As a startup recruitment agency, you’ll want all areas of the business to be as streamlined as possible to provide the best possible service and experience to your clients. Our partners New Millennia suggest coordinating this before you scale the agency will place you in the best position to thrive whenever you’re ready to grow.
Some of the biggest hurdles when starting your own business are the tasks which consume your time and resources but which are not your main focus or your area of expertise. The running of your recruitment agency back office is a prime example of this – payroll processing, invoice chasing, money and people management are likely not the reasons you began your startup! Finding the back office solutions which work for you is the way you overcome this hurdle. To prevent the tasks of back office management from stealing all of your time away from recruitment, New Millennia are bringing you a few tips from their years of experience in helping startup recruitment agencies get on their feet and successfully grow their business. These tips should allow you to put your efforts towards doing what you do best; placing viable candidates with growing companies.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing some of your back office tasks will free up some of your valuable time. As these tasks aren’t necessarily your areas of passion or expertise, it’s more logical to apply all of your brainpower and skill to the tasks at which you excel – recruitment! An assistant such as New Millennia can help you to take control by taking on your back office administration. These back office solutions can include payroll processing, invoicing, credit control, funding, and taking care of all legal contracts. An experienced back office solutions specialist communicating with clients will encourage a professional portrayal of your startup recruitment agency. And the funding New Millennia can offer your small business can help enormously to smooth the, often inconsistent, intake and output of funds. Not only does this mean more time for you to get back to what you do best, it means a swift, smooth and streamlined back office, with minimal effort on your part!
Organisation
As a startup, you have the chance to get your back office in order from day one and keep it that way. Familiarising yourself and your small startup team with the intricacies of the back office will mean that together you can tweak and organise processes and procedures, and iron out the kinks to develop your own back office solutions. If you all know how the office should be working, you can all ensure that everything is kept in order and to schedule going forward. It’s vital, whether you enlist assistance here or not, that there is a clear process in place and that it is adhered to by everyone working in your recruitment agency back office. Creating documented procedures for staff, old and new, to refer to is a great idea; these could be kept on a shared Google Drive, for example, so the guidelines for back office organisation are always accessible.
Clarity & Communication
You need a heightened level of communication between all members of the team concerning how the back office process works as discussed above, but also when it comes to any changes, concerns or issues that may arise as the recruitment agency grows. With everyone on the same page, there can be no confusion when it comes to back office management.
This level of communication also applies to clients. Your clarity with clients, as well as helping to build a strong and respectable working relationship, means that they will know what is expected of them, including timelines, who they need to contact and when they are expected to process payments, helping to keep organisation in place and become part of your back office solutions.
Centralise and automate
Centralising your recruitment agency back office keeps all information, processes and programmes on one system which can be accessed and altered by all who need it at any time. Automating your operations lowers the risk of human error in the process and ensures all members of staff are following the same process. If you choose to outsource your back office organisation, back office specialists will automate many of your operations with a compliant operating platform for online timesheets, portals and digital contracts.
There are plenty of tools and approaches that you can use and take to make running your recruitment agency back office much more straightforward than it initially may seem, so whether you plan to outsource your back office administration or not, make sure it doesn’t get on top of you and find your solution!
