Grow Your Staffing and Recruiting Firm: 4 Fundamentals for Unlocking Success

1. Determine goals, motivations, and obstacles
Before initiating any growth strategy, it’s essential to identify your goals. Whether you plan to grow organically or by acquisition, your plan should align with your objectives and proceed with a purpose that will keep you motivated.

It’s also crucial to assess the obstacles to your growth. Identifying these hurdles and addressing them in your growth plan is critical to increasing investments and achieving success. For instance, limited delivery capacity or weak lead flow can cap growth even when demand is there.

2. Gauge risk tolerance and choose a staffing growth strategy
As with any other major business decision, investing in your company’s growth involves a certain level of risk. Therefore, it’s essential to determine your risk tolerance before choosing a strategy.

Staffing firms typically choose one of two primary growth strategies: organic growth or growth by acquisition. Organic growth takes longer to achieve but carries a lower level of risk. Conversely, mergers and acquisitions can lead to faster growth but carry a higher level of risk.

Both organic growth and growth by acquisition are legitimate strategies. The right choice for your success should be based on an honest evaluation of your resources and risk tolerance.

3. Plan for economic shifts that impact hiring demand
Economic shifts can come without warning and sometimes happen overnight. While wringing your hands and planning for every possible disaster is paralyzing and counterproductive, it is still important you examine the leading labor market signals that may impact your business before investing in growth. For example, if job postings and new requisitions in a key industry start to slow, this could be a sign of instability or change.

While it is impossible to perfectly time your investments, you should still plan for potential impacts. Your ability to respond to or control these impacts may vary, but ignoring them could have a detrimental effect on your success.