Adding Value to Your Recruitment Business
Adding value to your recruitment business is all about offering additional services that utilise the skills of you and your consultants without actually costing anything. This means that you can charge for services that your clients will value but will not increase your cost base. The exact services you offer may differ depending on your location and the industry for which you recruit, but the following suggestions tend to suit most areas and recruitment segments, and are proven to appeal to paying customers.
CV Writing
Recruitment consultancies are perfectly placed to offer CV writing services as they are constantly seeing badly written CVs. A well-written CV is good for both the agency and the candidate as it means they are more likely to make a fee and find a new job, but there is no reason why you should offer this service for free. It is certainly true that some agencies do offer to re-write CVs for free, but this tends to be high street agencies and while they may make an improvement on the original CV, with a bit more time and effort they can be far more targeted.A good CV needs to be detailed without being too wordy, informative without being boring and filled with plenty of tangible examples of skills and experience. Agencies that re-write CVs for free do not tend to be able to take ages to do this, so as long as you can sell the fact that you take time to tailor-make each CV and present to its best possible advantage, you can charge for it. Perhaps you could refund the charge when your candidate is successfully placed? That way you make money from ‘less able’ candidates too.
Interview Coaching
For a recruitment consultant it can be so frustrating to register an excellent candidate and then realise that they perform poorly in interviews. Interview coaching is an excellent added value service as it benefits both the candidate and the agency.Interview coaching is essentially the practice of making sure your candidate performs as well as possible at interview. There is rarely a ‘one size fits all’ approach as each person tends to have a different issue, although common problems are nerves, being unable to think on the spot, poor body language and ineffective preparation. Interview coaching as a value added service needs to be offered carefully, as it can sound critical, but if approached correctly it can be a real boost to nervous candidates.
