6 Figures in 12 Months! How to Free Yourself from Wage Slavery

[Iwokeup]

Well, now we have a business model, 3 books to get you started, two former recruiters (myself and @Contrarian), at least two former contract employees, and a marketer familiar with the space (@Djs87 )offering to give advice. And we know that the cost to get started isn't very expensive.

So the question now becomes: what are you going to do with this information? Who among you is going to take action?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Iwokeup]

Well, I mean... I don't have all day. I was referring to specific questions! =)

Thank you for taking the time to respond to this thread, Sir. I'll start:

If you were just starting out and had a very small marketing budget:

1. How would you position the recruiting firm as a Quality Standout?
2. What would be the most effective spend of the marketing budget?

Thanks in advance!

 

[LibertyForMe]

One more question, any tips on finding companies that need people? Like, how do you get in touch with companies who are open to recruiters other than just cold calling every company?

 

[Iwokeup]

One more question, any tips on finding companies that need people? Like, how do you get in touch with companies who are open to recruiters other than just cold calling every company?

Trade shows, man. Send gift baskets. Visit in person if feasible. I don't know. Anything that sets you apart from everyone else.

Ready to Take Action?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Andy Black]

I've a question...

It's a two sided market.

If you were to choose which side to focus on getting, which would it be... the job vacancies, or the people looking for work (or rockstars who could be convinced to move)?

 

[RoadTrip]

Rockstars. It's all about connections. Rockstars will see open vacancies and be reminded of you if you treated them correctly during their process

 

[Eos]

How about creating fake candidate CV's and posting them up so that rival agencies contact you and sell you the role....
You then know what is out there, and what the requirements are, turn around, source your candidates and fill it yourself.... $$$

This happens

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[LibertyForMe]

How about creating fake candidate CV's and posting them up so that rival agencies contact you and sell you the role....
You then know what is out there, and what the requirements are, turn around, source your candidates and fill it yourself.... $$$

That is so unethical and dirty....ugh.

I would hate if someone wasted my time and resources like that.

 

[Eos]

That is so unethical and dirty....ugh.

I would hate if someone wasted my time and resources like that.

Yeah man, so bad.
Makes me wonder what else goes on behind the scenes.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Mr3Thirty5]

I've thought about this idea many times, but the area I live in is so impacted with recruiters. If you are able to successfully start one, the payout is definitely sweet (I've seen 40% markup). I have pitched this idea to a few close friends, but they are reluctant to join me. I don't blame them because I've seen three small staffing agencies close down in my area the last 2 years. Great idea for a city that doesn't already have a staffing agency on every corner.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Iwokeup]

I've thought about this idea many times, but the area I live in is so impacted with recruiters. If you are able to successfully start one, the payout is definitely sweet (I've seen 40% markup). I have pitched this idea to a few close friends, but they are reluctant to join me. I don't blame them because I've seen three small staffing agencies close down in my area the last 2 years. Great idea for a city that doesn't already have a staffing agency on every corner.

I doubt that those staffing agencies provided LEGENDARY customer service. Just because others have failed doesn't mean that you would.

 

[Contrarian]

I've a question...

It's a two sided market.

If you were to choose which side to focus on getting, which would it be... the job vacancies, or the people looking for work (or rockstars who could be convinced to move)?

There's various ways to skin a cat. And to some degree it depends on the market. But I've set up new desks from scratch several times over the years, and by far the quickest way to gain traction quickly is by looking for the rockstars first. If you're dealing in the senior end of the market, the rockstars will be your clients too one day. Good markets for search are where candidates are in short supply and high demand. If you find one of those this will work.

What I did that worked best:

1) Gather a minimum of 100 potential candidate names, companies they work at, job titles & contact numbers (often just the switchboard of the company)
1a) Also gather a minimum of 100 hiring managers, in a separate spreadsheet - but we won't call those yet
2) Made loads of calls to the potential candidates, got their mobile numbers so I could contact them when they're not in the office. Did a general Q&A, explained I specialise in the market and use it as a fact finding and relationship building call. You have to do this well or they'll think you're just fishing for information and wasting their time.
3) Many of these will be open to specific moves, so if you get any relevant leads you can come back to them and explore in more detail. But you want to keep doing this until you find a marketable candidate, one that fits the criteria for actively working on to find them a position. The books I recommended explain this in more detail but put simply, just because someone is really good at what they do doesn't make them marketable, even if they are placeable.
4) Take the marketable candidate and sell them in to relevant companies far and wide over the phone. Secure them interviews, whether on an active position or on an exploratory basis.

Sometimes you will place them, and you have fee income then and there. Other times, you won't but you will build reputation for delivering great people (they have to actually be great or you'll discredit yourself). Either way, you can use this to get in the door with new clients, and then over time some of them will give you positions to work on. Over time you will find the model changes from one of primarily marketing candidates to one of filling jobs.

