How to scale your recruitment business with automation
The very nature of recruitment businesses means that scaling them can be challenging.
For many businesses striving for growth in the industry, an obvious and popular strategy is to expand the team.
Investing £50k in a recruitment professional may add £150k revenue to your bottom line which would make this approach attractive, but it isn’t void of risk.
Will a new starter achieve their revenue targets? What about the additional costs of NI, PAYE, pension contributions and benefits that come with employment?
The gain in profit may not end up as attractive as it first sounds.
What if there is a way of adding revenue without significantly increasing cost and risk to the business?
To explore this, it would help to first understand the difference between growing and scaling a business.
Business Growth vs Business Scaling
Business growth involves adding revenue to a business in line with increased cost. It means you need to invest to grow.
The strategy of bringing in an additional recruitment consultant is an example of this as it involves significant investment, along with the element of risk over whether they will achieve their revenue targets or not.
Scaling a business, however, involves adding revenue to the business without significantly increasing cost.
There are different strategies on how to do this.
It could be that you employ administrative staff at a lower cost to take on non-revenue earning tasks, enabling your high performing revenue earners to sell more. This is the principle of scaling a business.
Strategies on the set-up and growth/scaling of recruitment businesses is one area that Davidson Gray, specialist recruitment start-up investor specializes in. In a recent article they highlighted their recommended top tools for recruitment business marketing.
Harnessing LinkedIn
LinkedIn offers one of the most powerful platforms for recruiters, and with over 700 million professionals it is no surprise that it is a popular choice. It can serve 2 roles:
- To generate awareness of your brand, in order to attract new clients seeking candidates.
- To create an up-to-date network of candidates, improving the efficiency of candidate placement.
It is the initial process of LinkedIn outreach that can consume alarge amount of a recruitment professional’s time, and if recruiters can reduce this element then there is a huge opportunity to scale your business. This is where automation tools, specifically for LinkedIn, come into play.
The Benefits of LinkedIn Automation
LinkedInAutomation has proven to save companies 80% of their time spent on their outreach activity. Growing LinkedIn networks without the cost of adding staff have also been tactics to help recruitment companies scale.
For recruiters particularly, getting to grips with LinkedIn Automation can really propel you forwards, but these tools should be used inthe right way. Here we demonstrate our strategy for using LinkedIn Automation to drive real results.
Dux-Soup LinkedIn Automation Tactics for Recruitment Agencies- Playbook
LinkedIn Automation tools are best positioned to replace early outreach activities. It is always a good idea to prepare an engagement strategy that suits your business ethos and then fit the automation activities around your strategy.
Assuming a fairly straightforward strategy for candidate placement we’ll outline steps taken by many Dux-Soup Users.
**Note that Dux-Soup works with LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Standard packages.**
1. Install Dux-Soup.
The Dux-Soup chrome extension is free to install and gives you basic automation functionality. Upgraded subscriptions are available which offer more functionality.
Once you’ve installed it you may want to watch this video tutorial which covers the basics of how to use it
2. Create your target lists.
Lists of target prospects can be built in a number of ways -
1. From within LinkedIn where you can filter by job title, geography, sector and many more options. Your LinkedIn subscription level will determine how many search results are visible each month, Sales Navigator is an excellent tool for building lists within LinkedIn.
2. Using the google X-Ray tool (great if you are on the standard LinkedIn) from within the Dux-Soup extension, which performs a Google Search of relevant contacts that you can target with Dux-Soup
3. By uploading your own list of contacts in csv format (requires Dux-Soup Professional Edition)
4. Linking your CRM system to Dux-Soup which offers a 2-way integration to a) target your contacts from within your CRM b) enrich your CRM with LinkedIn contacts (requires Dux-Soup Turbo)
3. Scan Profiles (optional)
Once you have your list of prospects, you can set Dux-Soup to work scanning the profiles in LinkedIn.
This will record the information of all contacts scanned (including email addresses, numbers of connections etc.).
With Dux-Soup Professional at $15/month you can export this data and tidy it up to ensure your targeting is even more accurate before you run a campaign to it.
For example, remove connections with job titles that don’t match your search.
You can then upload this list to Dux-Soup to commence your outreach by clicking on the revisit button within the extension.
If you don’t have Dux-Soup Professional, and are using the free version, you can just go straight to visiting profiles and connecting without running a pre-cleanse of your list.
4. Visit Profiles and Connect
You’ve probably seen that you get notified when people have visited your profile. This creates an opportunity to increase the visibility of your brand.
Often this is your first chance to get your brand in front of a prospect so it’s important that you have a professional profile.
Here are some tips on how to create a good LinkedIn profile that we’d recommend before starting your outreach - to improve success rates.
Use Dux-Soup to automate profile visits of the LinkedIn search results, the data you are revisiting or segments within your CRM system.
5. Personalised connection requests
When you choose to send a connection request to your target audience then it’s important to personalise these messages.
This is where tagging and segmentation can become valuable. It may be that you target members of a group and you want to invite them to connect with you using an intro such as:
Dear xxx
I see that we are both members of ??? group. I’m interested to follow you and hear your updates on the group.
Best regards,
xx
Dux-Soup enables you to tag profiles and make notes against profiles that you scan and visit, enabling you to better personalise your follow up connection requests and messages.
By personalising connection requests with first names and sending bespoke messages to your segments, Dux-Soup users have achieved high connection success rates whilst saving a huge amount of time.
6. Automated messages and drip campaigns
Whether or not you choose to continue to automate messages and drip campaigns via LinkedIn to your audience depends on your strategy.
For some, at the point when a prospect has accepted a connection request, this is the time to take it personal (for that read manual).
For others, you could look at further using automation to achieve the following via LinkedIn:
1. Communicating company updates to clients
2. Communicating new job roles to candidates
3. Sharing thought leadership content with prospective clients
The opportunities are endless but deciding on whether to automate the engagement element of your business depends on your personal approach, your target market, the volumes of prospects you are dealing with and sales process.
The ability is certainly there and we recommend testing, reviewing and amending your strategy accordingly.
Reaping the benefits
Once you’ve then got the hang of automating your LinkedIn outreach and engagement you can start to think about building a multi-channel marketing strategy using other social media and marketing tools.
By integrating Dux-Soup into your CRM system with the premium Turbo plan, you can manage this easily from one platform and start to feed the leads generated into other marketing campaigns such as email, telemarketing, and social media campaigns.
You’’ll start to see your business scale in no time.
Next Steps
Try Dux for free!
The great news about Dux-Soup is that you can use our Starter edition for as long as you want to, absolutely free! Download Dux for free now - start visiting LinkedIn profiles and see the tool in action.
Or try our premium Turbo edition on a Free 7-day trial
Join our very active Facebook group and sign up to the Dux-Soup Blog to keep up to date with our regular webinars and lead generation insights.
If you have any thoughts or questions email info@dux-soup.com or find us on the live chat!
We look forward to welcoming you onboard!
P.S. Why not check out how to save 75% of your time when you use Dux-Soup for LinkedIn recruitment.
