2020 – the strangest year for many businesses globally. The recruitment industry has been no different. Getting back on track will be the mantra for almost every business.

Here is how recruitment agency owners can support their recruitment and sales teams in 2021.

1. Hire a dedicated Researcher: Many of your sales/360-degree recruiters will have little or no support at all for sourcing and generating new leads. Mapping the market, finding the right party contact, and their relevant information such as Name, Title, Email, DDI, and Mobile is a highly time-consuming activity. Support your team by hiring a dedicated Researcher that can continuously feed new information. Give them what they need to get what you want, i.e. new customers and jobs to work.

2. Get your ATS in order: Sourcers can sometimes do this for you, but make sure each Recruiter gets the type of candidates, and the number of candidates, most optimised for them. Look after the internal database by cleansing and regeneration. Database regeneration not only weeds out inactive and irrelevant CVs but also improves CV to vacancy match with updated information. Getting the right matching candidate to your Recruiters is imperative. Upkeep of the internal database is a highly time-consuming task, and you want your Recruiters to be focused on rapport building with clients, and candidates and generating revenue. Some recruiters can handle sourcing and regeneration, while others cannot. Optimise the internal database, and you will get a 25% lift just doing this.

3. Deploy a team of dedicated Sourcers: Sourcers can work on the upkeep of the internal database whilst ensuring new candidates are generated for the jobs brought in by the Recruiters. Getting vetted prequalified candidates into the Recruiters inbox on a real-time basis in a quick turnaround makes the Recruiter’s life much more comfortable. Let the Recruiter further focus on building rapport and influence the candidate to work for their client.

4. Invest in training & development: Being the first one to get the CV to the hiring manager has been the mantra of recruiting until now. However, in a highly connected world and open access to candidate pools, it is not just the speed that is the need of the hour. Recruiters with the skill to influence and negotiate will be the ones to thrive. Train your teams on influencing and negotiation skills.

5. Invest in recruitment analytics tool: What gets measured gets managed. Implement business analytics to make informed decisions and improve accuracy, efficiency, and response time. Tools like Cube19, Zoho Recruit, etc. help recruitment agencies to get a clearer image of goals and objectives.

6. Have aggressive but sane targets for 2021: 2020 is a rough year; however, ensuring that majority of the recruiters on your team can hit the targets in 2021. Success looks elusive when failure appears certain.

7. Lose anyone that is not performing: If you want to witness magic, give leads to top-performing recruiters and sales staff who can close the information. Do not let your precious “business leads” go in vain. The key to success is making way for star performers and letting go of nonperformers. You will see the closure of the lead ratio increase exponentially.

8. Meet with prospects and existing customers: Support the team with your gravitas as MD. Meeting existing clients helps in organic growth, reduces customer churn and meeting with the options enables in closing the deals quicker. Zoom with the clients and prospects, face time is critical.

9. Celebrate wins! Keep the team engaged and energised by celebrating successes. It doesn’t matter if the win is big or small. Doing this on Zoom or Teams is inevitable, given the current scenario. If you are not used to it, start doing it. There is no other alternative as it stands at this stage. People want to be engaged and recognised. Create memorable moments that teams can cherish for a long time. You can always ship a bottle of wine or a bottle of champagne to the top performers and celebrate on Zoom. Where there is a will, there is away!

10. Customer conference: Why not plan your prospects and customer conference. A virtual summit is a good starting point. Bringing both the clients and prospects on one forum helps with overall growth and development of your business. Your sales team will thank you.

11. Whitepapers & Surveys: Conduct compensation and benefits surveys for your industry sector. Covid-19 has changed the employment scenario globally. Circulate the research to your prospects and clients. Whitepapers and research results have proven to attract prospects and generate more business.

12. Support: Check if you have all the help in-house or need external support. Do not waste time, money and efforts on tasks that can either be automated at lesser costs or outsourced to improve efficiencies.

Start executing the plans if you have not already for the year 2021. Exploring and putting the solution in place before 1st Jan 2021 gets your recruitment business a great head start.