In my case, the marketable candidate I used first got several interviews through me but I never quite placed him. However, he gave me three senior management jobs and I filled them all either with candidates I had approached in the initial phase or through referrals from those candidates. £80k-ish fee income in month four from setup. It opened up all the doors that helped me build the business.

This is by no means the only way to build the business but it's definitely the fastest, and needs far less selling skill than hammering on clients' doors. Far easier to sell the tangible than the intangible.

 

[LibertyForMe]

by far the quickest way to gain traction quickly is by looking for the rockstars first. If you're dealing in the senior end of the market, the rockstars will be your clients too one day

So, do you recommend focusing solely on the high-paid senior types of positions?

I have more personal career experience working in entry to mid level analytics positions with some management experience, so if I did something like this I would probably focus on rock star college students in business schools who are graduating soon, and then helping place them with good companies. I know that commissions would be smaller since they would be for entry level spots, so that is a downside. Also, entry level people wouldn't become my clients one day either.

Thoughts?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Contrarian]

So, do you recommend focusing solely on the high-paid senior types of positions?

I have more personal career experience working in entry to mid level analytics positions with some management experience, so if I did something like this I would probably focus on rock star college students in business schools who are graduating soon, and then helping place them with good companies. I know that commissions would be smaller since they would be for entry level spots, so that is a downside. Also, entry level people wouldn't become my clients one day either.

Thoughts?

I've little experience working with junior positions, and companies do make a successful model out of that but you have to bear in mind the supply, demand and competition side of things. It's a lot easier for companies to recruit graduates directly than it is mid-senior level engineers. Increasingly recruitment agencies are being cut out of the equation anyway, what with technology being able to replace the middleman in many cases, in-house recruitment teams, etc. It's a lot harder to make a living out of than it used to be, and some parts of the industry are more heavily affected than others.

There are a few prominent graduate recruitment companies in the UK, but they tend to focus on sales & recruitment jobs, and the business model is a little more complex. They run assessment centres, where high potential candidates are selected to be put on the database. Then when they place someone, they put them on a residential sales training course, and training for a vocational sales qualification throughout their first year of employment, etc. I went through one of these out of school. The cost to the client will be pretty high because of the training costs etc. Pareto Law is an example of such a company.

I can't give you a definitive answer on this one because I don't have any real background in it. I'm cynical but biased.

 

[Mr3Thirty5]

I doubt that those staffing agencies provided LEGENDARY customer service. Just because others have failed doesn't mean that you would.

Thanks! I know customer service plays a huge role. I know I can provide that for both my customer and clients. There are 4 large staffing agencies in my area, and all the skilled individuals looking for contract work flocks there. I've done research on this type of business and am looking for a couple right people to partner up with. Keeping this option in my back pocket for future use. Currently focusing on importing goods, hoping this will fund my next business venture.

 

[tranquil43]

Oh man am I glad this thread exists! I'm someone who has actually taken action in this space and you can read about my experiences below:

A bit of my background; IT professional, have been contracting since 2010. Always was happy with the money I made but always thought to myself why couldn't I fill people in temporary assignments and take a piece of the pay? Recruiters did that with me so why couldn't I do what they did?

So back in September, when my contract at the time ended, I decided to give the IT placement thing a try. I opened a site, and branded my company as a social media placement firm (social media jobs I should mention are hot right now). I have a friend who has done recruiting and has a very large pool of potential talent so I knew that finding talent to place wouldn't be an issue. The issue for me was finding willing clients.

I didn't really have a list of potential clients to lean back on or anything. I tried thinking of ways to find clients and one idea was to give a speech. So I reached out to someone who runs a group for technology executives in NYC and asked if I could give a presentation on social media. He accepted and I gave a speech to a room full of tech executives who were interested in the subject matter. After the speech I went around giving business cards and got theirs. I then proceeded to message each one and ask them if I could help with placements within their firms.

In parallel, I looked up job openings on sites like Dice and Monster, looked at the job description and reached out to the HR folks for those companies (whom I found on Linkedin). I hit the pavement hard but I always encountered the same answers, answers such as:

1. Our company isn't looking to fill any temporary spots at the moment
2. We have a preferred vendor that we already work with
3. We don't deal with outside placement firms
4. And then there were those who never responded

So that has been my challenge these past few months. I gotta say, cold calling sucks and a bit inefficient for my tastes.

My current plan is to re-brand my company into something very niche in the IT world, something like CRM or SharePoint consulting, and then get the word out by advertising my company to specific sites and publications that draw in a IT crowd.

