Recruitment Business Tips Archives - Superfast Recruitment

This week’s post and podcast are about recruitment pricing strategies and how to communicate the real value of your services. This podcast is one of our expert interviews, where I got an opportunity to speak to Jon Brooks, who has a unique position in our industry. He’s the only person in the world who specialises exclusively in helping recruitment companies with pricing strategies.

We covered everything from why 66% of recruitment work goes unpaid on contingent models to the surprising truth about winning retained business. If you’ve ever struggled to justify your fees or wondered how to move away from contingent work, this conversation is packed with practical insights you can use immediately.

Jon started his career at Reed, one of the UK’s biggest recruitment brands, working directly with founder Sir Alec Reed. That experience taught him something fundamental about business: when you create different services, you need to price them differently.

If you price everything the same way, it looks the same to your clients.

Here’s the thing: Price isn’t just a number. It’s a signal.

It positions what you do. If you launch a new service and charge the same as your existing offering, clients will think it’s just fancy words with no real difference. But when your price reflects genuine value, it helps define and position what you’re actually selling.

Jon worked with a management consultancy that specialised in value and pricing. The consultants had never worked in recruitment before. They came from law firms, global engineering companies, and manufacturing businesses.

That outside perspective was gold. It showed him how other industries think about pricing and how those principles could work for recruitment consultants sitting with clients.

He left Reed about six or seven years ago to build his consultancy. The timing was questionable (just before COVID), but he’s been helping recruitment owners ever since.

Interestingly, every agency must get pricing right, yet hardly anyone focuses on it properly. We all learn on the job, but research and knowledge from other sectors can make a huge difference.

We talked about AI and technology and whether recruitment has a future. It’s a fair question. LinkedIn allows anyone to find anyone, yet recruitment and search businesses have become more valuable since it became mainstream.

Fees have increased, and we are more important than ever.

AI is bringing massive change, that’s certain. We’re already seeing AI-generated applications overwhelm hiring managers. However, recruitment companies have always adapted to technology shifts. Think about the journey from motorbike couriers driving CVs around London to digital databases, job boards, and LinkedIn. People predicted the end of recruiters; companies found new ways to add value each time.

Here’s Jon’s prediction: AI tools that help manage candidate applications won’t be cheap. Individual hiring managers in most companies won’t get access to the best solutions because they only recruit occasionally.

It’s too expensive to give every manager premium AI tools. However, a smart recruitment company can invest in these solutions and spread the cost across hundreds of clients.

That’s what companies have always done brilliantly. You invest in LinkedIn licences because you use them constantly across multiple clients.

The same principle will apply to AI recruitment tools.

Companies will have access to better technology, processes, and ways to cut through the noise. Your value will be in helping clients through the complexity that AI is creating.

Let’s discuss the truth of contingent recruitment. Jon laid it out clearly: with a typical success rate of 33%, you’re not getting paid for your work 66% of the time. That’s devastating for your business and your self-worth. It affects how you value yourself and your services.

But here’s the mistake most companies make when trying to move to retained work: They sell the retainer and list all the benefits of retained recruitment. They’re doing the right thing, tactically focusing on benefits rather than features, but strategically, they’re getting it completely wrong.

A retainer is just a payment schedule. There’s no intrinsic value in when money gets paid. The value is in your service, not in the timing of payments. If you explain why retention is better for you, clients will immediately see through it. They’re not interested in what’s better for your business.

So, what’s the answer? Create demand for your service, not for the retainer. When clients desperately want to work with you, they’ll pay whatever you ask. They’ll work to your terms. It becomes a non-issue.

Jon gave a brilliant example. When he was putting together his book, he’d seen a designer whose work he loved online. He thought, “If I ever make a book, that’s the person I want.”

When the time came, he was willing to pay pretty much anything within his budget. He would have paid upfront, in instalments, however the designer wanted. The demand was so high that payment terms didn’t matter.

That’s what you need to create with your clients. Get them to the point where they say, “Yes, I really want to work with you. How can I work with you?” Then it’s easy to say: “You pay some fee now, some more later, and here’s how it works.” They’ll say yes because they’ve already decided they want to work with you.

Think about any supplier you’ve desperately wanted to work with. Maybe it was a particular consultant, a software provider, or a service you’d heard brilliant things about. When you finally got to work with them, did you quibble about payment terms? Probably not. You were just pleased they had space for you. That’s the position you want to be in with your clients.

Most recruitment companies already have huge value within them. The problem isn’t that the value doesn’t exist. The problem is that clients can’t see it. You’re not presenting it in a way that makes it obvious.

Jon broke this down into a simple framework. First, you need to understand your value. What do you do that’s genuinely different and better?

Then, you need to map that value to your clients’ concerns.

What keeps them awake at night? What problems are they trying to solve? Finally, and this is the crucial bit, you must present it so that clients can immediately understand and recognise that value.

Think about your typical client conversation. You might be brilliant at finding passive candidates, understanding company culture, and managing complex stakeholder processes. But they won’t see the value if you’re not articulating those capabilities in language that resonates with your client’s situation. They’ll see another recruiter offering to find them people.

Here’s what changes everything: specificity. Instead of saying, “We have a great network,” say, “We placed three finance directors in your sector in the last six months, including one who increased their company’s profitability by 40% in the first year.” Instead of saying, “We understand your market,” say, “We’ve tracked salary movements in your region for five years and can show you exactly why you’re losing candidates at the offer stage.”

Value is always in the client’s eye. What matters to them? What outcomes are they trying to achieve? When you can draw a direct line from what you do to outcomes they care about, pricing conversations become completely different.

This is where most companies fall. They know they’re good at their work, and their clients tell them they’re happy. But can they articulate exactly why they’re better than the five companies the client could call? Can they explain their value in concrete, measurable terms? Usually not. And that’s why they compete on price or get pushed into contingent terms.

Let’s get practical about this.

Say you specialise in engineering recruitment. You don’t just say “we know the engineering market.” You say: “We’ve placed 47 engineers in the last 18 months with an average time to hire of 32 days, compared to the industry average of 58 days. That means your projects start faster, you beat competitors to market, and you save roughly £15,000 per hire in lost productivity.”

See the difference? One is vague. The other is concrete, specific, and directly tied to business outcomes the client cares about. That second version makes it easy for a client to justify your fee because they can see exactly what they’re getting and why it matters.

Jon emphasised that this isn’t about making things up or exaggerating what you do. It’s about being honest and clear about the value you deliver. Start with what you know. Look at your last ten placements. How long did they take? What happened next? Did those people perform well? What feedback did you get?

Then think about your process. What do you do that other companies don’t? Maybe you interview every candidate face-to-face. Perhaps you do reference checks that go beyond the standard questions. Maybe you provide market intelligence reports with every search. Possibly you have a 12-month guarantee. These things all have value, but only if you articulate them clearly.

Now consider your relationships.

Do you have access to passive candidates who aren’t on job boards?

This is valuable, but clients won’t know about it unless you tell them.

The key is connecting all these capabilities to client outcomes. Don’t just list what you do. Explain what it means for them. “We interview every candidate face-to-face” becomes “We interview every candidate face-to-face, which means you only meet people we’ve thoroughly assessed for cultural fit, saving you from wasting time on unsuitable candidates and reducing your risk of a bad hire.”

Everything you do can be framed this way. The question is: have you done the work to articulate it? Have you made it easy for clients to understand why you’re worth more than the agency down the road?

Once you understand your value and can communicate it clearly, retainers become a logical necessity. Jon made this point brilliantly. When you deliver genuinely high-value recruitment services, working on contingency makes no sense. Why would you do all that valuable work without any commitment from the client?

The future of recruitment demands higher-value services. Technology is handling the basic stuff. Your role is to go upmarket, tackle the more complex challenges, and build closer client partnerships. Most people in recruitment want this. They’re proud of what they do and want to work more strategically.

As you move up the value chain, your fees need to increase, too. Price is a signifier of value. If you’re solving bigger problems, dealing with more complexity, and delivering better outcomes, your rates should reflect that. You need confidence to say, “This is premium work. You work to my terms, and here’s the value you’re getting.”

This isn’t about being arrogant. It’s about being honest. Premium pricing is fair and justified when your service significantly impacts your client’s business. The clients who understand that value won’t question your fees. They’ll ask whether they can afford not to work with you.

Jon talked about learning from other industries, where it gets interesting. Look at law firms, management consultancies, and architects. They don’t work on contingent terms. They charge for their expertise, their time, and their knowledge. Why? Because they’ve positioned themselves as experts whose advice is valuable regardless of the outcome.

Now, recruitment is different. You are delivering the outcome of a successful hire, but the principle stands. Your expertise in finding, assessing, and placing candidates has value even before someone accepts an offer.

Your market knowledge has value, as does your ability to represent a company well to passive candidates. Your process for reducing hiring risks also has value and deserves to be paid for.

The mistake is thinking you must “convince” clients to pay retainers. You don’t. You need to make them want to work with you so badly that paying up front becomes an obvious step. Payment terms become secondary when someone sees you as the solution to their problem, trusts your expertise, and believes you can deliver what others can’t.

Here’s the truth: clients who argue about retainers or want contingent terms are usually not convinced about your value yet. That’s not a payment terms problem. That’s a positioning problem. Rather than getting better at selling retainers, get better at demonstrating value. The rest follows naturally.

Let’s discuss what’s happening in the market. AI and automation handle basic recruitment tasks, and sourcing candidates is easier than ever.

Information is everywhere. So, what’s left for recruitment companies?

The high-value stuff, the complex roles, the hard-to-fill positions, the situations where expertise, judgement, and relationships matter.

This means your average fee should be going up, not down. You’re not competing with job boards anymore. You’re not even competing with LinkedIn. You’re competing with other experts who understand how to solve difficult hiring challenges. And expertise costs money.

Jon was clear about this. If you’re genuinely providing a premium, high-value service, your pricing needs to reflect that. Clients use price as a signal.

If you charge the same as everyone else, they assume you offer the same. If you charge less, they often assume you’re worth less. Premium pricing positions you as premium.

But here’s the catch: you can’t just increase your prices and hope for the best. The price has to match the value.

This brings us back to the core message: understand your value, map it to client needs, and present it clearly. When you get that right, premium pricing isn’t a barrier. It’s confirmation that you’re the right choice.

Think about your own buying decisions. Do you always choose the cheapest option when you need important legal advice, medical treatment, or a crucial repair? Or do you find the best solution and accept that quality costs money? Your clients think the same way about recruitment when the role matters to them.

Start by auditing your value. Write down everything you do for clients, not just “we find candidates,” but the actual details.

How do you source? What’s your process? What expertise do you bring? What results have you achieved? Get specific about the outcomes you’ve delivered.

