How To Know When It's Time To Hire Your First Employee In Your Recruitment Agency

Hello everybody, my name is James Blackwell and welcome to today's video. And today I'm going to discuss around when you should hire your first recruitment consultant. So when I first started out my agency back in 2015, I was fortunate to have my brother be the first employee. Although he came fresh out of school with pretty much zero qualifications, I trained him up from scratch to do the recruitment piece and really specialize in the sourcing for our industry after that time. Obviously I have made a few mistakes, so I thought I would share some with you today because not everything's always rosy. When you grow an agency you do go through some challenges and one of the biggest mistakes I was that I have made in my agency is definitely been around hiring. So a few mistakes I made. I think looking back over the last three to four years, I think I've fired like 12 employees or 12 at least. Haven't worked out for one reason or another. So some have left, some obviously we've let go just because they weren't the right culture fit. Some were poor performers. So as you grow like your boutique agency, like hiring is pretty much one of the most important things that you should spend a lot of time on because it's very competitive in the market and everyone is looking for good recruiters or good salespeople. I sort of redefined like how we actually model the business. So we don't really operate in a traditional agency sense, I. E. Like 90% of most businesses is just all recruiters on a desk. They get a phone and laptop and away they go on a certain designated market. We've sort of pieced together our agency slightly different where we've got layers of virtual team and sources. Then we've got in house what are called marketeer sources. And then we've got recruiters that are delivery consultants. And then obviously on the BD fund we've got myself that would go out and win and still do like win the bigger clients. And then we've got a delivery model for some couple of 360 people in the business that would do some of the client presentation stuff along with the delivery. So our model is very hybrid and so that means the type of people we look for on traditionally what you would call like 360 based recruitment consultants. Because one of the core strengths that I would recommend anyone doing when you're growing your agency is be really good at developing long term partnerships with your clients as opposed to even if you're in a candidate short market. Yes. You want to make a great brand and great repertoire Representation across social channels to interact with that audience. But the client is what pays you. At the end of the day, they're the ones that get the invoice and actually pay the 5, 10, $15,000 fee for your services. So you need to make sure that you've got those relationships really tight. So we obviously, obviously offer like a few different value ads in terms of our USP as well as just being a transactional CV send out agency. We try and offer a lot more extra services to make sure that we can solidify our place in the market. Our exclusively overturned services. But coming on to hiring, yeah, I did make a lot of mistakes. So like, it's tough because no matter how many books I read and some great books that you could read about hiring, his Top Grading, which is a good book about A players, B players and C players. So we went through a phase where obviously we were looking for the A players in the market and we made a few mistakes because people interview well as, as well. So like they'll come across and say everything you want them to say. And that doesn't necessarily transcend into when they do start in the business. A big shift for them because whoever's coming into our size agency, which is around 14 employees, if they're coming from 100, 200 person businesses, the culture shift is huge because they're going from being really micromanaged with layers of management and set structures for everything to be what I would call the self managing model, which is what I built our agency on, is our guys are self managing. So that means they manage their own time, their own day plan. They'll have certain metrics that they need to hit, but how they get there is up to them. So they get a lot more freedom and it is a harder transition for some people that are coming from a real corporate environment are used to being chained to a desk or whipped into shape to hit certain numbers or hit certain phone times. Like our environment isn't like that. So some people didn't really adapt to that as well as we expected. But probably the biggest tip I would say to you, if you either started or start to grow your agency, is be more picky. Because at the start I was really keen. So I was overselling our agency. I was selling to them instead of them selling to me because I felt like, oh, because some of our competitors are bigger, which bigger doesn't always mean better. We need to oversell what we do and how we operate. And another thing that I would say is like sleep on it. So never make an instant decision that you want to hire that person right away. Even if you know and you've got that is the right thing to do. Make sure you take 24 hours. So make sure you take that time to think about that person. How are they going to fit into that business because then you've got the challenge of onboarding them. And if you're like my agency, you probably you won't have like a set designated trainer. So yes we have video material and onboarding process but there still needs some hand holding whoever's going to come into the business. So that will take people that are being productive and generating revenue for you off tools to help that other person. So you really need to do be picky in terms of when you are hiring. So that's one thing I have learned is be extra picky. Take that extra interview. So don't just interview them once. Get them back in, get them to start doing a presentation, get them to really think do they want the job. And then when they do come in make sure you do give them that support because it is tough to transcend into the environment. So it's important that you've got that in place to get that time because they're never always going to hit the ground running. So sometimes you do need more patience. So I'm interested to hear anyone's challenges below. Like if you would like me to go into a little bit more detail around the hiring aspect of growing your agency, I'm more than happy to do another video on the YouTube channel if you are interested in working with me one on one. I've had a phenomenal take up of that so far. So we've got a really good tight group that is getting weekly mentorship and on our recruiter accelerator program which is helping people build a six figure profitable agency through our online course and weekly coaching calls. So if you're interested booking a call, there'll be a link down below in the feed. And thanks for supporting as ever. So smash that like button if you enjoyed the video because I'm trying to grow our subscribers. I know we've just hit the 1000 subscriber mark which is great. I get a lot of positive feedback so I appreciate everyone that watches this video. So in order to help the channel grow if you wouldn't mind making sure you do subscribe if you haven't and liking the video. So I hope you have a great day and I'll catch you soon. Hi, thanks for watching today's video. If you like what you've seen, please like and subscribe the button with Entrepreneur Gems so you keep up to date with all of the updated videos. If you've got any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you. So please drop a comment in Entrepreneur Gems below. I 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.