Being the best in your niche will require resilience, hard work and creativity. If you want to stay ahead, you have to be ready to roll up your sleeves and work for what you want. That also means you will have to find a way to communicate this to your employees and keep motivating them to make this dream theirs and not to settle for less than the best.
Here are a few practical tips to get you on your way to the top:
1. Be niche specific:
Though you may be a general recruiter, you may need to break your firm into different departments to enable you function with a degree of accuracy or you can focus your entire company in a more specific niche. Niche specific firms are more effective because they know and are known in their markets more than those who are into general recruitments.
2. Commit to stronger connections:
The best recruitment firms are those who own the streets through broad and rich connections with people. If you want to be the go-to company when it comes to recruitment, you must be that kind of company that is abreast with the people, their needs, their drives, their motivations and their goals.
Organize events and programs that will make you meet and connect with the right people in your niche, keep these connections rich and strong by reaching out to them with what they may need.
Use social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook for branding and expanding your recruiting niche audience, integrate a blog to your website and make sure you update it from time to time with relevant information. Send monthly newsletters to them and make it so rich they will not be able to resist.
Host webinars and other programs; do whatever it takes to get yourself on the streets.
3. Build reputation and keep it at all cost:
If you want to achieve and retain an edge on your competition, make reputation your greatest goal. This is done by making sure that you deliver quality personnel to your clients every time.
Never supply shabby or incompetent personnel, tidy up your end of the process so much that you only produce the best.
Even if you are not making profits as fast as the others who are rushing through the process, it will eventually pay off and word will soon be out on the street that you are thorough, detailed and dependable.
4. Use the latest technologies:
You will not be ahead if your company’s technology is from the Stone Age! You need to take advantage of the latest technology available to do your work.
Make sure that at least a large portion of what you do is automated and easily accessible; this will make you more financially efficient, more labor effective and more physically organized. If your technology is outdated, the times will soon leave you behind.
5. Get the best for yourself:
Don’t make the mistake of giving the best candidates to your clients and managing with average or below average employees. If you want to stay ahead in your niche, reserve some of the best potential employees for yourself and keep helping them to build their expertise and capacity while they are working with you.
6. Reinvent yourself:
From time to time, take a good look at your business and see the loopholes, the drawbacks and the areas that need improvements and do something about them.
You can never get to that point where you become complacent or overconfident; keep searching for what you can improve; what you can do better and keep working on it. The moment you stop improving, you start depreciating in value. Self-reinvention is the secret of the greats.