Recruitment’s always been a highly competitive business…even more so in these extraordinary times. So making sure your business, large or small, is on a firm financial footing is more vital than ever.

With that in mind, we’ve used our long experience of working with recruitment businesses of all shapes and sizes to put together our six top tips to help your business – whether you’re a start-up or an established agency – cut costs, save money and maximise your profits. Which, right now, could make all the difference.

  1. Office or off-site?

Like so many businesses, you and your team have no doubt been doing a lot more remotely in the last few months. So you may well find it worthwhile considering whether you’ll need the offices you have now in the future. With working from home currently the norm, many businesses from small start-ups to multinationals are looking at other options, including sub-leasing, co-working spaces or simply downsizing their offices and rotating staff to work three days in and two from home, for example. All of which could lead to substantial savings.

  1. Get the right tech and tools

You’ve a lot on your plate right now, not least of which will be sourcing candidates, running them through the selection process and making sure new hires stay engaged and productive. Perhaps surprisingly though, there’s a whole host of new and not-so-new tools out there to help you get the job done quickly and efficiently – and even more surprisingly, many of them are free! For example, free job posting sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, and Betterteam, which allows you to post to several platforms at once; Crystal, that helps improve candidate engagement; and Hunter.io, that lets you find professional email addresses to build better connections. All are free, and all could transform the way you work.

  1. Check your cash flow

You don’t need us to tell you how important cash flow is. But right now, it could literally mean life or death to your recruitment business. So make sure you map out your payment terms in contracts and make sure they’re adhered to, be firm and make the consequences clear and if necessary utilise the recruitment funding options available to keep your cash flowing (you can always talk to Back Office about that).

  1. Free Marketing

If you’re a small business and rely on one or two main clients, losing one of them could be catastrophic – so it’s more important than ever to promote your business as much as possible. Fortunately, there are many channels available to do it without spending a penny – such as social media, email marketing via free tools such as Mailchimp, blogging on your website and even just posting to job boards. You might find it useful to read one of our previous blogs on the subject of social media for a few pointers.

  1. Prioritise productivity

We’ve already mentioned some of the free tools available online, but there are others – such as Trello – that can help you organise tasks, make sure deadlines are being met, set clear targets and more to make sure your team’s working as efficiently as possible. Another option is to outsource some of the tasks that eat up your time and stop you doing what you do best, which brings us to…

  1. Extra, external support

Although they’re not free, using efficient and trustworthy back office support services from a third party (such as Back office) can free up a great deal of your time so you can focus on your specialist skills, and prevent costly mistakes from being made – so in theory they should more than pay for themselves. Especially as getting all those services from one supplier brings cost efficiencies too.

A lot of what we have discussed is back to basics advice, but it really can pay dividends.

As well as getting better control over costs, there’s a great deal you can be doing now to make sure you’re working efficiently and ready to roll when the market starts to improve, which we covered previously in our blog.

Of course, if you’d like to talk to us about Tip #6, the Back Office team will be only too pleased to help! Just call us on 01260 280 290 or just drop us an email.