Create a spreadsheet. List your last 20 placements. For each one, note the time to hire, how many candidates are presented, the offer acceptance rate, whether the person is still there, any feedback from the client, and any measurable impact you know about.

Patterns will emerge. You’ll spot where your real strengths lie.

Next, talk to your best clients. Ask them why they work with you. What difference have you made? What would happen if they didn’t have you? You’ll often discover value you didn’t even realise you were providing. Clients see things differently and can articulate the impact you’ve overlooked.

Set up three client calls this week. Not sales calls. Discovery calls. Tell them you’re reviewing your services and want their honest feedback. Ask questions like: What do we do that other companies don’t? What surprised you about working with us? What’s the most valuable thing we’ve done for you? If you recommended us to another company, what would you tell them?

The answers will give you language you can use in your marketing, proposals, and client conversations. When a client says, “You saved us three months of searching,” that becomes part of your value story. When they say, “your candidate is the best hire we’ve made in years,” that’s evidence you can share.

Then, look at how you present yourself on your website, proposals, and conversations. Are you talking about your processes or their outcomes? Are you using generic recruitment language or specific, concrete examples? Are you making it easy for clients to see what value you bring?

Go to your website right now. Read the homepage. Does it talk about you or about what clients get? Does it use vague claims (“we’re the best”) or specific evidence (“we’ve placed 200 accountants in the East Midlands with a 94% retention rate”)? Most recruitment websites fail this test badly. They’re full of process descriptions and generic claims without concrete proof of value.

Your proposals need the same treatment. Don’t just outline what you’ll do. Explain what they’ll get. Don’t say, “We’ll source candidates through our network.” Say, “We’ll identify candidates who aren’t actively looking, giving you access to people your competitors can’t reach, which typically reduces your time to hire by 40%.” Every statement should connect to a client benefit.

Finally, start testing premium pricing with your best clients. The ones who already love what you do. The ones where demand is high. Please don’t sell them a retainer. Sell them an even better service, positioned clearly, priced appropriately. See what happens when you lead with confidence about your value.

Pick one client where you’ve delivered brilliant results. Approach them with a new service offering. Maybe it’s exclusive access to you for six months. Perhaps it’s a complete hiring solution for a specific department. Maybe it’s market mapping and talent intelligence plus recruitment. Package it properly, price it at 30% more than your standard rate, and see what happens.

The worst that can happen? They say no, and you learn something about how to position it better. The best that can happen? They say yes immediately, and you realise you’ve been undercharging for years. Either way, you move forward.

You might think, “This all sounds good, but my market is price sensitive.” Or, “My clients won’t pay premium fees.” Or “I’ve tried charging more, and clients just went elsewhere.” These are common responses, and they’re worth addressing.

First, every market has buyers at different price points. Yes, some clients will always choose the cheapest option. They’re not your target clients. You can’t be all things to all people. The question is: are there clients in your market who value quality over cost? Almost certainly yes. You need to find them and speak to them.

Second, if clients go elsewhere when you increase prices, it usually means one of two things. Either you didn’t justify the increase with additional value, or you were targeting the wrong clients. Simply charging more for the same service doesn’t work. But charging more for a genuinely better service, clearly articulated, does work—with the right clients.

Third, price sensitivity often reflects unclear value. When clients don’t understand what they’re getting, price becomes the main decision factor. Price becomes less important when they know exactly what they’re getting and why it matters. The solution isn’t to lower your prices. It’s to clarify your value.

Jon shared insights from working with dozens of companies. The ones that succeed with premium pricing consistently do three things: They get crystal clear on their value proposition, they target clients who have genuine pain points they can solve, and they communicate their value in concrete, specific terms that clients can easily understand and justify internally.

You don’t need to convince every prospect. You need to attract and convert the right prospects. The ones who understand that hiring well matters. The ones who cheap recruiters have burned. The ones who value expertise and results over low fees. Those clients exist in every market. Your job is to make it obvious why you’re the right choice for them.

To find out more about Jon, visit his website here. TheValueAdvantage.

Thanks

Sharon

At Superfast Recruitment, we work with companies to create revenue certainty, develop market authority and build their business vitality.

We understand that pricing conversations are valuable, and we help companies articulate their unique strengths in ways that resonate with both clients and candidates.

To find out more, book a call with us here.

The post Pricing Strategies for Recruitment Companies: An Interview With Jon Brooks appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Hi everyone, this is Denise, and welcome back to the Recruitment Marketing Sales Podcast. Today, we’re talking about something that’s probably causing many of you stress – the complete chaos that may pass for marketing processes in your recruitment business.

I suspect if you’re reading this, you’re juggling LinkedIn outreach, content creation, candidate nurturing, client relationships, and about 15 other marketing tasks. Then there’s managing your team and growth on top of that.

Here’s what I know about the majority of recruitment business owners – you’re incredible at finding talent and closing deals. Still, when it comes to systematising your marketing processes, you’re winging it. In the UK, we have this saying about “flying by the seat of your pants” or making it up as you go along. This approach is costing you time, money, and probably your sanity.

In today’s environment, there’s always another piece of software you could use or another AI tool you absolutely must try. It’s easy to get overwhelmed thinking you’re losing out if you don’t buy 30 different domain names or use every new platform. That’s not the case.

What you need is to focus on the basics and have systems and processes around them. You build from there. That’s what we’re talking about today – standard operating procedures, a paint-by-numbers system that literally anyone can follow and implement.

Standard operating procedures have been around for years. The earliest documented SOPs were from the British Royal Navy, which needed consistency and reliability in its operations. They needed tasks completed within a specific timeframe with documented processes for onboarding tasks.

SOPs became widespread during the Industrial Revolution, and the military adopted the formalisation of these procedures. As small business owners, we use them now for workflow and getting things done in a timely manner without losing our minds.

An SOP is fundamentally the basics – it stands for standard operating procedure. It’s simply a step-by-step guide that documents how to complete a specific task or process in your business. Think about it logically – it’s like a recipe. But instead of making a cake or apple crumble, you’re creating a repeatable system for onboarding a new client or creating LinkedIn content.

Over the years, SOPs have grown in their use, particularly with remote work. For marketing SOPs, there’s another element you can add – creating a video of the process. This is quite nuanced for marketing because you can record yourself doing something, and that video becomes a training resource.

Here’s where most business owners get it wrong – SOPs don’t need to be fancy. They don’t need lots of workflows and fancy formatting. The best SOPs are simple, clear bullet points: Step one, Step two, Step three, Step four. They work well when you have a video to watch simultaneously.

Simple Word document processes work particularly well for slightly more technical processes. Something I do is screen grabs using the snipping tool. You can paste these into your recipe if that works for you.

As a recruitment business, SOPs are particularly crucial because your marketing activities are relationship-based and require consistency. When you’re building relationships with candidates and clients, you can’t afford to be inconsistent in your approach.

If you stop posting or a random post goes out that doesn’t follow your format, such as the wrong colour or imagery, it can impact your brand.

Let me give you examples of marketing SOPs that every recruitment business should consider:

Content creation SOPs could include how to research and write LinkedIn posts that generate leads, how to create video content for candidates, how to create video content for clients, and how to repurpose one piece of content across multiple platforms.

Lead generation SOPs might cover how to identify and research potential clients, how to implement a LinkedIn outreach campaign, and how to follow up with prospects.

Imagine having all of these that your team could follow, so you know things are getting done right. Using and implementing these systems is important with your team because you want to support them. SOPs do that and minimise the number of questions you get.

I often say to team members, “Have you watched the SOP video and followed the SOP? Go back and look at them.” They’ll come back saying they worked it out because they’d missed step five or six. People often think they remember things, but even I use SOPs.

For our email marketing, I know how to do everything, but I haven’t done it for a few weeks because a different team member has been handling it. So, I go back to the SOP to remind myself which button to click. They’re helpful as memory joggers for people implementing the process.

Let me share about Sarah, who runs a recruitment company. Every week, she posted on LinkedIn ten times at completely random times whenever she got a spare minute. Sometimes she posted about industry trends, sometimes personal branding posts, testimonials, or just something interesting she found.

Her engagement was inconsistent. She wasn’t getting many views and wasn’t sure what was working.

I had a conversation with Sarah about creating an SOP for LinkedIn content creation. She now has a system: Monday is industry insights, Wednesday is success stories, Thursday is a poll, Friday is career advice. She has templates for each type of post.

Once she started doing this, her engagement shot through the roof because she was doing something consistently. We’ve all experienced looking for something on a particular day. Most people listening to this podcast know that every Friday, you get a short email from us saying, “Here’s our latest podcast, you might find it useful.”

It’s consistency. By knowing what to do when, people start looking for things. We’ve all watched soaps on TV and know they’re on at certain times. The BBC has news at 6:00 and 10:00 every night. I’m wired to look because I usually work till 6:00 in the evening and time it to one minute to six.

That’s how people are wired – they’re looking for things from you. Having that SOP makes a huge difference.

Let me share more benefits of creating SOPs that might convince you further.

Consistency builds trust. In recruitment, consistency is everything. Your clients need to know they can rely on you. Your candidates need to feel confident in the process. When you have SOPs for marketing activities, you ensure every touchpoint with your audience reflects your brand, values, and standards while getting people excited about working with you.

SOPs save you time. Have you ever thought, “Do I need to do this first, or that first?” only to spend time looking for passwords? You can waste hours each week on this. With your SOP, you may have saved it on your system with a search string to find it in Dropbox. That saves hours.

Scalability without chaos. This is huge. Right now, for many of you, the business revolves around you, particularly if you’re new to creating content. What happens when you want to grow, hire team members, or take a holiday? SOPs help because people just need to follow them.

If you’re working with a virtual assistant in the Philippines, South Africa, or anywhere remote, they can get consistent results. You become less of a bottleneck and more of the strategic leader you’ve always wanted to be.

Increased quality and reduced errors. When you’re rushing through marketing tasks without a systematic approach, mistakes happen. You forget to follow up with leads, miss essential details in client communications, or publish content with errors. Having an SOP reduces these errors.

One benefit I mentioned with Logan, one of our team members, is better training and onboarding. People feel included in the process. You can’t just hand someone something and say, “follow that step by step,” but having that SOP means you can go through training quickly and support your people.

Documented systems mean improvement opportunities. Having a documented system means you can identify and implement improvements. If you see something that could be done more efficiently, having an SOP gives you something to examine and modify.

There’s something valuable about peace of mind that’s hard to quantify. When you’ve got systems in place, you can take time off without worrying that your marketing is falling apart. You can focus on strategy rather than constantly putting out fires.

I’m going to share the simple process for creating a marketing SOP. Here’s something that’s not popular but necessary – you need to do it, not somebody else. You want the business done your way.

