Last Updated May 28, 2024
Winning clients is the single most significant and essential factor in growing a staffing agency from the ground up. If you know how to find clients, running a staffing agency can be a lucrative venture. As long as you’re ambitious and are deploying the right strategies, the sky is the limit for your business.
To help your business reach its fullest potential, follow along, as this guide will provide seven tips for getting clients for your staffing agency.
Before Finding Clients
Before you look for new business, ensure that you’ve checked off all the requirements to open a staffing agency. Aside from required paperwork and documentation, this includes creating a business plan, setting feasible but ambitious goals, and budgeting.
Take a look at where your staffing agency is now financially, and then ask yourself where you want it to be in five years. When deciding on a goal, you should also take your limitations into account. For example, how many clients can you take on with the team you have right now before reaching capacity?
It’s all about scaling your business. Landing 100 clients tomorrow doesn’t do you any good if you can only handle 20 clients today. As you will soon discover, it’s not about finding clients so much as bringing the right clients to you.
You’ll want to consider business financing as well. When starting a staffing agency, you may not qualify for a traditional loan off the bat, so an alternative financing solution like invoice factoring could provide the working capital needed to avoid having to turn away new business.
How to Find Clients for Your Staffing Agency
Learning how to get clients is pivotal for every business owner. Once you get in a rhythm, you’ll have determined which ways work for winning clients and which ways don’t, but the trickiest part is the beginning: how should you start off devoting your time when you first begin searching for business?
The following tips have proven successful for existing staffing agency owners, so by taking note of these strategies, you’ll have a good jumping-off point to begin finding clients.
1. Optimize Your Staffing Agency Website
One of the most important elements for any staffing agency is its website. Without a well-designed website, recruitment agencies will have a tough time finding clients. This means that a blockish, clunky website that looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 1990s isn’t going to cut it. Studies have shown that 94% of first impressions of webpages are design-related.
When it comes to a quality website, user experience is everything. People look for usability, ease of navigation, engaging images, and a sleek design. In building a website for your staffing agency, you should focus on making navigation easy and creating a sleek design to appeal to customers. You can check out existing staffing agency websites for inspiration. While you don’t want to copy your competitors, paying close attention to the strategies that industry leaders are utilizing to succeed can provide inspiration.
Images are important because they attract attention. Be sure to use images creatively and try to stand out from the other staffing agencies out there. A lot of staffing agencies use simple, ubiquitous stock photos showing office workers. While that might be sufficient, try to devise a site that truly stands out.
You should pick a unique, attention-grabbing domain. Hot domains can be hard to come by, as many of the best ones are either already taken or quickly snatched up by competitors. However, keep in mind that there are still plenty of great domains to come up with, so use your imagination!
One last tip: learn the basics of SEO. It can be a great way to drive leads to your site organically without eating into your budget. By successfully incorporating SEO tactics into a website, staffing agencies can eventually find clients and land contracts without spending a single dollar.
2. Identify Your Target Client by Creating a Persona
When you’re creating your staffing agency business plan, you’ll likely want to consider and research industries that you’ll focus on staffing for. Having a niche is the norm in staffing, so you’ll want to identify that niche and know how to find clients for that industry in particular from the start. For instance, if you decide on staffing the nursing field, you should begin researching how nursing agencies get contracts.
What can be particularly helpful is developing a client persona. By doing so, you’ll gain a full understanding of the type of client your staffing agency is attempting to win over, including their specific habits and tendencies.
3. Become an Industry Expert
Researching your target industry should go beyond understanding the ins and outs of solely your business and your client’s business. It means being an overall industry expert. For staffing, this means having a deep understanding of the staffing industry, along with your target clients’ industries.
Using the nursing staffing agency example, if you know next to nothing about the nursing field and you aren’t keeping up with nursing industry trends, your leads might pick up on that and turn to one of your competitors. On the contrary, a nursing professional might be impressed by your knowledge about the industry, leading to increased trust and, hopefully, getting a new client for your employment agency!
4. Provide Value for Free
One of the most effective strategies many staffing agencies use to get clients and build relationships is to provide value for free in the form of workshops, talks, presentations, seminars, and more.
Take pictures from your seminar and feature them in blog posts and social media to boost credibility and awareness. Becoming a successful staffing agency and attracting clients starts with establishing yourself as an authority in the field.
If you’re sitting there with no clients whatsoever, hosting a few seminars to establishing your authority in your niche can put new faces in front of your business. When you’re starting off, you’re not expected to have a line of business partners at your door. Rather, what’s important is being an industry expert and showing a passion for what you do. And when it becomes evident that you care, others will care too.
5. Utilize Your Staffing Network
Networking is essential to the success of any staffing agency. Join social media groups in the staffing arena and offer advice. Reach out to industry leaders on LinkedIn. Ask those industry leaders questions when participating in webinars.
Become the educational voice that people come to for answers in the staffing world. Once you’ve done that, your network will recommend you, and clients will find you.
6. Convert Leads into Clients by Providing a Personalized Experience
Once leads start rolling in from following the tips listed here, your work is just getting started. When you start getting traffic, it’s time to begin turning traffic into clients for your employment agency.
Treat every inquiry seriously and treat every potential new client professionally, even if you don’t think they’ll be a fit. If you’ve been having difficulty finding new clients for your staffing agency, you can turn that disadvantage into an advantage. How? By giving new clients what the busier staffing agencies can’t: personalized attention.
By giving each prospect individual attention, you’ll build stronger relationships, leading to the next key to finding staffing agency clients: referrals.
7. Ask for Referrals
Make each client count by asking them for referrals. Do the best job you can for every individual client and ask them for referrals. If you’ve blown their minds with your incredible quality of service, most clients will be more than willing to provide you with testimonials.
A great deal of the staffing business revolves around relationships. While forging client relationships can be challenging for new staffing agencies, it’s not impossible, and once you get some traction, everything will become easier for you!
Final Thoughts
Now that you have plenty of information to get started, it’s time to put that knowledge into action and take your staffing agency to the top! Remember, it’s not all about finding clients. It’s about making clients want to come to you. The best way to do that is to establish yourself as an industry authority by highlighting your knowledge and expertise.
Best of luck! If you need help financing, check out our guides on payroll funding for staffing companies and financing a staffing company. Here are some of the other staffing resources for you as well:
- Staffing Company Marketing Strategy
- Pricing Your Staffing Services
- What Is VMS in Staffing?
- What Is MSP in Staffing?
- Behavioral Interview Tips for Staffing Agencies
Grey was previously the Director of Marketing for altLINE by The Southern Bank. With 10 years’ experience in digital marketing, content creation and small business operations, he helped businesses find the information they needed to make informed decisions about invoice factoring and A/R financing.
