Start a Recruitment Agency on Your Own

Starting a recruitment agency on your own takes a lot of guts and needs careful preparation. You cannot just leap head first into starting a business in the same way that you can start a new job. To be successful in running your own small business, that has the potential to earn you a good living and grow, you will need to understand your strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths and Weaknesses

You do not just decide to start a business one day and set it up the next – you will probably have felt frustrated in your current recruitment role for some time and have had the idea of setting up your own agency for some time. To understand if you are the right sort of person to run your own recruitment consultancy, first you will need to be totally honest with yourself about what you can do and what you will need to find in other people.

In order to get to the bottom of what your strengths and weaknesses are, you may need to ask someone you trust to give you an honest critique. This could be a trusted colleague, a business minded relative or a commercial mentor from your bank. There are also a number of government-funded support agencies and networks that offer excellent advice, often for free, which can also give you access to really useful grants and information.

Once you have got a clear picture of where your skills lie, you can see if you are suited to setting up an agency by yourself. Even if there are gaping holes in your commercial experience, with the right drive and focus you will be able to find freelance staff or employees that match your needs.

Funding

To set up a recruitment business on your own you will need to have enough funding in place to support yourself. This is particularly important if you are planning to operate a temps desk because many new agencies fail due to having to pay temps before the agency is paid by the client. Most temps expect to be paid on a weekly basis, whereas most clients expect a minimum of thirty day payment terms.

The amount of funding you need depends greatly on what you are prepared to be flexible on – you do not need to shell out for a fancy office, for example, if you are smart with using technology and a virtual office address. There is no point wasting money on something that you do not need at first.

Experience

Having the right experience in recruitment and running a small business is just as important as funding. To be able to make the most of the opportunities you have identified, you will need to have an insight into the recruitment industry and the sector in which you plan to specialise. To be able to set up an agency on your own, you must have this experience yourself. Although you could pay someone else instead, this will eat into any potential profit right from the start.

You do not need to know everything about recruitment to be able to set up your own business, but you do need to be able to see the opportunities, understand the industry sector and guide your career towards a successful future.