Our team members have training videos and resources. I’m talking to people creating SOPs themselves. The important thing is you know what you want and how you want it delivered.

When we had our bigger marketing agency writing content, I used to drive people mad because I wanted things delivered in a certain way. I wanted our clients to get a great experience, and I wanted the documents they received formatted the same way – same font, same point size. We used Calibri 11 point with subheadings at 16 points. I wanted consistency. I didn’t want it looking like what we call in the UK “a dog’s breakfast.”

Creating that SOP fell to me. Yes, it’s time-consuming, but things get done your way. You can ask for feedback and adapt things – people might add something to the conversation. However, doing the SOP yourself works well.

Here’s how I create an SOP using a simple three-step process:

First, record yourself doing the task. A great way to do this is using Zoom. In Zoom, there’s a button you can click that will transcribe your audio from the video, which is brilliant.

When you record doing the task, and this has to be said, don’t mumble, don’t speak fast, don’t be clicking rapidly. Someone doing this process may not have done it before. Go through the task painfully slowly so they understand every part of the process.

Second, get the video transcribed. If you’re using something other than Zoom as a video recorder, you need to get a transcription. This is where it becomes amazing because AI is so helpful.

Third, use AI to create your SOP. If you have the transcription from your video recording, you can use your favourite AI tool – there are multiple ones out there. The paid ones are always better, whether it’s ChatGPT or Claude (one of my favourites).

You get your transcription and put a prompt into your AI tool. Give a detailed prompt like: “I have a transcription of myself performing writing a personal branding post. Please create a comprehensive standard operating procedure based on this transcription. Please number it from one to the final number. Leave spacing. Start with a capital letter. Please make it practical and easy to follow for someone who hasn’t done this task before. Here’s the transcription.”

AI will work its magic and usually come up with something more than usable. You must read through it all and check the nuances because sometimes AI tools can produce ridiculous things. Make sure you go through and tweak anything needed.

Then I test it by following it to the letter myself to see how it works. I can tweak it if I’ve missed something during the recording. Remember, AI can only work with what you give it. If you forgot to mention clicking somewhere or saving something, AI won’t pick that up because you missed it in the video.

That’s something anyone can do when creating an SOP. Record yourself doing the process. Use the transcription given to you or use a tool to transcribe it (there are Otter, Sonix, Descript, and multiple AI transcribing tools that do it almost instantly). Then, you’ve got your SOP.

We have a folder with different people accessing it – a secure business version of Dropbox with a training folder inside. Every single process is listed out with videos recorded and SOPs from those videos.

Imagine by the end of summer having SOPs created for key functions in your business. If you have a marketer, you could ask them to make an SOP on their process. Then, if they’re on holiday or you become busy, one of their colleagues can use the same process.

SOPs aren’t just for marketing. They could be for sales too. I was brought up with sales scripts, and they’re brilliant despite what anyone tells you. They put multiple six figures into my bank account over the years.

Consider the value and beauty of how you can use SOPs in other parts of your business. This is a foolproof process I’ve used that works incredibly well.

Thanks

Denise

Creating effective marketing SOPs is just one part of building a scalable recruitment business. If you’re ready to systematise your marketing processes and stop winging it with your business growth, we can help. Our programmes give you the frameworks, templates, and step-by-step guidance to create marketing systems that work for recruitment businesses. You’ll get the SOPs, the training videos, and the ongoing support to implement them properly in your business.

The post Why Marketing SOPs Save Recruitment Business Sanity appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Hi there, everyone. This week’s post and podcast are about the marketing tools we use daily that will help your recruitment business. It’s a question we’re often asked – what camera do you use, what’s that thing you do there, or how do you manage your content creation? I thought I’d share our main tools, why we chose them, and how they help us deliver client results.

I want to be upfront – we’re not affiliates for these tools. We won’t share affiliate links or make money from what we share here. I will tell you what they are, and then you can decide whether they’re right for you and your business.

Before we dive in, there are 476 podcasts on the Superfast blog. Go and look – there’s a search bar where you can answer any question. I’m sure I’ll have recorded something on it. And here’s one tool I must mention: Score App by Dan Priestley and his team.

This software helps create the scorecard we’re currently running. Please do if you haven’t filled it out to get your candidate and client attraction score.

Go to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/scorecard. It’ll take you to a page explaining what it’s about. You’ll get a personalised report that will help you no end. It’s 15 questions and takes 3 to 5 minutes, and for anyone who fills it out, we’re happy to give you a free 45-minute consultation.

Let me start with the basics—hardware—because people often ask. Even though I have an iPhone and iPad for random surfing and use them as my Kindle, I am actually an Android girl. Once an Android girl, always an Android girl. People are always surprised that as a writer involved in marketing, I don’t use a Mac. I use Android—that’s what I do.

I do most of my work on a desktop unless we’re working away from home, in which case I use a laptop. I don’t think the brand is important with either of those. At home, because we work from home and have a home office, I use two screens. It is a game-changer. When you’re doing multiple tasks, being able to work on two different screens is incredibly useful.

Sharon and I use a Rode Podcaster for microphones and cameras. I’ve had a few problems with this Rode recently, but I think it’s just the cables getting tangled. You might have heard crackling on some podcasts—maybe it’s the universe telling me it’s time to change.

If you want to buy a Rode Podcaster and do podcasting as part of what you do, it’ll cost you nearly £200. If you’re going to do lots of recordings, it’s well worth it. You could get a decent microphone for well under £100 online if not.

We use our iPhones a lot for recording videos. However, many of you have commented that our videos look really clear—that’s because we have what I call a fancy pants camera. We’ve had it for a few years now, and it’s a Sony 6100. I have it on my desk, pointing towards me. It connects with Zoom, which is another piece of software I’ll come to, and we also have a capture card.

The capture card allows you to stream and record without having to worry about filling up the card. Basically, the camera is attached to a capture card that goes into the back of the PC, and it’s great because you can record without technical hassles. It’s expensive—you’ll spend well over a grand on it. However, remember, we’re marketers using it all the time. It depends on what you want to use, but I know some people really geek out on that.

We also use lapel mics. You’ll notice Sharon uses them a lot. There are multiple ones you can get. The one we have is called a Boya mic. It’s less than £20, you can get it on Amazon, it works well, and you can put it into a smartphone or a posh camera too. We use it because it’s easy. You can get wireless microphones by Rode, too – lots of people are using those now. You work with what you have, where you are. The Boya mic’s always been pretty good.

We work remotely, and our team members are located in different parts of the UK and other countries. So, it’s really important to store everything securely. We use Dropbox—we have the company version—where our files are hosted. t’s all secure.

We use something called a NAS box, which is a network-attached storage system. We have a couple of IT experts who recommended it. It’s like an interface from the cloud, a bit like a server. Sharon and I work from home in different offices, so we can use the NAS box to store and draw down data. It makes it much easier than going onto the online version of Dropbox, downloading a file, editing it, and doing all those things. It’s more secure and works better for us. Talk to your IT person about it or Google it – you’ll find loads of information.

When it comes to planning, I’m a huge planner. Planning is a game-changer for your business. We use Microsoft 365, and you probably think, “Oh yeah, we all do that, Denise.” I know not everybody does – some people use Google Workspace. Microsoft 365 has so many add-ons now. Shout out to the Bearded 365 guy on YouTube – he’s called Jonathan, he’s from Yorkshire, and he’s brilliant regarding Microsoft 365 and all the different things you can use it for, including Copilot and AI software.

If you’re using Microsoft, you get free access to a certain level of Copilot. Then you can have more advanced versions if you spend more money. You might want to use MS Teams for meetings, depending on what organisations you work with. You’ve got all those things with 365.

My calendar drives my behaviour. I put everything into my calendar. I’m working on working less at the moment, and I find that the more I plan, the more I can make that happen so I can do other things on top of my day job. I plan things in my diary and then work on my diary.

Two other things are invaluable to me. I am a Remarkable convert. I have the Remarkable 2, which is an electronic notebook. I got my Remarkable for my birthday in January 2024. I’d been looking at it for a while, wondering if it would work for me. It does. It’s incredible because I am the notebook woman. I have notebooks everywhere.

I do lots of journaling, so I have journals for personal journaling. I have notebooks all over the place – for Superfast, another business we have, for when I’m on calls with clients. This piece of kit costs around £300, but it’s been another game-changer. I think the first year was free for online, but it syncs with my computer. I can even use it if I’m presenting and presenting from it. It has the same feel as writing on paper, which is very important. I can tap different things on it, turning them all into text.

I like taking notes as a coach. Legally, if you’re working with someone in a coaching contract, it’s important that you keep notes so that your client can access them. I can share notes with my clients—anything I’ve written down that they might want to have. After seeing how useful they are, at least five of our clients have bought them as well.

The other thing we use is project management software. Years ago, I used Monday—I really loved it. But like anything with software, things improve. Now I use Clickup. What I like about ClickUp is that all our team members can work on it, and we have different workspaces. The Clickup version we have allows Sharon to have a workspace for her Sharon Newey coaching, a workspace for Superfast, and a workspace for something else we do.

You can tag people in it. You can start for free if you want. I love that we can set recurring tasks, so we know all the functions that happen. When I’m recording podcasts like these, a process occurs. I record the podcast, then something else happens, and I need to make sure everything goes onto the website, an image is created—all these are mapped out and set into a recurring process.

Every day, lovely Mr Clickup emails me to tell me what I need to do. That works really well because I know everything will work in the month. There are lots of videos on YouTube about Clickup. It’s not outrageously expensive—I think there are six of us on it, so it might be £30 to £40 a month. It’s another game-changer that we find really useful.

Let me talk about other software that might help you. Two very important pieces for us are Thrive Cart, one of our payment processors, and Stripe. Many of you probably will have heard of Stripe—it’s a way to take payments. Obviously, there’s a fee attached—there’s always a cost of doing business. We use Stripe and Thrive Cart as our payment gateway because most clients pay us via credit card.

When we first went into business 18 or 19 years ago, it wasn’t easy to access credit card processing. Now it’s much easier with things like Stripe. Give your clients options on how they can pay you. That’s another game-changer. You have to factor in the fee, but what if it makes it easier for your clients? Some people pay their credit card bills at certain times in the month, so they started their membership with us when their credit card was going to click over. It works for everybody.

Regarding LinkedIn, we don’t use an automation tool. Many people do—there are several out there like Link Helper, Dripify, or Expandi; we do our own at the moment. Something we do use is Sales Navigator. We couldn’t live without it. It’s underused. Many of you will have recruiter licences, which might be different for you. Still, if you’re focused on business development, Sales Navigator can help prioritise the people you want to contact.