Any thoughts, comments, or help at all would be greatly appreciated!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Contrarian]

Oh man am I glad this thread exists! I'm someone who has actually taken action in this space and you can read about my experiences below:

A bit of my background; IT professional, have been contracting since 2010. Always was happy with the money I made but always thought to myself why couldn't I fill people in temporary assignments and take a piece of the pay? Recruiters did that with me so why couldn't I do what they did?

So back in September, when my contract at the time ended, I decided to give the IT placement thing a try. I opened a site, and branded my company as a social media placement firm (social media jobs I should mention are hot right now). I have a friend who has done recruiting and has a very large pool of potential talent so I knew that finding talent to place wouldn't be an issue. The issue for me was finding willing clients.

I didn't really have a list of potential clients to lean back on or anything. I tried thinking of ways to find clients and one idea was to give a speech. So I reached out to someone who runs a group for technology executives in NYC and asked if I could give a presentation on social media. He accepted and I gave a speech to a room full of tech executives who were interested in the subject matter. After the speech I went around giving business cards and got theirs. I then proceeded to message each one and ask them if I could help with placements within their firms.

In parallel, I looked up job openings on sites like Dice and Monster, looked at the job description and reached out to the HR folks for those companies (whom I found on Linkedin). I hit the pavement hard but I always encountered the same answers, answers such as:

1. Our company isn't looking to fill any temporary spots at the moment
2. We have a preferred vendor that we already work with
3. We don't deal with outside placement firms

So that has been my challenge these past few months. I gotta say, cold calling sucks and a bit inefficient for my tastes.

My current plan is to re-brand my company into something very niche in the IT world, something like CRM or SharePoint consulting, and then get the word out by advertising my company to specific sites and publications that draw in a IT crowd.

Any thoughts, comments, or help at all would be greatly appreciated!

Nice work on taking the plunge.

Marketing is increasingly important in recruiting these days, as buyer mindsets change to reflect the free information world we live in. And most recruiting companies suck at it, or don't do any at all (like the one I work for now). So good work on using that route. But ultimately recruiting is a sales business and a contact sport. You need to be on the phone, a lot. You need to make lots of sales calls. No way around that. And you will always get objections.

These HR types get a dozen calls a day in some instances, from largely-identical sounding recruiters asking if there's anything they need help with or some variation of "we're unique for all these same reasons that everyone else says". And without a sales background, you're up against a horde of people who are much better salespeople than you.

Every part of recruiting is sales, not just winning clients. Negotiating rates is sales. Getting candidates is sales. Getting interviews arranged is sales. Closing the placement is sales. Coaching the client on how to interview correctly is sales. Overcoming fear of change is sales. Defending against counteroffers is sales. And it's never ever as simple as it looks.

You can "warm up" your cold calls by having specific and useful reasons for calling other than "I'd like to introduce my company to you". Having a candidate in hand. Taking a thorough reference and then bridging into a sales call. Referrals. Contacting them as candidates and converting them into clients later. There are many ways. I don't recommend flat out cold calling as a strategy of anything other than last resort.

I would get your sales skills in order before you worry about the marketing so much. You can do the best presentation in the world, but if you don't make the right impression when it comes to selling time, it won't matter.

With overcoming the objections of "current vendor list", "don't deal with placement firms" etc...it all goes back to giving value instead of looking for money. Find a big enough problem, solve it, and they will happily pay you. If you have the person in hand who can solve their problems, then suddenly their preferred vendor becomes irrelevant. But if you're only talking to HR bods then you will get this a lot, because they are bureaucrats and by and large, they're driven by processes and not outcomes. Go to the guy with the problem. You will no doubt still need to deal with the HR bods but they are driven by different things.

It's really an apprentice business. Assuming you're still dipping your toes into entrepreneurship, if you're really dead set on this I'd recommend getting a job at a good recruiting firm for a while and learn that way. Combined with book learning. I'm not saying it can't be done on your own, of course it can, but it will take you a lot longer to figure it out.

 

[tranquil43]

I definitely need to brush up on my sales skills My issue I think is being specific in who I reach out to. Giving a speech to a room full of technology executives hoping they have a need for someone to find them talent isn't efficient as I happened to learn the hard way.

I think I need to be laser like focused and as you said reach out to those who have the problems that need to be solved, not HR bots.

I actually was able to find a willing client (who canceled the role 2 weeks after) by reaching out to the CIO of the company and offering to send some resumes of some qualified candidates. That small change definitely seemed to help. Sure if didn't pan out the way I wanted it to but it was a bite when nobody was really biting.

I think a good route for me would be to learn a lot about a niche area in IT (like CRM as I mentioned for) and release some great contact for free. Hopefully this will help me gain credibility as well as an audience that I can then leverage into business. Entrepreneurship isn't easy not by a long shot.....

 

[MitchC]

Somewhat related to this as scummy jobfinding things seem to be getting posted.

