How To Start Your Recruitment Agency As a Beginner
James Blackwell (Entrepreneur James) gives a practical tutorial for beginners on launching a recruitment agency with a lean approach: build a simple website and logo cheaply (examples: ~£50 site, ~$20 logo), use LinkedIn Recruiter Lite or Sales Navigator (~$99/$79/month) and email autoresponders (Reply.io, QuickMail) for outreach, target SMEs (5–50 employees), book many meetings (personalised outreach: ~20–25/day → ~10 replies/week → ~3 meetings), focus on making placements to get revenue, handle invoicing simply (Xero mentioned) and register for VAT, and build a personal brand through LinkedIn content. He also promotes an 8-week accelerator (test group of 10) and claims growing his agency to ~£1.5M.
Questions this video answers
Expected £10–20,000; actual first site ~£50.
Around $20 (or £50–100 for his initial logo).
LinkedIn Recruiter Lite ~ $99/month; Sales Navigator ~ $79/month (mentioned as alternatives).
Personalised outreach ~20–25/day (≈100/week) → ~10 replies/week → ~3 meetings/week (estimates).
SMEs; around 5 to 30–50 employees.
How to start your recruitment agency as a beginner. My name is James Blackwell and I'm founder of Entrepreneur James. So welcome to today's video. So today I wanted to talk around how you actually start your recruitment agency when you're a beginner and a novice. So back when I started my agency over almost five years ago now, I didn't really understand how to launch a website, how to launch a brand, how to win clients, how to have a lead funnel, how to systemize the business, how to hire talent. There's a lot of different moving parts when you're launching a recruitment agency. But my tip is going to be for if you are a beginner, what you need to do is actually have a lean model. So think of it really simply so you can build a website. So my initial thoughts were back five years ago, I thought it was going to cost me between 10 to 20,000 pounds to actually build a website. No, that's not true. You can actually build a website for 50, 100 pounds. So our first website that we launched with Ronald James actually only cost, I think it was like 50 quid. And my brother actually built the first version one of it in Wix.com and I think it took them like a weekend to put together and it was really simple and straightforward and to be fair, we actually got quite a lot of good feedback from clients saying, we really love your website. So that was coupled with so websites. So tips I would give for a website you can build it in, you can use WordPress, so you could hire a freelance developer to do it and you could probably find someone for $250, $300, you can use templates. So there's like websites like Squarespace Document, you could use wix.com there's plenty of templates out there. When you're just getting started, do not waste too much time trying to work out how to build the website properly and spending weeks and weeks perfecting it. You just want a clear landing page, a home page of exactly what you do, your specialism in your area. You want a home about us contact us page. Don't worry about job adverts for now or vacancies on your site that can come next on the line. What you want to do when you first launch a new recruitment agency, you just want to get six figures. So you want to get six figures as fast as possible and that will enable you to fund the growth with version 2 of your website, version 3 of your website and then you can go from there. So the first thing you could pretty Much build a website for $100. Next you want a logo. So the best way I would recommend getting your first logo designed, you can use a tool called fiverr.com that's F I V E and you can get a logo done for again $20. I wouldn't again waste too much time on that. I think we spend maybe 50, 100 pounds on our initial logo and we're still using that same logo today. So again, don't waste too much time. Make sure it looks professional and relates to your target market and your sector. But again that can be done very cost effectively and very cheap. The next thing that you would need when you start a recruitment agency as a beginner would be obviously your LinkedIn license. So I think LinkedIn's moved on a lot since I launched my agency in 2015. So you had obviously LinkedIn Premium back then, but then now you've got Recruiter Lite and you've got LinkedIn recruiter licenses. My agency uses LinkedIn recruiter licenses. It is a big expense I think when you first start now. So my personal advice to you would be to get a LinkedIn Recruiter Lite version and I think I believe that's around about $99 a month in and around. So it gives you the opportunity to have full candidate searches but also it'll give you the access for inmails as well. So I would start off with LinkedIn recruiter Lite and you might need to couple that with Premium or the other option could be using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which again is a similar price, I think around about $79 a month. And LinkedIn sales navigator still do a similar amount of jobs as LinkedIn recruiter Lite will. It might be a better benefit to start off with Sales Navigator because you're going to be using LinkedIn to generate clients as well. So there's a different project list you could do in that and searching companies. So potentially I would maybe move into Sales Navigator first. Next thing to start your recruitment agency would be email autoresponder. So what that is is we need there's only one of you, so you need to leverage your time as much as possible when you're first starting out and you want to leverage that by using tools and automation strategies. So the best advice I would give is using an email autoresponder. So there's plenty of different tools out there that you could use. There's a new one that I've started using called Reply IO. I think it is plenty of other ones out there. I Think there's another one called Quick Mail we used to use as well. So what that is is that's a black and white HTML text email that you can send down to a target client list and what you're trying to do there is get replies. So you're trying to get leads coming inbound. So you could start that off pretty much from day one. And that's something I would recommend getting going quite quickly. In my accelerator program, I talk a little bit around and I teach you exactly how you can set that up, how you can build a client lead funnel, how you get clients inbound, and how you systemize and automate that with a virtual team as well. So that's something I'm going to further detail, but that gives you the main ballpark of what you would need to launch the agency. Next strategy would be book as many meetings as possible with potential clients. So how you do this, that is for the email autoresponder, but also through LinkedIn. So I have a lot of success with LinkedIn. So if I was starting my agency again and how I would teach others to do it to get the six figures first would be connecting in with the owner, the CEO, founder, director of all of the companies want to target. For me personally, I would target SMEs first. I wouldn't try and get in thousand, ten thousand plus employee companies. There's a lot of red tape structure. It is harder to get through the front door. So what you really want is some quick and easy wins first because your number one priority is getting money through the door. The only way you can do that is to make placements. And the only way to make placements