Yes, there are other scraping tools on the market. However, with Sales Nav, you can put your criteria in—I want companies with more than 11 employees or more than 50 employees working in this sector, and I like the MDs. You’ll get lots of people that you can use that for. I think it costs around £60 to £70 a month. It’s worth it from a business development perspective.

I touched on Score App—it’s a relatively new tool for us at the moment. It’s working well. Go and try a couple of score apps yourself. Come and try ours. Have a look at some of the information. Go and check out Dan Priestley on YouTube—he came up with the software idea. It’s a really fabulous bit of kit, and I’ll report back more when we’ve had more people go through it.

We use Canva Pro – I would always recommend using the pro version for what it costs. We have professionally designed Canva templates for our Superfast Circle clients that they can use for their business. That’s something great with Canva. You can probably find a Canva designer somewhere who will do things for you and drop them into it with all your brand palette and everything else. You can create professional things in Canva – from videos to reports to PDFs. For like £100 a year, it’s buttons.

We use Zoom for all our meetings. We’ve used it for ten years, before it became popular during lockdown and Covid. I’m sure most people use Zoom. It’s a great piece of recording software.

Our videos are on YouTube, but we also use Wistia software. We’ve been using Wistia for probably 12 or 13 years now. I’m quite loyal – once I get software that works, it works for us. It’s more expensive, but what I like about Wistia is that you can’t tell the individual who’s been watching a video. Still, if you know you’ve sent your video to somebody in Cambridge, for instance, and then you can see from the analytics that somebody from Cambridge has watched that video – yippee! – Then you know that person is maybe more engaged with you, and you could reach out to them.

We use YouTube and software that writes the text from the recording. Multiple pieces of software do that now – Descript, CapCut, all those. I’ve stuck with Splasheo. We like Splasheo. We’ve been using it for years. I know Gideon, the guy who owns the company. I sent away three videos this morning – it’s click, click, click, and it goes away and comes back within a few hours, all done by a human being. I quite like that.

For email marketing, we use a version of GoHighLevel. Go High Level is a CRM for consultancies. Does it work in recruitment? Interestingly, one of our clients is using it, and she’s doing well with it. Go High Level has multiple things you can do – a CRM, and you can even host a website. Lots of things you can do.

We also use Zapier, a connection tool. Sometimes, software doesn’t talk to one another, and you need them to talk to one another. You need to create connections called Zaps between them. We use Zapier for that.

When we record videos and Sharon interviews someone, and we use it for other things in our business, there’s software called Riverside FM that has multiple capabilities. You can do your LinkedIn live streams from it as well. You can live stream onto various platforms. It does high-quality videos and helps you with podcasts. We got an offer many years ago, but it costs us £200 to £300 a year. It might not be something you want to do. Still, if you’re considering moving into podcasting and doing more video, it could be something to consider because it is a brilliant piece of kit, and they’re always updating it.

A little bit on AI tools – everyone loves a good AI tool. Yes, we use the paid version of ChatGPT. I’ll be honest, not as much. I have a preferred tool, which is Claude AI. I like Claude. It has very similar things to ChatGPT, but AI tools are very personal in how you use them. I like Claude and how it presents itself, and how I can store information.

The other AI tool I use is Perplexity, which does deep research and goes on the web. I love Perplexity for doing lots of research for both us and our clients. Again, I use the pro version. Perplexity and Claude are two AI tools I use all the time, and they probably save me hours a week.

I use another one called Sonix, which is a transcription tool. It’s AI transcription, but it’s incredible. Again, it’s very inexpensive—you’re looking at a handful of dollars for an hour’s transcription.

We have a great website designed by Mike at 1510. Our website is WordPress, but we use a theme called Elementor, which works with many other things.

Another piece of software we use for video editing that I probably use every single day of the week—I couldn’t live without it—is Camtasia. It’s created by a company called TechSmith, and they have a whole suite of products. I use two tools from them. One is Camtasia, and I’m on 2025 at the moment. It does incredible things—it’s really amazing when it comes to editing software.

They’re very good at their training. They have trainers who will jump on a call with you as well—paid for, by the way. They have lots of training modules and a great YouTube channel. I’ve been using Camtasia since probably 2008, various versions of it. Now, you can upload videos into it, and they’ll do a transcription for you as well.

We use Skool for our community platform—that’s spelt S-K-O-O-L. It’s a great platform where we store all our videos. It’s really safe. We have our paid group on there, so all our clients get access to Skool because it’s secure, and we can just upload things there for them as they need them.

Many of you have asked about creating a community—should I go for a Facebook group or something else? I don’t know. There are weird things going on in the world at the moment, and I’m not too sure about Facebook. We have a group on Facebook, and we still put content there for people, but who knows? I like Skool, so it might be worth checking it out.

Thanks,

Denise and Sharon

We’ve spent years testing these tools and systems, so you don’t have to. Instead of figuring out the tech yourself, you can focus on what you do best – recruiting great people – while we handle the marketing side.

From content creation to lead generation systems, we’ll show you exactly which tools to use and how to use them effectively for your situation.

The post My Favourite Marketing and Productivity Tools appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

As we cycle towards the end of the year, we have 450 podcasts available for you to explore various marketing strategies. Pre-ending 2024 and moving into 2025, if you haven’t audited your current position, head over to SuperFastGroup.co.uk/MCL. It’s an ideal time of year to use our checklist. You can print it off and tick the boxes as you go along. We’re currently creating a new version that will generate your personalised PDF, which we’ll share soon. 

Today, I want to discuss standing out in the market. This topic emerged prominently during our recent Superfast Circle Live event, where a consistent theme throughout the two days was differentiation. When you’re in a service-based business producing results for clients, remember that whilst you don’t need to completely differentiate yourself, you do need to consider how people recognise your brand above others in the market. 

About 4-5 weeks ago, I recorded a podcast about employer branding and its significance. As a recruitment company, you’re likely discussing employer branding with clients and its effectiveness in attracting candidates. However, a strong employer brand also attracts clients because people prefer working with well-known and recognised brands. If you’re not effectively communicating who you are, your values, mission, and working environment, you’re missing opportunities. 

As my first mentor often reminded me, people cannot work with you if they don’t know who you are. During this festive season, you’re probably noticing multiple adverts for various products across different channels. Take a lesson from e-commerce – you need to maintain a consistent presence to make an impact and stand out. Simply posting once a week won’t generate sufficient demand in an uncertain market. 

Your demand generation strategy should include active social media presence, promotional emails, and regular communication about your services and results. Share value-added content and develop your personal brand. Our LinkedIn statistics show that video content generally receives more impressions than other content types. When we reach out to people, they often comment on our podcasts and videos, demonstrating the effectiveness of diverse content. 

In today’s environment, clients often prefer working with experts rather than generalists. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with being a generalist recruiter, specialising in specific areas like tech recruitment can be more productive. At our recent SFC event, many recruiters shared their decades of experience, showcasing remarkable expertise. People are actively seeking specialists, so if you’re not leveraging your expertise effectively, you’re missing opportunities. 

People choose services that solve their problems and partners who can help them achieve their goals. Consider your current offer – what’s included? In the current market, offering multiple types of service packages can help generate consistent revenue. With various software solutions, AI tools, and profiling platforms like McQuaig available, you can provide a more comprehensive service to your clients. 

If you haven’t updated your service offerings in 2-3 years, it’s time to reassess. The market is evolving, and your services should reflect these changes. Sometimes, a unique additional service can be the hook that attracts new clients. For instance, I’m currently exploring a particular service because its additional offerings caught my attention and could enhance our client processes. 

When you possess expertise and excel in your field, your personal brand becomes crucial in communicating this online. Whilst some resist personal branding, thinking it means sharing their entire life, it’s really about meaningful connection. At our recent event, Vanessa Rath streamed in from South Africa to emphasise how developing your personal brand helps you stand out as a recruiter. 

People increasingly buy from people, not faceless organisations. Recently, I received an email about pay-per-click marketing, but when I visited their website and LinkedIn profile, I couldn’t find any human faces. This immediately discouraged me because, like most people, I prefer seeing who I might work with. Videos and personal communication are more important than ever. 

Personal branding effectively helps you stand out and become more distinctive because whilst many start creating content, few maintain consistency. Taking a different approach next year by focusing on these fundamentals can make a significant difference. These strategies aren’t complicated – they just require consistent effort in key areas. 

Remember, standing out in the market isn’t about radical transformation; it’s about consistent, thoughtful execution of these fundamental elements. Whether it’s through employer branding, demand generation, niche expertise, service offerings, or personal branding, each component contributes to building a distinctive presence in your market. As we move into 2025, consider how you can implement these strategies to enhance your market position and create meaningful connections with your audience. 

Thanks  

Denise  

Ready to stand out from the crowd in 2025? Book a call, and we’ll show you how to build your distinctive recruitment brand, strengthen your market position, and create the kind of presence that draws clients.  

The post Differentiating Yourself In A Crowded Recruitment Marketplace appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today, I want to talk about making plans and deciding where to focus our energy and time in our business. It can be very easy to think, “I’m not doing this” or “I could do that,” so I want to give you some ideas on what to ask yourself when looking at where to start and what to do next.  

If you’re new here, welcome! There are another 448 podcasts you can listen to that will help you market your recruitment company. This is a great time of year to assess where you are. Download our audit checklist at superfast.co.uk/MCL. There’s a simple, straightforward spreadsheet you can use. We’re updating our checklist to a snazzy online version that will generate your own PDF. Either way, you’ll get a PDF showing exactly where you are, giving you ideas on things to consider as you start.  

This podcast answers questions many people have when sitting in front of their work, thinking, “What should I do? Where should I start?” I was thinking about this while watching MasterChef in the UK. There are famous chefs like Monica Galetti (whose hairstyle inspired my recent change) and Michael Roux on the team. It always starts with their signature dish and a skills test.  

It fascinates me because, during the skills test, Monica will give them 20 minutes to make something specific. They have all the ingredients they might need, plus some different ones. The chefs automatically get into their groove and do what they’ve always done. At the end, they get feedback from Michael and Monica, who often point out unused ingredients or unnecessary steps in their process.  

One of the things we do with our Super Circle clients is get them to look at some basics. Here’s a huge clue – if you haven’t downloaded the Marketing Checklist, please do that or look at your original version. We map out different activities and tactics that are very good to do. One of our current clients uses it as his touchstone for processes he needs to implement.  

Organisations that do really well stick to the basics and fundamentals. They don’t try to change things around too much. They do what they know works. We’re entering the holiday season with offers everywhere for Black Friday and Christmas. People are using tried-and-tested methods, like John Lewis’s special video ad around Christmas time because they know these things work.  

