Starting a recruitment business means starting with a marketing plan. We all know more about marketing nowadays, but it’s still not fully understood by many.

Marketing Your Start Up
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‘Starting a recruitment business means starting with a marketing plan.”
I commented recently on the fact that some words that were once only part of an internal industry language are now in common usage. Time was that marketing was seen as a mixture of art and science, viewed with suspicion by consumers. Now you can visit a new housing development and be welcomed into a show house proudly labelled ‘Marketing Suite’.

We all know more about marketing nowadays, but it’s still not fully understood by many. People refer to ‘marketing’ when they’re actually talking about advertising for instance. And advertising is only a part of marketing.

The best definition for marketing is this – ‘Marketing is the management process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably’.

That means it covers a vast range of activities including research, planning, product development, media selection, advertising, creative writing and design……it’s big.

But, no matter how sophisticated the process is there are some fundamentals that apply, and ones that you should adhere to when starting up a recruitment business.

Those essential principles centre on asking yourself the ‘5 W’s’.

Who? What? When? Where? Why?

Let me talk you through it.

Who? Who is your target audience? Who will you be selling to? As a recruitment business you’ll typically have two key audiences – recruiters and candidates. But are they industrial, logistics, or commercial? Are they permanent or temps?

You’ll also need to ask yourself who are we? What’s the nature and personality of your business? If you know your brand and can establish who you are then the marketing instantly becomes easier. You can set objectives and define what is and is not ‘on brand’.

What? What is it we’re selling? Recruitment, obviously, but what precisely are you offering? A full service including interviewing and CV advice? A consultancy for large corporate clients? You need to be clear about what your offering is because it will not only help establish your business plan, it will have a direct impact on your advertising and promotion.

When? Seasonality has more impact on some businesses than others. In recruitment it’s perhaps not so directly impactful but you need to think about the seasonality of your clients workforce demands. That of course is something you’ll know because you’ve answered the ‘Who?’ question. When are people most likely to need your services? When is it best to promote your business, ahead of those predicted peaks in demand? Timing is key.

Where? Geography is the first issue here. How far are you going to spread your target market? Where are the key centres of employment and recruitment in your region? Where do candidates live, and travel to for work?
Closely linked to this is the question of where you need to promote your business. It’s the media selection question. Do you need local radio, local press or e mailers? Which online media reach your target audiences?

Why? In many ways this is the big one. Why should people come to you rather than any other agency or consultancy? What makes you special?
This is about defining your USP – the Unique Selling Proposition.
To analyse this fully you need to, rigorously, examine your strengths and weaknesses. Be honest about them. Look at your competitors and measure yourself against them. What have you got that they don’t?

If you can accurately and candidly define your USP and then promote it, to the right audiences, in the right place, at the right time you’re implementing a marketing strategy.

And one final piece of advice. It will pay you to have the input and opinions of experts. Whilst the ‘5 W’s’ bring the marketing process into sharp, grounded, focus it’s still important to accept that there are people who know as much about marketing recruitment agencies as you do about running one.

Serious, strategic guidance at the outset will pay enormous dividends in the long run. And let’s face it – if you’re starting up you’re planning on being in it for the long run.

For many recruitment professionals who want to start up for themselves the concept of becoming a franchisee is very tempting.

For many recruitment professionals who want to start up for themselvesContinue reading

You’re starting up your own recruitment business, and you want to stamp your own identity on it.

The Name Game

You’re starting up your own recruitment business, and you want to stamp your own identity on it.
You’re starting up your own recruitment business, and you want to stamp your own identity on it. It’s one of the main reasons you’re doing it. High on the list of things to do then is decide what you’ll call your business. You’ve probably had ideas for a while. In fact you’ve probably thought about the name for your own business while you were doing business for someone else, and before you finally decided to take the leap.

Now it’s a reality though and maybe simply putting your name over the door isn’t quite going to cut it. ‘John Smith Limited’. Nice to feel autonomous. But so what?

You can use your name of course, but it’s going to mean more to your target audience – in fact it’s going to identify you with your audience – if you add key words like ‘Recruitment’ or ‘Personnel’ to it.

