How to Break the Productivity Ceiling in Your Agency - Rethinking Recruiting

Running a recruitment agency with a team of recruiters is a balancing act. In fact, data shows that scaling agencies often float between 9 and 14 recruiters, but rarely increase profit as they flex up and down.  

It’s not a question of working hard - everyone is busy, but placements don’t always grow at the same pace as the effort that agencies and their recruiters are putting in. Why? Because too much recruiter time gets eaten up by manual tasks, duplicated work, and scattered data.

The days of just hiring more recruiters to scale are gone. The real productivity gains now come from simplifying the way recruitment gets done and making sure your tech empowers recruiters to be the best they can be.  

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Four Levers to Unlock More Billings

If your agency is struggling to maximise the output from recruiters, then you actually have a great opportunity to unlock more billings. The following four productivity levers will allow you to unlock the true potential of your agency:

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1. Eliminate Waste

Eliminating processes or meetings that waste time gives you the opportunity to turn that time into a tangible revenue return. Take these steps to steal that time back:

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• Strip back unnecessary check-ins. Meetings that have a purpose and keep teams focussed on revenue generating activities serve a significant purpose in recruitment, but it is easy for agencies to become meeting heavy. If your recruiters are spending hours a week in meetings, then it’s important to make sure there is value in those meetings. Just one hour of wasted time across a team each week will be costing thousands in resource, without even considering the value of the lost opportunity.  

• Give meetings clear focus. Where meetings are maintained it is important to ensure they are directly supporting revenue with tangible outcomes. To achieve this, it is important to set clear agendas with consistent reporting. Meetings with a framework will be far more effective and productive than meetings with a loose agenda and no clear purpose.  

• Break down internal barriers. Remember that your consultants work for your agency and not just themselves. Recruiters should always be contributing to a shared pool of candidates at the heart of your recruitment agency, not building their own little black book. Coordinating consultants around a central talent pool means they are working together, not alongside one another, and are collaboratively preparing candidates for market.

• Remove manual tasks. One of the biggest forms of waste in recruitment agencies is the manual tasks created by disconnections in your tech stack. These micro-tasks add up to a huge amount of time and resource being wasted. In some cases removing manual tasks can save 8 hours per recruiter per week, effectively giving your agency an extra day each week to focus on reenue generation.

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2. Synchronise Activity‍

Synchronising activities creates a more productive and collaborative recruitment environment, as well as making activity and outcomes more visible and accountable.  

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• Keep job priorities aligned. Recruiters deal with a wide range of different tasks and have a wide spread of responsibilities. As a result it is easy for recruiters to become distracted by certain tasks and pulled away from other priorities. Often the work created is unproductive and recruiters end up busy with all the wrong things. Using clear dashboards and KPIs will help to keep priorities aligned and clarify expectations with both clients and your internal teams. Share candidate pipelines openly within the team to avoid wasted effort.

• Create a single version of truth. One of the biggest challenges for recruitment agencies is making all the data they control useful. With mis-matched spreadsheets, inboxes, and CRM records that don’t match, a huge amount of time is wasted on simply trying to find the right information. With a broad tech stack it can also be tempting to pull reports from multiple locations, but the reality is that doing so often makes performance harder to track. By using one version of the truth in your central CRM for live roles, CV submissions, and client feedback, you create clarity and remove confusion. This clarity will help to synchronise activity and enable recruiters to see the outcomes of their activity to develop and improve.  

• Use clear KPIs. KPIs need to be consistent and aligned from the bottom to top of your agency, so every input is working towards the same objective. Creating clear KPIs that contribute visibly to the broader agency goals creates accountability, visibility, and enables clear pathways for recruiter development to be created.  

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3. Streamline Processes

‍Streamlining processes simplifies workloads, removes duplication of effort, and helps to eliminate admin that doesn’t need to be done.  

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• Standardise common processes. Standardising job intake questions, interview prep, and submission packs means recruiters don’t need to reinvent the wheel with every job. It makes it easier to complete onboarding, streamlines the effort, and ensures a consistent experience for everyone engaging with your agency. Standardisation will also enable you to cut wasted time that is often invisible when recruiters have their individual processes.  

• Focus reporting on what matters. The core metrics in your agency should be clear, focused, and built around revenue generating outcomes: jobs filled, fees invoiced, and time-to-fill. All activity feeds into these outcomes, so this is where reporting should be focused. It is very easy to get lost in activity reporting, which measures volume, not quality. If you flip the mentality to outcomes, it is far easier to gauge quality over quantity and refine activity.  

• Integrate any external systems. The recruitment tech stack is getting bloated, and with every additional non-integrated bit of tech, you lose data, create manual work, and waste time. Integrating external systems will save you huge amounts of time. Check out this guide to learn how.  

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4. Automate Admin

‍Use AI and automation tools to eliminate tasks that are completed manually and to further enrich your database.

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• Simplify activity with your CRM. Your recruitment CRM should be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for your recruitment agency. You can use it to handle bulk emails, schedule interviews, and format CVs. By using tools like the Firefish AI CV parser, your agency can benefit from huge time savings, improved database enrichment, and a clearer picture of candidates before they go to market.  

• Manage recruiter time with tasks. Keeping recruiters focused on the most important tasks, the ones that are fee-generating, can be difficult. This is why it’s essential to automate reminders for client follow-ups and candidate care. Automating these vital steps means nothing is missed and your agency’s revenue and reputation is protected.  

• Automate reporting. The days of reporting manually with excel should be well and truly over. Dashboards should be used to replace manual reporting to eliminate waste and and to ensure accuracy and consistency. Excel based reports are easy to get wrong, easy to manipulate, and generally unreliable. A dashboard reporting hard fact from the database, however, gives you a direct answer without any wasted time.  

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How Breaking the Productivity Cap Will Benefit Your Agency

Small agencies can’t afford wasted effort. But for many agencies the trap of focusing on the wrong things leads to a busy but unproductive team. Every hour a recruiter spends completing admin is an hour not spent billing and becomes a drain on your agency. By simplifying systems, unifying teams and data, and automating manual processes, your agency can unlock a powerful workforce for fee-generating activity. Agencies that manage to break the productivity cap can expect to benefit from:

• Increased speed to submission and placement.

• Stronger relationships between consultants and their clients and candidates.

• Improved consistency of candidate experience.

• The ability to scale without adding more recruiters.

• A 15% average reduction in operational costs.  

• A 30% increase in revenue per recruiter.

Recruiters aren’t there to complete admin tasks, attend meetings and jump through hoops for clients; they’re there to build relationships with clients and candidates so they can make placements that stick. If you’re suffering from a productivity cap that is stunting your agency’s growth – it’s time to streamline your processes, unify your data in one central source, and use automation to free recruiters to do what they do best: build relationships and close deals.

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Want to learn more about how to break the productivity cap in your agency? Get in touch here.