As you look at what’s worked for you this year, check if you’re following the fundamentals: regular social media posts, maintaining a blog, doing cold outreach. Everything doesn’t have to be super sexy to work. Sometimes, it’s about doing the basics – finding your ideal client or candidate you can work with and support, then making them an offer.  

Remember, offers equal money and revenue in your bank. People sell things for different reasons, often to help their clients and candidates make more money. The recruitment sector is about helping clients build their business and helping candidates get better salaries and accelerate their careers. Think about what offers you’re making and how you can help your current clients.  

The next important aspect is constraints. What’s constraining your business and stopping growth? While it’s easy to say, “I don’t have enough time,” we need to look beyond that. Consider what’s really holding you back. For example, one of our friends struggles with getting potential clients to book follow-up sales calls. She’s improved by scheduling next steps while still on the initial call.  

For us, one constraint is follow-up. We have sales calls with people worldwide and need to improve our follow-up process. Some clients lack enough billers or marketing reach. Think about what constraint you need to handle in the next 12 months to make a difference. Sometimes, it’s something smaller than you realise, but addressing it can create significant change.  

What drives your business? For many, it’s the volume of sales calls. For us, it’s the number of demos we conduct. For many clients, it’s the number of client meetings or quality candidates registered in their database. Until you analyse these metrics, you won’t know what truly drives your success.  

Consider whether you’re doing the fundamentals correctly. What’s working? What’s missing? What could you do differently? Maybe you need to recruit a VA or get marketing materials. Perhaps you’re not focused on the key drivers that will make a difference in your market next year. Maybe you should expand your geographical reach.  

Think about these elements as you plan for the coming months. Look at your fundamentals, identify your constraints, focus on conversion, and determine where to start. These considerations will help guide your business planning and growth strategies for the upcoming year.  

Remember, success often comes from mastering the basics rather than constantly seeking new methods. By understanding your constraints and focusing on key drivers, you can create a more effective plan for your business’s future.

Thanks 

Denise 

Feeling overwhelmed about where to focus your recruitment business efforts in 2025? Book a call, and we’ll help you analyse your fundamentals, identify your constraints, and create a strategic growth plan that delivers results. 

The post Making Recruitment Business Plans: Understanding Fundamentals and Constraints appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Last week we discussed the benefits of having marketing systems; you can access the post here.

As you set up your marketing system, it does not take a genius to work out that there will be multiple moving parts, often delivered by several team members.

The tasks aren’t hard, though; they do need to be carried out in a certain order to deliver the result you want in the way you want by literally anyone in your company.

Enter a standard operating procedure or SOP.

Originally developed in the manufacturing sector as a way to ensure everything happened in the right way, they soon became adopted by many industries as a way to leverage both time and process.

Let’s look at some of the upsides of an SOP and several marketing SOPs you can add to your business.

Many recruitment business owners want a marketing system that provides clarity and direction. In other words, specifically, what do I need to do and when.

Let’s be frank; I’m a marketer, and Marketing is my big passion. I love marketing. However, I know other people can get confused because of the many moving parts.

The upside of an SOP is that everything happens consistently how you want it to.

For instance, this podcast production is driven by an SOP; it’s the reason it happens so regularly every month.

The topics are mapped out ahead of time and then the week before the podcast goes live. I record three different parts.

Part two is sent off to be transcribed and then goes through a basic edit. The other audio files are then sent to Andy, our podcast guy who creates the podcast with an SOP I created.

The podcast and transcription are added to our blog, which automates distribution across various podcast channels.

An image is created, and I also send a social post by email.

….. and it happens consistently because I follow the right procedure.

The great thing about an SOP is anyone can use them to deliver a task, which brings me to training.

Fact: it’s easy to train people when you have an SOP.

In today’s digital landscape, you can use multiple training options, including flow diagrams, word documents, and screen capture videos you could make on loom.

We use Monday.Com for managing our work, and here we can add an SOP with links to a video to watch; so straightforward.

What can often happen, as I mentioned earlier, is that things do get missed. Things will get missed if you don’t have a list to follow.

Marketing done well has many moving parts.

A detailed SOP stands a better chance of delivering your desired results.

Because if you have an SOP list written out and there are only 4 or 5 things on it, the chances are it’s probably not going to be as successful as you want.

Let’s say you’re creating and adding your social media to different channels, or you’re making a sales funnel, and, you know, certain elements have been missed.

Well, it’s a great reminder that your SOP needs a level of detail; if you want something to happen consistently, you might need to add more steps or check your SOP and say, “Did we put that in?

And you might find, as often people do, that some steps in the process were missed because the SOP hadn’t been put together with a level of detail.

Unless you are in a programme like Superfast Circle, where we provide training and SOP templates, it starts with you.

Which is a good thing.

You drive the business and decide what you want to happen and how. I suspect you have created other systems in your business around sales and resourcing, which is the same for marketing.

You can always work with a marketer to help flesh out the detail.

Want a particular font or colour, put it in the SOP.

Want varied social media going out three times a day, put it in the SOP.

So what SOPs are good to use in marketing? Let me share the ones we have.

If you create your content and social media or use Canva as a design tool, you might want to include some of the following steps.

Follow the content plan and write and edit the blog ahead of time. Add relevant keywords subheadings and source copy approved images. Add a call to action and internal links.

Add SEO to the blog page and check everything is formatted correctly using the correct font and size.

Then schedule the post to go out at the same time every week.

Creating a step-by-step SOP and recording a video of the process means anyone on the team could do this.

Here is a list of SOPs to create that will make your life easier.

S.O.P.s have been a God send to our business and will be for yours.

Thanks,

Denise

In our Superfast Circle training platform, we have specific training on SOP creation, and we have templates to get you started. If you want to find out more, book a quick demonstration here.

The post The Many Benefits of Marketing SOPs: Standing Operating Procedures appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Something different today; who doesn’t love an inspiring story at Christmas? A year ago, two of our clients Lee and Theresa Durrant, moved their life and Salesforce recruiting business to the Lake District from Kent.

They arrived to pick up the keys of their new home 72 hours before the country went into lockdown again! We have been working with them for many years, and we would often get together for a marketing planning meeting when they were up here on a walking holiday.

The conversation at night in the bar over a few glasses of wine would turn to how we ran our business from here, so why couldn’t they?

In this podcast, they share their journey, the ups and the downs, how they manage their current team remotely and their plans for scaling. [As always this is a direct transcription so please excuse any strange typing errors.]

Sharon: Lee, Theresa, welcome back to the Superfast Recruitment podcast and thank you for taking some time today. Can you believe it’s almost two years since we were in a similar situation, having a conversation like this, and who would have known what was about to happen? 

Theresa: We were put into a lockdown and came out the other side, and the world has changed. So much is different. 

Sharon: It is. Also, what’s different as well, literally in the last 12 months is, where Resource on Demand is now based, where you are living. It’s been an incredible year for the business.  

Lee: It’s going to be one of those years, when we’re a bit older and we look back over a glass of wine, we’ll probably think, “How did that happen?”. A lot has happened in the two years since we last did one of these, but certainly, the last year has seen a lot of things forced on us that we’ve twisted into a positive.  But it’s been a whirlwind, hasn’t it, in the last 12 months? 

Theresa: Yes. We’re the kind of people anyway that always try to see opportunity in whatever situation is thrown at you. No one would have anticipated something like COVID coming along, but it has made us change our life completely. It’s changed the way we now run our business, which I’m sure we’re going to come to in a second. 

It’s changed our output and philosophy around life because watching people being devastated across the country and losing loved ones makes you think about your values again.  Life is so short, you need to grab it with both hands, and you need to make the most of it. Sometimes, being workaholic kind of people, you actually start to realise that there are loved ones out there who are dying, and families have been devastated through COVID. There needs to be more to life than work. 

It’s made us think about it a lot differently. The fact that we’ve now gone fully remote means that we’ve been able to realise a dream that we thought was for retirement, which was one day, we’d love to live in the Lake District. We can live that life now. It’s not impacting the business in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it’s had only positive effects on the business: massive move, massive changes. 

Theresa: I think we can pinpoint when the penny dropped for us. Obviously, we were forced into a situation; it was a case of you work remotely, or you don’t work at all, that was forced upon everybody. We were in a way very fortunate that when we set up the business back in 2007, we actually embraced cloud technology. For us to be able to move out of an office at a day’s notice and work without any impact on the business was very fortunate for us. 

I think as we started to have conversations with employees, and there was one particular person, Paul, we were saying to him, “Just imagine you can work from anywhere.” He’s got this wonderful little place that he goes to with his wife, and they go and escape there for the weekend; we kept saying, “Well, you can go there and work from there if you want.” 

Lee: He was talking about commuting there one day to the office we used to have, and it’s like, “Oh, it’s a nightmare.” This came along, and we were saying to him, “You can move to the moon if you want.” So when we heard ourselves say to other people, we thought, “Hang on a minute, we can go as well.” 

Theresa: We do encourage it. One of our ladies recently wanted to go away and see her family in Wales. Of course, because of lockdown, she wanted to go for a period of time. She just decided, “I’m going to go and work there for the week.” There are so many benefits of people being able to go off on holiday but to take extended leave with family and still be productive and work. For us, that was when it hit home, that we could start to live that life that we wanted to have now. 

Who knows what is around the corner? We wanted to enjoy the Lakes while we were still young enough to go off and explore. It’s an amazing opportunity. I can’t believe how lucky we’ve been. 

Theresa: I think first of all it was a novelty. I think it was a novelty for a lot of people at first that they could work from home and just log on. Again, we had the systems in place anyway, so people could just log on straightaway the next morning, but I think it was a novelty at first. Then I think the realisation cut in because people had been at home; they were starting to probably get a bit jaded with the fact that they couldn’t go out and see people. 

Then I think after a period of time, people started to realise the benefits they were getting off the back of it. One of our guys had a lockdown baby, and he started to realise, “Actually, I’m there at bath times; I can go off and play with my little son during the day.” He was taking part in changing nappies and stuff like that. He would never have been able to have that in an office. 

As people started to have their own experiences, like one of our ladies has run a half marathon, she would never have thought to do that, but her commuting time was spent on going out running and fitness and health. I think people have started to realise, “Actually, we could have this all the time.” In a way, it was a very organic process. 

Lee: Our situation was quite unique in that we were in a situation with our lease where we could get out with one day’s notice. I understand that there’ll be some companies that were tied in three or five years or even longer, and those companies may have felt that they had to go back. I think that situation made us think, “Okay, maybe”.  