I applied for a warehousing job listed on a job website posted by a recruitment agency and got a call back a couple of weeks later.

They asked about my experience and said I would be good, talked wages, talked about it being a growing industry, yet it was all broad stuff no specific job.

Anyway he asked if I had a forklift or truck licence, I said no, he said my experience is great but anyone with those would come above me, my training team mentioned a course in my town, hang on I'll have a chat with them and call you back.

Called me back and said I was eligible for a govt funded course and after doing the course they would give me a voucher to get me one of those licences, and then they should be able to get me a job quite quickly.

Super scummy, but basically post a fake job, register and offer govt funded courses, get your $3000 funding per person and give the person a $700 voucher for a licence at the end of the 1 week bullshit course, and get heaps of warm leads through the ad, promise them jobs if they do the course. He probably makes like $30k+ a course and it's a 1 week work in your own time booklet type thing.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Deleted29854]

@tranquil43 Recruiter here. Late to the game on this thread but I noticed your comments and they jumped out at me. Want to help but have to be a bit blunt. (Quick aside, I often think about going into IT because its more straight forward with less hassle. We both suffer from lawn envy)

Sell what you know. Recruiting is three pillars; Sales, Knowledge/Skills of role, & Communication. You already have two of those, knowledge and communication. What better way to learn how to sell or polish your skills than talking about what you know.

Social media roles are bunch of low paying bullshit. (Social media is phenomenal for sales funnel for entres, brand awareness, etc but I've never seen a role looking to pay more than $35-40/hr so your max spread would be $15-18, maybe $20/HR). Companies had rev. streams before social media so its an after thought. Now, if you go into E-Comm (Sterling, Hybris, ATG) you are looking at rates of $100+/HR and that's where you make money. The higher you go into the operations/revenue stream, the less H1B competition you'll have and the less HR will be able to be a roadblock.

The whole business comes back to relationship value. What value do you add to the relationship. If you deliver real value, you'll always have a client. Your value point is your prior IT expertise so leverage that into revenue. Call every manager you've worked for and tell them the deal, I bet you'll get some hits.

Happy to answer any other questions you have.

 

[tranquil43]

Thanks NH!

What is the typical way recruitment companies generate new business? I've always been curious about that. If you can shed some light on that I'd really appreciate it!

 

[Deleted29854]

Thanks NH!

What is the typical way recruitment companies generate new business? I've always been curious about that. If you can shed some light on that I'd really appreciate it!

Sure can. I've worked for two vastly different agencies that overlapped in one particular space. My first firm is a global, forward thinking, tech trend centric firm which likes to stay on the bleeding edge of technology developments. They feel this gives them the first mover advantage by trying to capture as much "relationship credit" as possible. This creates a very inconsistent strategy and kills managerial efficiency. They are great at understanding technology, immersing themselves in the world, and being capability experts. Also, they will spend a lot of money in areas they foresee ROI. The execution is subpar. I had three managing partners in my time working for them. Company #2, does not innovate at all, doesn't care about technology, and tries to be a jack of all trades. A dollar is a dollar in their eye. They have decent execution and have been in business for over 30 years. We are more monolithic and believe in client over technology. This allows for more stable, predictable cash flows but removes any chance at big growth or capturing super high margins/getting a foothold in a developing area.

With all that said, the quickest way to clients is leads. You get leads from job boards, primarily LinkedIn. You get leads from candidates, who they've interviewed with, who has called them, etc, etc. You get leads from networking events. You get leads from those silly lists (not effective). You get leads by calling a decision maker with a fake job, building rapport, and trying to get into his company. IMHO, you are already on the right track to be speaking at events. You just have to find the right one. Your company isn't big enough to be a sponsor at "CIO/VP/Director level Networking group ie. evanta or SIM" but you will be. The key to getting into those is having the right pitch and capabilities. Technology first, staffing second. I got my company to the sponsorship stage with one last year where the group asked us to join but we didn't want to bc it cost us 5K upfront. I mean, who wants to spend 5K to be in a room 80+ times a year with decision makers that control over $1+B in budget spend. <This is the actual reason I am on this forum, I have bet on myself and can't let idiots dictate my future.

The #1 strategy you should abide by is when you speak to a great, engaging person make note of it & invest with them. People hire sincerity and competence. I almost always know within a few minutes of speaking to someone if I can place them or not. You will develop this instinct.

My first piece of advice to you is to define your realm. What do you want to eat, shit, and breathe? Then focus on clients. There are too many generalist firms out there for you to play that game. If you don't define it, you will always be reactive in a sea of recruiters. If Sharepoint is your thing, well that is a great place to start. Grow from there.

That was long but hopefully it helped. LMK if you have other questions, happy to help.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[tranquil43]

That was incredibly helpful, thank you! I will definitely keep everyone updated on my progress.