What is preventing recruitment companies from growing?

What is stopping the boutique recruiting firm, those small companies of one to five people, from becoming larger entities? For many small companies, they just don't want to grow. These small businesses are in a comfort zone and see no need to change. However, there are plenty of owners (and you may be one of them) who are scratching their heads thinking "why can't we grow beyond a few good recruiters who can constantly bring in locations and bills?" It can be done because there are large executive search and recruitment companies that have grown from two or three recruiters to thousands. What is your secret? Why are there so few large recruiting companies?

One reason why small businesses fail completely or do not grow is that the cost of entry to the recruiting business is extremely low. In today's world you don't even need a phone. A computer with VoIP will work fine. So you could really start a recruiting business from a prison cell, have a room at the local YMCA, or from a public library. It is not surprising that these types of recruiting companies fail because the people who create these companies do not have the experience to run any kind of business in the first place.

So what about companies with recruiters who have some professional business skills? When recruiting, as in any other type of business, the owners constantly make a key mistake: they try to clone their skills in others for the expansion of the business. But companies simply don't grow by making copies of the president / founder. The successful recruiter must divide his process into a series of steps that can be taught or produced by third parties or tools. So the recruiter / owner must go from being a good recruiter to being a good leader and teacher. If the successful recruiter just watches and trains people to be like him / her, then the only success will be to make a good recruiter who will start their own business.

In fact, it is a business model used by some of our clients and, if that is your intention as a business owner, it seems to be successful. These companies hire people to train as full recruiters to go out and go on their own and hire and train other recruiters to be successful and go out on their own. For me, this approach is too individualistic and does nothing for the original business owner unless he gets a share of the profits from the cloned individual recruiting companies.

So how do you 'build' good recruiters to grow your business? A good recruiter is almost as rare as a professional athlete. There are thousands upon thousands of good athletes at the secondary and college levels, but very few can really play at the professional level. The components of what makes a good recruiter need to be defined and separated. It is not possible to simply duplicate everything that comes in as a successful recruiter and hope to date another successful recruiter.

To grow a small recruiting business, the challenge for the recruiting entrepreneur is to leave his role as a successful producer and then try to figure out what his new role should be. He / she must "cross the bridge" from an issuer to an invoice issuer. Breaking components is not an easy task. Components can be recruiter-specific, such as research, candidate selection and prospecting, or simple, mundane tasks that make a component step more efficient. But quantifying these tasks in metrics is essential. Without metrics, the business simply cannot be managed.