There must have been a time, and I’m trying to remember when it was, where we had that aha moment of, “Let’s never go back to being in an office every single day, and while we’re at it, let’s move to the Lake District.” If I remember correctly, I think we were slightly more nervous to tell our employees about the move to the Lake District than we were our friends and family. It probably meant more for them. Obviously, we see our friends and family, but probably meant more for them in terms, for them, “That means we’re not going to get an office.” 

Lee: I think mentally, we went through a process of maybe we’ll do that thing where we’ll get some shell of an office and pop back every now and then. As time went on, I don’t think it’s even on the table anymore. We meet up every now and then, but the rest of the time, we just crack on. 

Lee: I’ve never asked any of them, so I don’t know for sure, but I don’t see that it would make any difference because we weren’t the sort of recruitment company that met candidates or even clients that often. To them, we’ve always been phone, Zoom, occasional meeting in London, but that’s about it. It’s not like we had an office where people came and saw us. The office is just for the recruiters who are on the phone, and they can now do that anyway. 

Theresa: The thing about recruitment is when you’ve been in it as long as we have, after a while, some of those candidates, and also clients, become close friends. We’ve had some positive messages from people via LinkedIn who, when we started to put out on social media that we’ve relocated, just send these amazing messages saying, “Good luck,” and, “We wish you all the best,” and, “This is an amazing journey for you. Just go out and enjoy your life.” 

It has just been supportive. We have had some nice messages from people and quite a lot of people saying, “I wish I could do what you’ve done.” People are saying, “If only I could go and move to the Lakes,” or, “I’ve always wanted to live in Wales,” and places like that. It’s people saying, “I would like to be able to go and do what you’ve done.” 

Theresa: It’s inspiring for people to see, “Well, actually it is possible. It can be done”. I sometimes think while it gets people thinking everybody has different sets of circumstances, but it also gets people thinking about, “If I have done it like Lee and Theresa, what would have to change?” Just the fact that they start thinking about that begins to move people in a direction towards it as well. 

Lee: The clients and candidates may not have been aware that the people that work for ROD now are more willing to ring them out of hours than they would have been in an office. If you’re in an office, it’s 9:00 to 5:30. The candidate or client said, “Can you ring me at 6:00?” There’s no specific example here, but I would imagine some recruiters will think, “No, I want to go home now.” 

Whereas we have the flexible working now and they’re more than happy to take a call or make a call at eight o’clock in the morning or 6:30 at night, even later than that. From a client’s point of view, maybe we’re a bit more accessible than we used to be. 

Theresa: I think when you work in an office environment, and it’s very much 9:00 to 6:00  o’clock or whatever it is, it’s almost like you fit your personal life in and around work. Whereas this way, it’s almost like work fits in and around your personal life. We realised very early on because it impacts us as well that when you’re asking people to work from home, there are other people in their household they’re interacting with. It’s impossible to hold down a 9:00 to 6:00 job when you’ve got other people coming and going. 

We very much realised that if we’re asking people to work from their own homes, we’ve got to be adaptable and make sure that we can offer them the environment that fits in with their hours. That has meant people popping off to watch the little kiddie at a school play or something like that or popping off to the gym, or even putting washing on. It means the weekend is much better quality as well because they do not have to focus on those sorts of stuff. 

Lee: That might come around because we moved up to the Lake District, and someone said to us, it might have even been you, “When the weather’s nice, we’ve got to take advantage and get out there.” We’re sitting here looking out the window, thinking, “Oh, it’s quite sunny today; we should be out there.” That train of thought led us to think, “We should do flexitime because if we want to go out and have a two-hour lunch and it’s nice, we should offer that to everybody else.” As long as you make it up later on or whatever. 

Theresa: I think it’s important to say that I don’t think we’ve got it perfect yet and probably it may never be perfect, but I think that the small cons are far outweighed by the pros, of the benefits that people get for their health, from work-life balance, just for being more present with their families. The things that we have had to put in place, things like Zoom calls, is more around the logistics of getting the team together, making sure that we can still be sociable. We can still knowledge share and swap ideas, and collaborate. 

Little things like having a WhatsApp group for everybody, so it’s a quick point of communication during the day and more regular Zoom meetings. We still make sure that we do monthly team individual review meetings, ensuring that we’ve got more training online for people coming into the business. 

From perhaps a hiring point of view, I also think that we’ve had to change our whole recruitment process. We think about that differently, how we market ourselves towards potential employees. There have been some subtle shifts, but I think on the day-to-day, because of the systems that we use and the fact that we’ve got all of the information there, it’s very collaborative, we’ve got tools in place that enable collaboration, that I’d say, hasn’t changed. 

Some really good things that have come off the back of it are the time we spend with people is a bit more focused because it’s booked in the diary. We have to; otherwise, when do people know when to join the Zoom calls? Suddenly it’s not conversations taking place in a corridor; it’s a proper, “Let’s sit, let’s work through these changes.” 

Lee: You give them more of your attention. In the office people walk in when you’re in your office, they walk in, and they want to ask you a quick question. I was never very good at saying no. You’re half doing what you’re doing and half-listening to them. These morning meetings we have at nine o’clock, they’re much, much better than what we used to do when we walked into an office at nine o’clock, “Morning,” and shuffle off to your office, and off you go. 

Whereas now, I think it’s much more pointed a much more, “What’s the plan for the day? Do you need any help with anything?” I don’t think we ever really did that on a day-to-day basis in the office. We had one big meeting a week, but we now have one big meeting every morning. 

Theresa: You still need to have some element of chit-chat because that’s what brings a team together. We’re still getting used to the fact that you have to instigate that kind of conversation, whereas before, they were just done a bit more naturally. 

Theresa: Having to adapt that way but again, it makes you think about it. The Thursday afternoon chats; usually, we talk about rubbish.  

Theresa: We work four day weeks and stuff like that. Thursday afternoon is usually the time that everybody is there for the last time during the week. It just tends to be what’s happening at the weekend, “What are you up to? What’re your plans?” that sort of thing. Then it just descends into an hour of chaos for a little while, but it’s nice because people get to have some of that banter that I think we miss out on. 

It has to be a bit more organised. That’s probably one of the biggest challenges we realised early on; we had to be more organised with those sorts of things. Now that we’ve got into the rhythm of it, it feels more natural. 

Lee: The marketplace we’re in is really busy, so that helps, I think. It went quiet for a little bit, but within a matter of a few months, the pendulum swung back, not only to the middle but towards the other side again. Not just because of what we’re going through, but Salesforce and the cloud are more relevant than ever with what’s going on. It’s a busy market, which helps in recruitment. That’s helped us have a good year. We switched our recruitment policy from local and inexperienced junior people because of our location; we are now looking for people with experience. It doesn’t matter where they’re based. As long as they’re in the UK and have the right attitude, those kinds of people can come into the business. In recruitment, you tend to find that you can pick up the technology speak quite quickly. It’s quite exciting for the company moving forward that we are in a crazy growth market. 

Lee: Technically, the restrictions on growth for us, one of the main ones was the location; we picked it so we can’t moan about it. We didn’t want to go to London every day, so we chose this particular part of Kent, but it hindered our growth in terms of finding people that knew how to do recruitment, and that has gone now. That barrier has been removed. I think those two things.  

Theresa: People that we can hire for but even the fact that we offer remote working, we offer flexible working, opens up the spectrum. Like mums returning to work. It’s made it a lot more accessible for them or any parent to be able to juggle childcare and work-life balance 

Theresa: Suddenly again, you’re expanding your horizons a little bit further there. It also means that we could potentially look at branching out into other countries in the future. We’re not just limited by a geographical location or just the fact that we’re in the UK. We could start to look further afield anyway. Being a recruitment company that has covered Europe and Dubai and places like that, that’s quite an exciting opportunity. 

Theresa: It starts to attract a different calibre of employee because they begin to see the potential there. 

There are lots of other things that are starting to generate success. Even just the people that we’ve taken on. I’ve got to give a little shout-out because we’ve recruited three people now since going fully remote. We’ve had to change our recruitment process to make sure we’re finding the right people that are motivated to work from home because they’re equally making it a success because they’re living their best life possible. Those are great success stories because ordinarily, they wouldn’t have had that chance. They would have been forced back into the office or even stuck with travelling expenses; even if you add that up in itself, financially, they’re better off because they don’t have to drive into an office. 

Lee: Also, a little shout-out to our marketing team, which is yourselves, because we obviously relied on you a lot. In the early stages of the pandemic, we probably didn’t think about marketing, but after a while, we started to realise that we had to stay, with your help, of course, we have to stay relevant and front of mind, but without talking about jobs. I think that’s really helped position us in the market as a company that wasn’t going anywhere and were there if you wanted to talk to us. With a few of the podcasts, it was your idea for us to get out there. It’s always good to have a marketing company that can talk to you about a quick shift in your message that quickly, which we did. 

Theresa: Actually, I want to add a point in because one candidate springs to mind in particular. I won’t say their name. We became almost like an agony aunt during the lockdown, and people were coming to us because the message was, “You’re still working, you’re still trading, you’re still doing business as normal.” That was specifically down to marketing. There were so many companies that just shut up shop. I know that we were in danger of it at the beginning, and thank you for talking us out of that. We made ourselves relevant with some of the roundtables that we’ve done with your help. 

Theresa: People saw us as a little beacon of light in the darkness, and they were coming to us. For months and months, we were just taking phone calls from people. 

Theresa: “We just want to talk to someone familiar, someone who understands what we’re going through.” There were some people that we’ve had amazing messages from that have said, “We’re so pleased because we don’t know how we would have got through that period without you.” That is a knock-on effect from the marketing that you guys continued to do for us. 

Theresa: I think also being able to not make it about yourself, and I think that’s what we tried to do during that period. It wasn’t about us; it was about them. It was about their pain, their journey that they were going through, and just being there for other people. Yes, our business was impacted, but in some respect, what people were going through and the ability to be able to help them helped us because it gave us a bit of a kick up the bum and said, “Right, come on, we’ve got to push on through this.” 

Lee: We talked to a lot of companies. A lot of our clients have always been remote. Not the big, big boys, but a lot of the companies we recruit for, have always had this remote model. I don’t know why, but I never really thought that was for us. 

Lee: I grew up in an office environment, and a sales office should be a buzzy office, deals being done and high fives and all that cheesy nonsense. I don’t suppose we would have ever done it if it wasn’t forced upon us, but having it forced upon us, the ridiculous cost savings from having an office and all that sort of stuff; that helped. I don’t know if there’s a particular moment where I could say, “Yes, that’s the day it was like, ‘We’re never going to go back to an office.'” The lifestyle we’re now leading is flexible. 

Theresa: We got a bit more spontaneous as well, which is quite nice. I would add to what Lee was saying that we’ve always been very open and transparent with our employees. We very much care about what they think about the business’s direction and any changes that we’re thinking of introducing.  