You can abbreviate your name, to your initials, and add that descriptor. So, ‘John Smith’ and its vagueness becomes ‘JS Recruitment Ltd’, which starts to sound more like it.

Step outside that area of name ideas and it becomes a blank canvas. Everything from anagrams of your childrens’ names to powerful nouns like ‘Rocket’, or softer titles such as ‘Select’, are all in the frame. You could define the market area you’ll operate in with variants of ‘Executive Recruitment’.

If you approach the problem sensibly you’ll definitely create some long lists before you whittle it down to the final choice.

Break the list down into groups and you’ll see that some are driven by personal links – like your or your family and possibly associates’ names and some will be ‘emotional’, like ‘Power’ or ‘Direct’.

The next challenge is to decide what it is you want the name to convey. Recruitment – obviously, but do you want an image of power and dynamism, or a more personal and attentive service? The answer may lie in which target audiences you’ve decided to aim at. Large corporates may well respect the strong and powerful approach, but if you’re going to be working primarily in the care sector you may want to consider something more approachable!

Your business name has to sound right – try saying it as if you’re answering the phone or introduce yourself to people including your business name. Reactions to the name are great and if people instantly understand the name and what it is trying to convey, you know you are headed in the right direction.

Your business name will need to look right too. Whatever you choose needs to be something that can be visualised in a logo and work across everything from your stationery to your website.

It’s worth getting professional guidance for a couple of key reasons. Firstly from a design and marketing point of view. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but ask a selection of people what they think, how it sounds, and what it means to them.

The other reason is legality. A very well-known international business changed its branding quite recently. Massive tv campaigns, direct mail drops and posters were held up for a while as despite the sheer size of the company and all its resources it had missed the fact that a tiny little retailer in its own home city had been using their ‘new’ name for years. By doing your research you will avoid creating unnecessary competition before you have launched.

Remember, there are a lot of people in the recruitment sector and the chances of a name already being in use are high. In years gone by if a company had the same name as yours, but they were two hundred miles away it didn’t matter. In the digital age, with search engines being a main route to finding you, it does matter.

And finally. When you have chosen the name, and checked it, and had the logo designed – stick with it. You may alter it one day. Ten years on when you’re a global group of recruitment consultancies and floated on the stock markets there may be corporate reasons to do that. Meantime you need to build a brand, develop an identity and win business. Changing your name every six months is not how to win the game!

Your logo is your first impression, make sure it’s right!

Your Logo Is Your First Impression, Make Sure It’s Right!
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The ‘look’ of your company and your logo will be the first impression you create and you need to make sure it’s the right one.”
There are a thousand things to do when you’re starting a business, and starting a recruitment business is no exception. Staff, premises, finance, IT and systems – they all have to be sorted.

And of course there’s the question of your identity. The ‘look’ of your company and your logo will be the first impression you create and you need to make sure it’s the right one.

We all use that word – logo. Once it was part of the internal language of the design and advertising industries. Now – we’re all experts. Or are we?

A quick lesson in language.

‘Logo’ is an abbreviation of logotype. It comes from the Greek, and means ‘a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol commonly used by commercial enterprises and organisations to aid and promote instant public recognition’. Logos are either purely graphic (symbols/icons) or are composed of the name of the organisation.

By extension, the term was also used for a uniquely set and arranged typeface.

You can see that, from the start, logo design has been all about creating something unique.

Today a company’s logo is often synonymous with its trademark or brand.

Ask a marketing professional to expand on that definition and they’ll tell you that a logo has to be constant. It’s the one thing that stays the same, unchanged and consistent, amongst your marketing communications.

The first important piece of advice regarding logo design is ask the professionals. You’re passionate about your new business, and it’s close to your heart. Because of that you’ll have ideas about what your logo should like. You’ll probably be scribbling ideas on envelopes or kicking around designs on your computer. The reality is that you could be the best recruitment professional ever; but that doesn’t mean you’re a designer.

By all means feed your ideas to designer, and let them know what you want to convey about your business and let them develop it.

There are different ways of approaching logo design. Your name alone can be your company’s name, and styled into a particular typeface, and with perhaps some added flourishes, it can become your logo.

