Thanks for replaying, I am currently reading your gold thread about recruitment agency and it's incredibly useful for me right now.
I have couple of years of experience working in a different corporations in departments related to law, finance, accounting and administration. I have never worked in HR or as a recruiter, but I have good knowledge about mentioned above subjects + I am quite good in communication and soft skills. Regarding sales and marketing this is a part in which I also don't have much experience beyond some small side hustle when I was younger. I am constantly trying to get better at it but reading books and videos is just a theory. I was thinking about starting a recruitment agency as my local (Polish) market is not so well developed in that area and Poland is right now a hot place in middle Europe for global and well known companies. I wouldn't create it by my own. I would cooperate with my colleagues who has similar background.
I was thinking about hiring as soon as possible a recruiter with big experience to focus more on growing a company and generally a business aspects, and recruitment part left to him.
I am not entrepreneur yet, I have never created a business from scratch, but everyone needs to start somewhere and I am currently in a great life situation to do it.
Polish market could be a very interesting place to be for sure. I would still specialise much further than that - the smaller the niche, the easier it will be to win clients and the more "reusable" your candidates will be against different jobs. But the niche still has to be large enough to support your business.
You can specialise by job function, by geography, by industry, and by seniority (or a combination of all four). As a good rule of thumb, you can have a very successful business as a one man operation with a target market of 500 hiring companies that each hire 5 people in your specialty per year. So, it doesn't need to be a huge space at all.
If it's feasible, I'd strongly recommend at least going to work for a recruitment company for a year before you set up your own thing (the higher end and more niched the firm, the better). It will make your life so much easier. There's literally dozens of different parts to the job you need to be good at to succeed, and if you suck at just one of them, it can easily derail your entire business. If you have no experience or training, you probably won't even realize there are parts of the process you aren't incorporating.
And it's an endlessly frustrating business at the best of times.
These books are IMO mandatory reading:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003BQOBYG/?tag=tff-amazonparser-20
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001G6Q2H2/?tag=tff-amazonparser-20
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0966969324/?tag=tff-amazonparser-20
Be aware these are all from the "old school" of recruiting, before digital marketing became a thing. That's fine. When you're new, that's where you should start. As you'll see from my thread, I made the epic mistake of obsessing over digital marketing at the expense of sales, actually doing recruiting, and even choosing a profitable niche. And that's as an experienced recruiter.
This online training platform is also reputable: Online Recruitment Training Courses | Recruitment Juice
So my suggested startup plan is:
- Get some training (if that includes working for a firm for a while, even better)
- Choose your niche
- Get a basic (but professional) website up, get your Linkedin profile on point, and sort out all the legal stuff (contracts, fee agreements, etc.)
- You can get a basic free recruitment CRM from various vendors, or just start off with spreadsheets to begin with
- Sketch out your sales and recruiting plans and activity metrics (those books/training will teach you how to do that)
- Pick up that phone and dial, dial, dial. Make as many calls as possible. Every time a call goes wrong, take a note of why and where - that's where to focus on for the most urgent improvement. You'll see the same objections/blocks/stonewalls come up over and over again and you'l learn how to handle them. 6-12 months in, you'll start feeling like you actually kinda know what you're doing.
When you already have a degree of success and your one-man business model is working well, then you can think about digital marketing, hiring, and things like that.
Don't even bother trying to hire a recruiter so you can focus on the "business aspects". Recruiting IS the business. In the early stages, there should be little else to manage, and if you're not offering anything unique to that recruiter beyond a salary, why would they work for you? Why would they stay?
If you can make it as a one-man operation (or a team of you doing the full cycle recruiting together), then you can think about scaling. Until that time, forget it.