We’ve made a point of talking to the guys about what they envisage the business to look like moving forward. It has come out of conversations where people are just saying, “Do you know what? I don’t care about whether we go back into the office. I’m quite enjoying my life right now and the flexibility that it gives me.” We’ve gone from saying, “Well, we’ll make sure we’ll meet up once a month.” To suddenly going well, “Do we need to do that? Because we’re on a Zoom call every day.” Even now, people are going, “Well, I think that’s a bit overkill.” It’s actually about listening to what people want within the business. It has been easy for us to get caught up in what we think is right 

Lee: I also think, digging deeper, the people that worked for us in the office, there was a few of them that we thought for sure would want to go back to an office, and they said they didn’t. It’s then making sure that it’s for the right reasons. Then for us, recruitment is one of those industries where it’s quite easy to track whether someone’s doing their job or not, by and large, KPIs and placements etc. It was easy to fairly quickly flush out if someone was saying they don’t want to go back to the office because they’re working from home and they’ve kind of not. Not that we had any of that. I know from speaking to these clients that we have how they remote manage people, which did help us. 

Lee: Speaking to those companies that you remote manage. In many ways, it’s easier to remote manage than it is when someone’s sat opposite you, in my opinion, because you’re not sitting there every day listening to the reasons and feeling sorry for them. When it’s in black and white, and you’re not there, you can look at the numbers and go, “What is it you’re not doing?” 

Theresa: He said to me one time, and this has always stuck in my head, and probably became more relevant when we started to work remotely was, “It’s about data, not drama.” You can very clearly see whether someone is performing or not, and of course, we were still very supportive. Just because we don’t sit near them at a desk, we still offer that same level of support. The beauty of it is you don’t see the excuses that go on. I would say that that has stopped. People realise now; they don’t have the distractions in the office. They can’t blame someone else for distracting them because people are very much self-sufficient now. Yes, it has kind of taken all of that away, which is amazing because it means we’re less stressed. We have a lot more energy. When we’re sitting in our meetings in the morning, we’re more upbeat and energetic because we haven’t got the drain of that. 

Theresa: Trying to counterbalance negative energy is draining, but we just don’t have any of that anymore. 

Lee: Since not having an office, the sickness record of people has been much improved. I’m not saying we’re pushing people to work when they’re at home and they’re sick. We’d obviously be the first people to say, “You’re ill; go back to bed. Log off.” Maybe in the olden days, if you were feeling a bit groggy, you wouldn’t want to go to work, so that was a day sick. That’s something that, if you’re just looking at the data, has plummeted. 

Sharon: It sounds like there’s a healthier physically and mentally team 

Theresa: You’re a coach Sharon, so you understand that they go hand in hand. If your life isn’t working very well, it has a knock-on effect. 

Theresa: If you can take care of yourself and you put your health first, actually, that means that you can start to look after your family and your relationships and your work and so on. It has a huge impact on your whole life. 

Lee: I think one of the things we’re going to be doing next year is setting out a bit more of a hierarchy in the business. We used to have, as you know, a sales manager, and then some younger people reporting to that person. It has gone flat in terms of the structure at the moment. When COVID kicked in, Theresa and I jumped straight back in, doing everything. 

Lee: Doing everything we do, which for me, isn’t a lot, but for Theresa, it’s most of the things. Paul came back as a non-billing manager to a biller, and everyone else is a biller. We’re going to get to a point where we need to start promoting leaders, and you can’t do a Zoom call in the morning with 20 little faces on there. It’s hard enough. I think we’ve reached a limit of 10. Even doing this now, we’re talking over each other all the time. We’ve got to split it out a little bit. That would be interesting in 2022.

Theresa: You don’t have the luxury of being able to walk through the office and touch base and catch up with people. This way, in smaller teams, it makes it a lot more manageable. We will definitely focus on how to restructure the company properly. We’re fortunate the space we work in is, again, we do coaching, is you find somebody who does it incredibly well, and you model your business around what works well. I think the onboarding as well is something that we’ll have to improve.  It’s got better each time we’ve taken someone on, but I feel sorry for Nick because he was the first guinea pig for onboarding remotely. We made sure that it’s a two-way conversation. If we’re not doing something, you need to tell us so that we can adjust it. 

Lee: That’s new stress, isn’t it? I think give a shout-out to Natalie here as well because she was the second person we took on remotely. The PC and all of the equipment that was supposed to get to her went on an around-the-world trip before it got to her. Between Theresa and Natalie, they were trying to figure out where it was. It was quite stressful because she was supposed to be starting in a couple of days. 

Theresa: It arrived the day before she was due to start. 

Theresa: From the trustworthy company that can deliver your equipment to employees, that’s number one on the list. You want them to feel valued. You don’t want people starting on the first day, and they don’t even have an email or can’t get access to anything. You try to get stuff sent out in plenty of time, but that was unbelievable. 

Theresa: It’s a little bit out of your control to a certain extent because you give it to this delivery person expecting it to arrive, and it’s like, “Well, where is it?” It was great bonding because we got to know one another really well in the lead up to it. 

Theresa: Number one is enjoying something whilst we’re young enough because we always thought it would be a bit of a retirement plan. The fact that we are living here at this stage of our life is just an absolute blessing. I think it has changed our outlook. We’ve gone from being complete and utter workaholics to having a much better work-life balance than we’ve ever had. Being a little bit more hands-off has given us more freedom to actually be more creative because we’re not just driven by a geographical location or an office. 

We don’t feel guilty now if we take a couple of hours off in the morning because we know we’re at our most creative when we’re out walking; that’s always been the case for us. I get other people have different outlets for creativity. We come up with our best plans of action when we’re going off for a long stroll. Now we can do it during the working day, and it becomes part of our work rather than the need to separate time out of the office. It’s been an absolute blessing. 

Lee: You move so far away from everything you’ve ever known, you’ve got to try and put yourself out there, especially if you work from home because you’re not going to get to meet coworkers. Obviously, you work from home in a place you don’t know anybody. Even though we’re busy and workaholics, one of our plans was to get out there and do some volunteering, whatever it is you can do in the Lake District. I just happened to search for volunteering opportunities and noticed Lake District Radio looking for presenters. I was picturing myself probably doing litter picking or something. I didn’t expect it to be that.  

Theresa: You’re the voice of RODcast; it’s a natural progression. 

Lee: I think the things like the fell walking; we always liked to do long walks as you know, with all the challenges we’ve done over the years. Now living in the middle of it, it’s nice to go when the weather is nice; we also do a bit of open water swimming now. All these things that I used to think other people did. Other people that I didn’t really like if I’m honest. 

Lee: But now that’s what we do. Yes, that’s great. Living in the middle of a tourist area, when the sun is shining, it is so tempting to log off and go outside. 

Lee: The minute Lockdown 1 stopped, and people were allowed to come and see you, you’d gone from a year of just the two of us, nice and quiet and, “Isn’t this nice.” The flood gates are open, and everyone’s on holiday when you’re trying to work. That’s a challenge as well. 

Where can people find out more about Resource on Demand? 

Theresa: There are so many channels. Thanks to our marketing team you guys, they’ve made sure that we’ve got something everywhere. If people want to find out about what we offer as a service, go to the website Resource on Demand or there is; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. We also have our podcast on iTunes, Spotify and Google podcasts.

Lee: JustGiving too; we’re planting trees now for every placement we make. Not literally, but someone is planting trees. 

Theresa: We’re offsetting our carbon and with every placement we make, we will now plant trees to help combat climate change. We also do offer careers coaching. Again, all of these things can be found on various social media platforms; we’re all over them. Recruiters thinking about a lifestyle change; we’ve got an amazing Working With Us page on our website so they can find out more. 

Lee: Plus the podcast that’s out there from wherever you get your podcasts. 

Lee: There are not hundreds of them; they’re people who are in my mind, absolute legends in the Salesforce space. Rather than have a recruiter telling you what you should and shouldn’t do for your next move or whether you should take their counter offer or not, listen to people in the industry that have been around a bit. 

Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you think would be great for people to know about what makes remote working a success or how you’ve made it a success, or anything else that you’d like to share as we draw to a close?  

Theresa: The only thing I would probably say is to keep an open mind. As a business owner, I know that people are tied into leases, but it’s seeing opportunity and keeping an open mind to that because I think we are all stuck in our habits because we’re just creatures of habit. 

Theresa: We just naturally fall into patterns. I think just being able to keep an open mind. Whatever opportunity comes along, just look for the opportunity in it. I think that’s probably the biggest thing because whilst we stupidly had all of the systems in place to be able to work remotely, it was only when push came to shove that it happened. Actually, we fully embraced it. We’ve taken it with both hands and tried to run with it. It’s just having that ability to be a bit open-minded. 

Lee: I think also when you’re working from home, there’s a fine line between feeling guilty if you put the washing on or do something that you might consider to be, “Oh wait, this is a chore I should be doing in the evening,” or the weekend or something. Give yourself a break. When planning your day, try and plan something for you, something like that walk at lunchtime or go in that coffee shop. I am a coffee addict, so I make sure we walk out every day to one of the many hundreds of lovely coffee shops we can get to.

I get grumpy if we don’t do it because I have to feel like I’m getting out. Have a little mooch around. Get a coffee, come back. Otherwise, because you’re working from home, it’s data over drama. People might be thinking, “I’ve got to show that I’m working and the only way to show I’m working is output,” but don’t feel guilty for blocking in an hour or maybe even more if you’ve got flexitime to go and have a walk, clear your head at the gym, watch your kids do something at school, whatever it is. That would be my tip.  

Theresa: Being able to create a boundary between work and home as well because you are in your home, it’s so important not to let work spillover. Don’t be frightened to switch off the mobile phone when you’ve finished at the end of the day. You don’t have to be reading emails or taking phone calls outside of the hours that you work. Don’t be frightened of switching off those devices; put them aside. We have one mobile phone, but we give a separate mobile phone to our employees purposely so that we know that they can switch it off at the end of the day because you’ve got to create a boundary. You can’t let the two spillover. 

Lee: I suppose that’s communication. We’ve had this with some clients where they’re almost expecting their employees because they’re working from home to be accessible all the time. If anyone’s looking to move jobs, ask upfront, “What are the boundaries?” “If you email me, Mr Boss, at 10:30pm, are you expecting a response?” Because you’re looking at 10:30 doesn’t mean that everyone else has to, because bosses probably will be working at 10:30 in some places. 

How We Can Help 

We have been working with Lee and Theresa for years to enable them to get their brand out and into the market. If you would our help to do the same drop us an email.

We have many clients on track for their best year ever because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we provide. If you want a quick chat to see how Superfast Circle can work for you, book your call and demonstration here. 