is to have clients and clients that you can try and get to quite quickly and turn around and control the process of one stage interviews, follow up on CVs, interview feedback, push for offers, all of that moving parts within a recruitment business, they're quite tough to manage. So don't make it harder by working with bigger companies straight away. You want to learn your trade right from the start, right from your grassroots. So I'll be focusing on either startups or companies that are looking to scale around about five employees to 30, 50 employees that I would focus on first. And you just want to try and go out and see as many people as possible or at least have as many Skype or zoom calls as possible. And what you want to do there is to help those companies. So you want to be spotting they've got active vacancies on the site. So whether that's on their website or LinkedIn. If they've got jobs on LinkedIn, that might be a little bit harder, I would say straight away, because that means a lot of people are targeting those companies. But also they'll be a little bit wiser into advertising directly, saving on fees, etc. They might have an internal recruiter, which is fine, you can still work with them. But I will be focusing on the companies that have maybe just got it on their career side, not necessarily. Even on your career site, you want to be obviously drilling down in your niche. So whatever you're doing, whether it's engineering, manufacturing, financial, it, digital, in those companies, you want to be focusing on the person with the money. And nine times out of 10 that's the founder or director or MD. So you want to be approaching them and having as many meetings as possible. There's another video I've recorded recently which talks a little bit around how you get those meetings and what you do on those meetings. So have a look through my YouTube channel for that. But those are the main areas of starting your recruitment agency. So you need your website logo launched. I would start with an email autoresponder campaign. You can get pick up a tool for around $50 a month and trust me, it's worth it because it means you can reach one to many very, very quickly and start getting inbound leads. I will couple that with LinkedIn personal one to one messages. So you would target the client market that you're looking to build. And I'll be doing personalised videos, so there's loads of free video recording tools out there. So in my program I teach you a little bit how you do that, how you start the video off, how you get it opened, how you get meetings. But I will be doing personalised one video messages and I'll be targeting myself at least 20 to 25 a day. So if you're doing what hundred a week, you should get at least 10 replies. Maybe five will be no, two maybes, three yeses. And three yeses are your three meetings for the next week. So I'll be going out and doing that as much as possible when I'm starting my agency and then it's all around making the placements, getting the money through the door. Next part is when you launch a new agency, how do you get paid? So obviously you send across your terms and get those signed and committed beforehand with the client. Once the candidate starts, you obviously raise your invoice. We use a tool called Xeroxero. Really clean and simple, very simplistic. To be honest, you don't even need that. I wouldn't be even investing in that until you've made 10 placements. So for the first 10, just let a head of paper with your address and their address and then you put invoice number 001 candidate placement fee and then at the percentage that you've agreed the full amount, whether it's 5,000, £10,000 or whatever, and then you obviously need to add your VAT on as well. So you need to register for VAT so you can reach on to an accountant to do that, or you could pretty much do that yourself. Very important to do that as quickly as possible because you really need to charge VAT and obviously then you can claim it back for your business expenses and your overheads as you go. But that's pretty much how I'll get started in my recruitment agency. I'll be pushing out as much content as possible on LinkedIn. LinkedIn at the moment in 2020 is still unbelievable for organic traffic through the newsfeed. So what you might have seen maybe three, four years ago on Facebook, we had so much organic reach on Facebook. Now it's all Facebook ads. It's very targeted. You can't really get a lot of traction with the organic likes and reaches anymore in LinkedIn. They're transitioning. Obviously LinkedIn ads are going to be huge I think in 2020 as well. And that's something that you can start investing in once you get cash through the business, but you can put on free content. So the more, if you think about it, the more potential hiring managers and companies that you're connecting in with, then you're putting out great content that's targeted to their specific niche and their specific pain point in terms of hiring certain candidates. And you give them free advice, you put out videos like I'm putting out videos. That gets you front of mind. And that's another thing that we teach in the program is how to build your personal brand on LinkedIn. Because as recruiters we're really marketeers and it's whoever manages to market their business and their profile the most effective will win the long term game for sure. So that's something that you need to bear in mind is giving value out on LinkedIn. You can do articles, you can do posts. Use hashtags now. So tip for a hashtag. I would only use three hashtags in a certain post because the more hashtags, the less diluted, the more diluted it is for your reach. But yeah, so if you need Any more tips? Feel free to comment below. I try and respond to as many comments as possible. Obviously if you could like and subscribe to the channel that would be fantastic because I'm trying to grow that channel more and more. If you are interested in learning one on one with myself, I am actually putting together a test group of 10 recruiters or recruitment agency owners. So whether you're even just starting your agency or you might get six figures now and you want to get seven, I'll show you exactly how I've built my business to over 1.5 million pounds agency while still having the lifestyle of freedom that I've got. So I'm working from home today on a Monday. I'm taking 10 on and I'm going to be doing an eight week accelerator program to get you to six or seven figures depending on where you are with the business. I'm going to give I'm going to make sure we're going you one on one to make sure that we can get the revenue and profit that you need in your business. So if you are interested, visit entrepreneurjames.com booking a strategy call with me, one of my team and then from there obviously go through the selection process and we'll let you know the cost and how that works, etc. So thanks for listening and watching this video and I'll catch you soon. Hi, thanks for watching today's video. If you like what you've seen, please like and subscribe to button with Entrepreneur James so you'll keep up to date with all of the updated videos. If you've got any questions or comment, I'd love to hear from you. So please drop a comment in Entrepreneur Gems below and we'll look to answer those on a weekly Q and A video. Keep an eye out for any future videos that we'll be posting. I'll be popping the video in here probably every one to two days. Thank you.
