Temporary roles should be a permanent fixture for a startup recruitment business
Perm or Temp?
The question that so often dominates the planning of a recruitment company’s strategy. It’s a particularly important question when the planning is for a startup business.
To deal with the negatives first; specialising in temporary roles can be seen as a demand on cash flow. If you’re explaining your strategy to, say, a bank manager he or she might flag up the question of your business settling temporary workers’ pay before your client pays you. That would be a negative in the eyes of someone who knows finance but doesn’t know recruitment.
If you do know recruitment you’ll see it differently of course. You could explain to the aforementioned bank manager that your startup is worth backing because you’ve thought it through and, despite their observation, temporary roles make eminent financial sense.
A steady flow of work and income
You could go on to say that, with a client base in need of temporary staff, and a database of candidates looking for non-permanent work you will have an increased chance of generating a steady flow of work and income. Ironically one that’s much smoother than the highs and lows of one off commission payments that come from placing permanent staff.
In fact, you could further embellish your pitch by pointing out the facts of permanent placements. The couple of months or so it takes to get the brief, the weeks it takes to find and place the candidate, and the 30 days minimum after that – worse if you have to go through a 3 month trial – before you get paid.
A balance of permanent and temporary roles
It may well be that a balance of permanent and temporary roles is the best long term strategy, but wherever your business plan takes you it’s dangerous to ignore the potential in temp roles, especially at the outset.
As to that pitch, you’ll find that if you put your business case to us you’d be preaching to the converted. We really do understand recruitment.
At The Recruit Venture Group, recruitment is what we do.
We specialise in providing the funding for recruitment professionals to start their own businesses. You get 100% financing to launch, and access to our back office and support systems. We’re there for you – but it’s your business. You’ll be able to draw a salary from the start – which gives you the peace of mind to get on with the job.
And, as we said, if you’re looking at building a portfolio with a strong thread of temporary roles in it, we’re behind you. We can see the sense of it.