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!