview process. The reason why these come up time and time again when I speak to recruitment companies, I'm like, what do you believe are the most important metrics that I need to measure as a recruiter that should mean if I get them in a really good place, I'm gonna be successful, I'm gonna hit my target, are these types of things. Because if you obsess with these types of metrics, like I said, the net positive of that is good behaviors, good recruitment experiences. And Alex Elliot, a great recruitment entrepreneur that I've had on the podcast, just a really simple thing, like, and I had this from companies that I met where they hired experienced people. We don't keep— we don't do KPIs, we hate KPIs. They join their business and then these experienced people start having shit months, but you haven't been measuring anything. So you've got experienced people going, I haven't hit my target, I'm struggling, and you're like, well, we haven't really been measuring anything. So there's so many different places that we could go to to try and understand where we can help you. But if you're not measuring anything, as Alex says here really simply, you can't improve what you don't measure. So I think it's absolutely criminal to not have north star metrics and KPIs within your business. Pillar number 3, they truly understand what they look for when they hire. It's not guesswork. I did a talk on this last year. For sure, the most successful recruitment companies absolutely have absolute clarity on what their non-negotiables are when they hire. Obviously, there's pros and cons of our industry, right? There's no barrier to entry, which means there's so many different success stories. People coming from working, you know, a Subway to working, you know, in a corporate environment to being successful in recruitment. So, you know, if you can find yourself very easily just hiring on potential because, you know, no, there isn't a set bar or set thing that everyone has to have in order to do recruitment, But you absolutely have to be clear on what your non-negotiables are. And a really easy way to do this, and I spoke about this last year, but they've really tried to understand, like, their top performers that may have come from all different backgrounds, what do they have in common? So if you feel like every time that you do interview someone for your business, you maybe have some clarity on what a good hire looks like, but you're not absolutely certain, like, start within your four walls. And really try and understand, like, what do our top performers have in common? What are the traits, the characteristics that these people have that we want in our future hires? It's absolutely not guesswork. And then the really actionable tip here is, let's just say it's things like curiosity, coachability, resilience. What then companies sometimes miss is that they then don't map their interview process to dig into those things. So if coachability is something that is really important to you as a non-negotiable, then you absolutely need to make sure that you are digging into questions at interview stage that's helping you understand if they're coachable or not. So once you've got your non-negotiables, make sure your interview process like matches up with uncovering what these non-negotiables are. And like I said, intentional interview questions, not what questions that feel right on the day. Like, you have to systemise this. Then we come to pillar number 4. So they overinvest in training and development, not underinvest. Without fail, the most successful companies that I've met are just really fucking good at developing their own talent into top performers. They really do view training as one of the most important aspects of of the company. And a big part of this is they've built their own methodology, which they really try and instill and embody in every single employee. Like, they have their way of doing things. Like, if you were to walk on, you know, a recruitment company that successfully scaled or is really profitable, I'd be very surprised if you hear people selling their USPs in an entirely different way. These companies will be selling how they do what they do and why they're different and why companies should work with them in a very similar way because they have a methodology, they have a DNA, they have a process that they really want to stick to, that they embed people with. And like I said, they don't have their teams of recruiters executing activities in like entirely different ways, in all different ways. So again, like what, what does this actually look like to try and make this, you know, as practical as as possible. Training in a successful business. They've absolutely thought about onboarding. You know, the— if you can reduce the amount of time it takes from going new hire to being profitable, that's a huge win, and that's going to really enable you to grow more profitably, scale more successfully. So they've absolutely broken down, right, okay, so if someone starts with us, in the first couple of weeks or 90 days or whatever, What is it that we're really instilling in them? What do we need to cover with them? And they've really broken that down module by module. They then also thought about, okay, so if we have people start with us and they start on the candidate side and then they transition to the 360 side, if you have a 360 model, they've really tried to make sure that, okay, once they get to this certain part of their career, that they've got particular programs to help them in their, you know, new skill gaps in the areas that they now need to improve. So you might have, you know, a delivery consultant focus program, a 360 recruitment program, and then a leadership program depending on how you run your business. Then I think the leaders is something to really think about. Like, you're not gonna scale your recruitment business if that's something you want to do without, you know, building successful leaders, and that is hard. Also, we've all heard, you know, the typical sentence of the billing manager is the hardest job in recruitment. Oftentimes why I actually think that is, is because you promote people who are typically top performers, you know, that you want to make sure you're not holding them back, you're progressing them. They get into that management seat and then they've had no help on how to coach people, how to manage people, how to give feedback, how to listen, how to deliver a one-on-one effectively. So this leadership layer in your business, I personally find, is one of the most underserved people in your business in terms of training and upskilling them on how to to now become great managers and great coaches. So oftentimes when managers get a shit name in recruitment, personally I think a lot of it can come down to have the business actually really helped them, or have they just pushed them into this management seat because they just want 3 or 4 of that top performer. Then others, as I've said here, they have their way of doing things, which they really do protect at all costs. They're going to be open to ideas, open to different ways of doing things, but absolutely they've got a methodology. They have a way of doing things that they protect. And then this is, this is a big one as well. I feel like the best recruitment companies do a really good job of not just training recruitment. They develop commercial awareness. If you recruit a lot in the startup space where they get funding, they work with venture capitalists, like helping them understand what does that mean? What does the lifecycle look like when a startup raises money? Then they deploy that capital. What does that look like? Giving them that expertise, or at least helping them understand how P&L works. One of the most common challenges I always hear from people that are first-time founders is like, oh, I write the deal on the board and then I don't get paid. They have to pay the invoice first, right? So developing this commercial awareness of your team will have so many knock-on benefits to help them as an all-rounded recruitment professional. and then again, for me, I know I was speaking to some recruiters today who were generalists. A lot of people I interview are all about the niche, inch wide, mile deep. But absolutely, if you are in a niche, like, you should definitely commit to, you know, building that subject matter expertise. So many great recruitment companies do that. They really commit to try and understand their industry. They might put events on, they might host a podcast, but they really try and develop their team's understanding of the industry that they actually serve. and I think that's a really good thing. And then Jamie Fraser, who I had on the podcast recently, really successful business that has scaled. If you listen to that podcast, what's absolutely clear is they have absolutely fucking committed to training people. And as you can see here, like something they said on the podcast, like what has been fundamental to his team and building a team of high performers is is that they really do have and commit to training. Like they train. What I really like here is it's a subtle difference. They train their people on, you know, not what they do. People buy into what we do. They buy into how you do it. So again, like training, I see it time and time again in recruitment companies that have successfully scaled. They have absolutely committed to developing and training their team.