Or you could consider designs that use graphics to convey the nature of your business. If you specialise in logistics recruitment for instance it’s feasible to explore designs that echo transport or movement.

An important point to consider when creating a logo for a recruitment company is the audience. Because, although not uniquely so, your business has to ‘speak’ to more than one target group. Your recruiter clients will be organisations who will expect a corporate approach but you also have to convey a friendly ‘consumer’ appeal to your candidates as well.

Colours will be a big discussion point. You want your logo to be legible, and stand out. That applies to the words and letters as well as any graphics. There are certain scientific facts about such things as black and yellow being a highly visible combination, and red and green being a problem for some people, but in truth there are no hard and fast rules. In any case it’s often the logos that broke the rules that have stood out most and lasted longest.

Fashion is an issue. Time was that ‘squirly’ and complicated designs were the big thing. They went out of fashion as clean cut modern European typefaces became all the rage. And they came back into vogue when the design world decided that retro ruled.

Your main concern will be to have a logo that stands the test of time. Firstly because constantly changing it detracts from its key purpose of building your identity. And secondly because constantly changing it detracts from your marketing budget!

If you’re spending your marketing budget wisely you’ll be using online media and techniques as much as any other. And that’s an added demand on logo design today. Now, it has to work not just as ‘ink on paper’ but also on your website, your e mails and banner advertising. The good thing is that, online, you can make it ‘sing and dance’ if you want. The challenging thing is to have a logo design that will work within that technology, and across all the platforms and devices. There’s no point in a logo that looks fantastic on a website if it disappears on a tablet or smartphone.

So, professional input is vital. Even more so now because logo design has to embrace the digital world. It always has been a mixture of art and science, but never more so than today.

You should consider professional help in another area too. I said at the outset that a logo is often seen as synonymous with a company’s trademark. It might be seen that way, but legally it’s not a trademark. For that you need separate guidance and registration processes. Be very aware that a logo is not necessarily a registered trademark.

In fact, be very aware that professional help and guidance is essential in starting up a recruitment company. You want it to be right. With exactly the right logo.

‘So far 2015 has been a busy year for Recruit Ventures. We have assisted multiple new joint ventures, created a new website and expanded our team.’Continue reading

‘As a Joint Venture company the business will benefit from the expertise of one of the UK’s largest independently owned recruitment groups.”

Recruit Ventures support tte launch of three new agenciesContinue reading

Inside Right launch in Wolverhampton funded and supported by Recruit Ventures.

Recruit Ventures Welcomes Inside Right
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Inside Right launch in Wolverhampton funded and supported by Recruit Ventures.
Currently specialising in Industrial, Engineering and Driving recruitment, Directors Ben Jones and Luke Walton who have worked closely together in previous roles are keen to offer their wealth of recruitment experience with the support of their team to businesses across the Wolverhampton and surrounding regions.

With the team offering over 30 years of recruitment experience Inside Right will provide a new, honest and credible service to local companies. Offering a unique business approach the new venture is positioned to offer Wolverhampton and the surrounding area personable and tailored recruitment solutions. Their high-street office will be open to welcome job seekers and clients looking for new options during their recruitment drives.

Being a new agency covering a wide range of sectors no task will be too demanding or beyond the abilities of this recruitment business. Ben Jones, Director says “There’s a lot of mediocracy in the market place and we feel there’s an opportunity for us to step in and do something better.” He continued “We’re going to offer a personable service to our clients as well as candidates. We feel we can add something fresh into the market with a lot of determination”

David Simons, Recruit Ventures Managing Director said “Being able to provide them with full back office support means that from day one of launching Inside Right, Ben and Luke can start their business safe in the knowledge that they and their team are supported by accounts, payroll, IT, marketing and HR experts allowing them to focus on the recruitment side of the business and building a reputation for their agency.”

Ben Jones, Director added. “Considering what has been needed and the support we have required, I think their service has been exceptional. I’ve been really happy with everyone we have dealt with. HR have been great as have payroll and accounts. The IT infrastructure is fantastic, and the business support manager has been incredibly helpful. Whenever we needed anything or we need top end direction we have been able to go to David and he’s come back to us straight away.”