Your Niche Is Not Saturated. It Never Was

Here's something that nobody in the space of recruitment is going to say out loud, and it might sound ridiculous at first, but when you hear it, I want you to pay close attention. But I've been running my own recruitment agency for over a decade, and in the past 13 years, I've never once come across a market that has been genuinely saturated. Not a single one. Because the word saturated, when it comes to recruitment niches, doesn't actually describe a real market condition. It describes a feeling. And that feeling has killed more recruitment businesses before they even started than any amount of actual competition ever has. In this video, I'm not going to give you a few niches to consider. I'm not going to show you a market map or tell you to go into X vertical because everyone else has found it or hasn't found it yet. I'm going to show you that the niche you already have is probably fine. And the problem you think you have, which is that it's too crowded, is probably not the problem at all. So let's start with what people actually mean because when When you trace it back, it's always the same thing. Every week someone says their niche feels saturated. Every time I ask the same follow-up question, what makes you think that? The answer is always the same. They scraped the internet and found 50 other recruitment agencies in the same space. A client told them that we already work with 3 other agencies and a LinkedIn search showed 20 competitors. So they sent a campaign and didn't get the response that they expected. None of that is saturation. That's just a market with other people in it. Every market has that. Every market has other people in it, and the ones that don't are the ones that have no demand. Just think about it for a second. What does it actually mean for a market to be saturated? It would mean that there's too much supply and not enough demand. This means that the market is full, that there is literally no room for another provider. Name me one recruitment niche where that is true. One niche where every single company has found a perfect recruiter, all of their hiring is done, and they never have a new requirement, and they would never consider working with somebody else. I'm telling you, that niche doesn't exist. What does exist is a niche where some recruiters are doing well and others aren't. That's not saturation, that's the market, and possibly a little bit of skill from a recruitment perspective. Because saturation is not a market condition, It's a story that you tell yourself when you're scared to go all in. And I want to show you what a genuinely crowded market actually looks like, because the example is quite obvious that basically once you see it, you can't unsee it. Come with me to any high street in any city in the world, never mind just the UK. McDonald's is serving coffee, Costa is serving coffee, Caffe Nero is serving coffee, Starbucks is serving coffee. There's an independent coffee shop that's been there for 15 years. And then there's a guy with a van parked on the corner from the train station who has been there every morning for as long as anyone can remember. Every single one of them is making money, otherwise they wouldn't be there. So if any market deserves the word saturated, it's selling coffee. And when you think about it, the margins are visible to everyone. The entry barrier is low. Anyone can learn to make an espresso. The infrastructure is everywhere. You can literally buy it off the shelf. And yet about 2 years ago, a brand called Black Sheep Coffee launched in London. Different positioning, slightly different product, slightly different aesthetic. And they're now a global company in what is by definition a saturated market. And every one of those coffee businesses I just named existed for different reasons. McDonald's is there because of location and volume. Costa is there because people trust the brand. Caffè Nero is there because it's comfortable and the loyalty card works pretty well. And the independents, Well, they're there because the coffee is probably better and the owner knows every single customer by name. The van guy is there because he's the only option at 5:30 in the morning and he charges £2. None of them are competing on the same thing. All of them are making money. And the question is never whether the market is crowded. The question is, what is the specific reason someone would choose you? If the coffee market is not saturated, I promise you, yours isn't either. But here's the part that makes recruitment different from every other market. And this one's important. When coffee shops compete with each other, they're competing with something that can be replicated. The cup of coffee I make and the cup Costa makes are not the same, but they serve the same function and can be replaced by each other. The candidate that you represent cannot be replaced. There is only one of them in the world. And every recruiter has access to a market, but not every recruiter has access to the same candidates. The person you found this week, the one with the specific experience in a really specific sub-niche your client is hiring for, is not sitting on another recruiter's CRM. Or if they are, they haven't been spoken to properly, positioned well, or even nurtured in a way that makes them willing to move. I run a 14-person recruitment company in one of the most technical niches in the construction space in the UK. My niche has about 900 companies in the whole country. Yes, 900, which sounds tiny by any normal definition. That sounds too small, but we are profitable because we know the candidates better than anyone else. And the product that you are selling is the candidate, and the candidate is the one thing your competitors, they can't copy. You can't clone a candidate, you can't mass produce them, you can't source them from the same supplier anyone else is using. So next time someone tells you that the market is crowded, What they're actually telling you is that there are other people trying to find and represent the same candidate that you're looking for. That's called demand, and that's a good thing. Your candidate is not a cup of coffee. There is only one of them in the world, and whoever represents them best is the one that wins the placement. So if saturation isn't real, why do so many people believe it? And this is the part I want to sit with you on because it's quite uncomfortable. When you tell