Everyone wants to grow their recruitment business.

Somewhat ironically though, recruitment as an industry has legendarily high churn rates – the percentage of people leaving within 12 months hit 24% in 2015/16, according to APSCo and Deloitte. And if your business is constantly looking to replace one in four staff, it’s all the harder to focus on making progress in terms of growth. Especially as replacing a member of staff can cost up to twice their annual salary, depending on their seniority.

In fact, a BDO survey in 2016 found that around half of the recruitment companies they spoke to thought that difficulty in attracting and retaining top employees was their main barrier to growth. So what’s the answer to retaining current employees and creating a stable basis for your business to grow?

It starts with good on-boarding. New hires need to be able to assess their performance and improve where necessary, so you should give them regular, honest feedback and appraisals.

Make sure they’re given clear objectives too – after all, how can you do well in a role if you don’t know what you’re working towards? Having a clear aim will make sure employees can measure how well they’re doing and enjoy their role more, too.

As you’d no doubt tell your own clients, finding the right people is also key. As the CIPD says, “an effective retention strategy needs to start with finding the right candidates. Our findings show that two-fifths (of companies surveyed) are making efforts to improve their selection and induction processes in their efforts to address retention”. Yet in the recruitment industry, too many of us don’t practice what we preach – and end up with people unsuited to the role who lose interest and leave.

That’s why it’s so important to assess candidates you’re thinking of recruiting, and using the insights you get to tailor both the on-boarding process and future motivational strategies.

The culture within your business is equally important. Making it helpful and co-operative, with a team ethos, is vital to help new people ask questions and learn to improve. If they can’t do that for fear of failure, they’re more likely to not bother asking for help and start looking elsewhere.

Again, you’d expect candidates you put forward to be offered a career progression plan – so make sure your own staff have one too. It doesn’t necessarily mean changing jobs or titles (some recruiters want to move into management, while others just want to carry on doing what they love); but providing new challenges and goals within the company is important, and means people are less likely to move on.

Much of the above is, of course, simply common sense; in the most part it’s what recruiters expect of their own clients, and forms the basis of best practice in hiring new talent.

But all too often over the years we’ve seen recruiters ‘forget’ what they should be doing when they hire their own staff – resulting in having to spend more time trying to replace people and, ultimately, restricting their business’s growth.

Back Office can handle all your admin and taking care of running your back office , so you have more time to focus on growing your business. Find out more by talking to the Back Office team on 01260 280 290.