The post Resource on Demand A Year of Remarkable Remote Recruiting appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Welcome to Episode 285 of The Recruitment Marketing and Sales podcast. [Excuse any typos; this is a brief transcription of the intro for this podcast.]

Today we have a special masterclass recording focusing on how to bounce forward and accelerate your growth this year.

This recording is the audio section of a webinar we ran about a year ago. When we titled this how to bounce back as time has moved on, I have called this bounce forward!

One of the reasons I wanted to share this with you today is over the past; I would say a month or so, we’ve been talking to a number of our clients within Superfast Circle who are part of a subgroup who set themselves impossible goals in 2021 to stretch themselves.

On a call this morning, we talked to two of them, who just happened; I am recording this in April, by the way, to have already achieved their impossible goal for Quarter 2 already!

Now bear in mind, they have over two months left of the quarter. These individuals have been students of ours for a while, and they do nail it by consistently following the various steps and processes that we give them.

If you want to elevate what you are doing and bounce forward, then we share many lessons within this recording.

This podcast is the audio from a webinar and is just under an hour long. It is worth sitting down with a notepad and listening to this. Listen to it in the car, or when you are on your own or whatever you are doing, or you’re exercising, and go back and listen to this again.

We share some superb questions that you can ask yourself. If things are not going according to plan, and my suspicion is for some people, they are not, then listening to this will give you a real sense of where to focus.

There are nine questions we give you to ask yourself. In this podcast, we lay everything out for you, what you need to consider doing, how to plan over 30, 60, 90 180 days.

We will also give you some examples of some of the things that our clients have done that have been successful, and that means that you can do them too.

I hope you enjoy this recording. I am sure you will.

Thanks,

Denise

P.S. We have many clients on track for their best year ever because they are implementing what we teach and utilising the content and campaigns we give them. If you want a quick chat to see if what we do can work for you, book a call here.

The post Masterclass Recordings: How to Bounce Forward and Grow Your Recruitment Business This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Creating your best year ever starts with marketing planning; at least if you want to create more demand for your recruiting service. As we move to the end of another year over I suspect it has had its ups and downs?

If you are keen on growth this is how it all works.

Now it’s time to get ready to plan 2020 and the start of a new decade; making sure that you start as you mean to go on… with your best foot forward.

I’m not necessarily talking about the whole ‘New Year, New You’ ‘dream’; because I don’t really buy into that.

Fact: It’s just not practical to think that you’ll wake up in January as a new person with different skills, will power or having received amazing skills as you slept on New Year’s Eve!

Let’s start at a place where we can get at least some level of success and kickstart next year in the best way possible.

I know you probably weren’t expecting me to start off with this one and it’s a great way of creating a fresh start.

Ever heard the saying that your outer world reflects your inner world?

That is why I love me a good clear out!

This year I have a couple of health goals, so a few random frozen apple crumbles have been given to neighbours as the freezer became a sugar-free zone.

I came into the office and cleared out some filing draws (yes, I still use a filing cabinet) and some folders of past proposals too.

Look at everything you have and decide whether it plays a crucial role in your business life or your personal growth.

If it doesn’t consider getting rid of it! This process creates physical space in your home, of course, but it also creates mental clarity too and is an easy way to shift your energy.

Taking time for a clear out is therapeutic and relaxing, once you get into it. It helps you to de-clutter your mind, as well as your home and office.

This process is subconsciously making room for a whole new you – and that is so, so powerful. Once this process is complete, it’s time to reflect on last year.

Bob Proctor, the well-known personal development speaker, often comments that we don’t spend enough time thinking.

Remember thinking and reflection is something we can do at any time; not only as one year ends and another one starts, though this time of year is as good as any to analyse where we are.

We have talked about the gap and the gain before, and you can read the post again here.

Success leaves clues, and I am certain some great things happened for you last year. So how about repeating them this year?

Though they might not be the ‘sexiest’ strategies sometimes nailing the basics is all that is required.

Spend some time with a journal and pen and ask yourself questions like:

Get your calendar or diary and look over the activities, to examine the year, month-on-month.

So, then determine how much of what you set out to achieve last year happened.

Then.

Looking specifically at the things you didn’t manage to achieve, decide whether those things are still relevant and important to you. If they are, circle them, as we can come back to them later.

This is an opportunity to take a long hard look at last year and map your progress along the way.

By analysing last year, you’re able to see clear, solid and quantifiable ways to improve and achieve more during the next 12 months.

Understanding and accepting what worked and what didn’t really is half of the battle.

One reason most people don’t achieve their goals is that they are not clear on what they want, or they expect ‘things’ to happen overnight without putting in the time, effort, or resources.

A mentor of mine defines his goals in 5, 10, and 20-year cycles.

That might be a step beyond what you were considering for some people reading this though it’s critical if you are serious about building a 7 or 8 figure recruitment business.

So, let’s make it easier for you.

The first place to start is with the things you circled in the previous step. Remember those things you wanted to happen last year that didn’t. The question is, are they still relevant? If they are adding them to your list.

What about your successes last year; can you take them to a logical next level?

[Hint: These are easy wins for you.]

Real goal setting takes thought.

Rather than randomly plucking an idea out of the air, decide how a goal fits into the plan.

A couple of years ago one of our clients had a goal to open a new office that year in neighbouring geography.

After a planning session with us, he realised that the first step was to mine his current geography and to up the billing level of his current team.

Within eight months, this had added 400k into the pot over and above current levels which meant more revenue with very little additional cost.

The new office was then added to the plan for the final quarter of the following year; which leads me onto the next step.

Back in the day both Sharon and I worked in the Pharmaceutical sector. It wasn’t the easiest job I have ever had though when it comes to understanding marketing and sales it taught me a huge amount.

One strategy that was consistently used was the quarterly cycle.

The year was split into 4.

In fact, as I write this some old buddies of mine will be attending the cycle one kick-off meeting again in January again. They have been working this way well before I started with them, so I sense it’s working!

In the words of the legendary Stephen Covey start with the end in mind and then map out the path to your goal.

Let’s say you have a goal to turn over an extra £750k this year, what would the steps be to get you there? Questions I would ask might be?

We encourage all our clients and students on Superfast Circle to work in this way.

We suggest breaking this down further into monthly and then weekly plans.

The devil really is in the detail.

This gives you some small ‘stepping stones’ to follow, on the way to achieving your major milestones.

In other words, you can focus on exactly what you need to do for the next few weeks.

It’s much easier to build 4 x weekly plans for the month ahead than it would be to plan out your path for the next year.

By breaking everything down this way, you can make sure that you’re always working on the month ahead… however, every step will take you to where you plan to be in a year.

This is SO much more effective than just starting a journey and making it up as you go along!

If you are stuck on the finer detail of what to do get in touch here.

If you have taken action on steps 1 to 4, you are ahead of the pack.

You’ve decided what you want.

Now you need to take action and get some support.

This is where a lot of people fall down.

Start by writing down your own goals for the week and then review what you have achieved. This takes discipline and won’t work for everyone… however, it is a start.

Alternatively, find someone who will support you and call you on your stuff when you need it.

If you want to take it even further join our Superfast Circle ninjas and make this your best year ever.

Thanks,

Denise

To accelerate your marketing at speed, you need to know your starting point and be clear on what good marketing looks like.

That is why we have designed a complimentary Marketing Audit Checklist that you can download here.

The post How To Make This Year Your Best Ever? appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

The easy path to selling more in your recruitment company? A question every business owner wants the answer too, especially at this time of year as one-year slides into another and the question whizzing round in our heads; ‘how can I make more placements next year?’

This isn’t going to be a long post. It doesn’t need to be.

Work on these five elements and you are gold.

It’s a straight forward formula:

• Goal
• Market
• Offer
• Leads
• Conversion mechanism

Of course, each of these elements has a few more ‘bits’ to it though these are the big chunks to consider.

Let me drill down to each in question.

Nothing happens without a goal. Period.

It will also inform the other parts of the process. You must know why you have this goal too; it always helps.

I know it sounds woo woo and all of us need a why to drive us. Whether that is to fulfil the potential we have always known we have, to be a great provider for our family, to have a business that makes a difference in the world, and the list goes on.

If you have a big vision you will need to factor in time too. If you want to turn over £3 million then you need to consider the sector, time, and resources to make that happen.

Which leads me onto your market or sector.

If you have a big goal will the sector you have chosen deliver the revenues, you want?

If you are in technology or the commercial sector the answer is probably yes.

Not sure? Then it is critical to do your own due diligence and research especially as you want to have a business building plan for a minimum of 5 years.

Google is your friend on this one. Here is a useful report I came across when preparing for this post from O2; from the data it presents, you probably wouldn’t want to be in printing and the manufacture of basic metals

Can you sector command higher fees? Is it more specialist? What about longer-term growth?

The markets are changing and specialists’ rule.

Google and the World Wide Web has changed what is possible for all of us.

What about verticals? How many could you have in your sector?

Now this often stumps recruitment owners.

What is your offer?

When it comes to clients you have a recruiting service? How comprehensive is it? Is it on the lines of RPO or an amazing service where you work closely with the client from scoping out a project to arranging behavioural testing, video screening and the whole 9 yards?

What service would your client value and want?

If it’s possible, then scope your offer around this and then charge them for it.

So many people miss this point.

Know what your client’s value then work out how you can deliver it well and make a profit.

Fact: Higher value clients will pay more for a service they want.

Ditto with your candidates too. If you can help a candidate with their career, particularly in a role where they might later become a client, deliver an outstanding service and watch all the dominoes fall in your direction.

This leads me onto leads; excuse the pun!

When you know what your ideal clients and candidates want attracting leads becomes easier. When you communicate through content and by phone and email that you understand your market more of those clients and candidates take your calls and get in touch.

Leads can come from multiple sources and because you know so much about your market it’s easier to presell them on your recruiting service.

Here are a few examples:

• Your website blogs, free reports, contact forms, chat boxes and chat bots.
• Social channels; LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram.
• Paid advertising LinkedIn, Google, Job adverts, Facebook.
• Email lists
• Referrals….. and the list goes on.

Marketing is about creating awareness and demand for your recruiting service and expertise. Once people start to know, like and trust you they are easier to convert.

The buyers cycle means that a small percentage are ready to work with your straight away the rest will over time.

Historically conversion takes place through a conversation be that on the phone, face to face or is a presentation setting.

Get all the other four elements ‘right’ and this part of the process becomes easier.

Jump into action. If you don’t have all the answers to these questions, then that is your starting point. If you haven’t yet downloaded our marketing checklist you can do that here.

If you want our help nailing your marketing next year get in touch by dropping us an email here.

The post The 5 Step System To Selling More In Your Recruitment Company Next Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.