yourself that your niche is saturated, you are looking for a reason to stop. Not always consciously, but that is what's happening. And here's how the cycle works. You pick a niche, you run one campaign, you get a lower response rate than what you hope for, whether that's a cold calling campaign, an email campaign, a LinkedIn campaign, or a client says that we already work with other recruiters, or you search on LinkedIn and then you see 15 other agencies in the exact same space. And your brain, which is looking for patterns, files that information under the market is crowded. That's how it works. And now something shifts because once you believe that, you start looking for justifications for it. Every difficult cold call becomes more evidence. Every no from a client is more proof. Every LinkedIn competitor you find confirms that belief. And before long, you have a whole case built for why this niche doesn't work and why you should probably try something else and why you should rethink the whole strategy. And just keep in mind, It's the belief that came first. The evidence came second. I've seen it with my own eyes. I've seen recruiters who have found 4 or 5 really good profitable niches and then just failed at all of them. And when I look at the pattern, it's never the niche. It's the same thing every time. One campaign, no placement, exit. One campaign, one negative response, exit. And the niche doesn't get the chance to fail because the person leaves before the niche can prove itself. Because there are recruiters who I've worked with and who have just seen their journeys, who are in probably the same niche as each other, following the exact same process and getting completely different results. So the niche is not the variable, it's the commitment. The moment you believe your niche is crowded, you start looking for proof that you are right. And once you're looking for it, you will always find it. That's not market research, that's just confirmation bias. And given my experience, this is the kind of stuff that I've helped recruiters get past. This has been recruiters who have just started their own agencies, employed recruiters that want to start their own businesses, or people who are already running recruitment businesses and they have challenges to get past. Because a lot of the time judgments have been made which lead to decisions which are not based on factual evidence. There's just confirmation bias. And if you ever want me or someone in my team to just do a full deep dive on your entire business and then see if we might be a good fit to work together, then I'll leave some information below. But Let's crack on. So let's talk about the difference between the markets. There is a real version of this conversation. It exists, which is that in some niches they are harder to break into than others. That's true, but harder is not the same as impossible. And this is exactly what I found. The recruiters who commit always beat the recruiter who just samples. I've watched people enter my own niche, the same niche that I recruit in, and exit in 6 months. Every time the reason isn't the market, it's that the niche is technical. You are dealing with degree-qualified professionals who expect you to know their world. And if you don't speak their language, they lose trust with you very quickly. And that's really hard. It takes a lot of time to develop. And here's the thing, that difficulty is also the protection layer. That same thing that makes it hard to get in makes it hard for competitors to stay in. Most people just try to copy, and I've seen some people attempt to copy what we've built, and they try to do it in our niche and they just don't last because they're not going deep enough. And the niches that feel saturated are usually the ones where the barrier to entry is super low. Everyone can send an email and so everybody does. And the answer isn't to find a niche with no competition. The answer is to go so deep into your niche that shallow competitors can't compete with you. And tell you what that means. It means knowing the clients by name, knowing candidates by reputation, knowing which companies are growing, which ones are struggling, which ones are about to restructure, knowing the terminology well enough that a hiring manager trusts you in the first minute of the call. No amount of competition changes that. The value of that knowledge, once you have it, and the way to win in a crowded market is not to find a less crowded one. It's to go so deep that shallow competitors, they just can't follow you. So I wanna leave you with one thing, one question that you should ask yourself before you make a decision about your specific niche. Ask yourself honestly, is there at least one person in the niche that you recruit in is already making good money right now? Not 1,000 people, not 50, just one. One person in that market recruiting in that space, building a real desk, placing candidates, making fees, and maybe even growing a team if that's the kind of incentive or objective that you have for your business. And if the answer is yes, and it has been a yes in every niche that I've seen a recruiter consider, then you can do it too. The market supports it. That demand is real. The question is only whether you're willing to go deep enough and stay long enough to prove it. Because the recruiters that I've watched build real businesses didn't find a hidden niche that nobody else had thought of. They found a normal niche, went into it properly, ran the full sequence, the calls, the emails, the LinkedIn, the follow-ups, the relationships, reworked it, attended events, and then reworked the entire lead list again. And at some point the market responded because the market always responds to someone who is consistent enough and specific enough and patient enough to earn its trust. And that's the only edge that actually compounds over time. Not the niche that you pick, but the depth that you go to. Saturated is what people say when they haven't even started yet, or when they've started and just stopped too soon. If you're watching this and you're at the stage where you're ready to actually commit to a niche and build this properly, then you need to watch this video next because this is an example of somebody who's probably in the same situation as you, struggling with their niche, not making many placements and was ultimately relying on one single strategy. So go and watch that video and I'll see you very soon.