Staffing Business Development: How to Grow Your Staffing Firm

Large or small, staffing companies all have the goal of growth in mind. We’re not talking about literal company size (though that may be a goal as well), but rather, growth in number of clients, brand awareness, and market share. Focusing on staffing business development results in new clients, sales, and business opportunities.

The Challenge With Staffing Business Development

Everyone wants their business to experience this type of growth, but knowing how is a near impossible task without the right data. What is the total available market for an industry you’re wanting to break into? Who are the top employers hiring for positions of interest? The answers to these questions provide valuable insights into how you can saturate markets and expand into new ones. The good news—those answers don’t have to be hard to find.

Identifying Opportunities for Growth

One of the most common ways staffing companies can grow and develop is by looking at spending opportunities. Let’s say your staffing company wants to get involved in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX area. You first want to see how valuable staffing companies are there. After some digging, you find that this market spends a significant amount on staffing ($7.31B), which means they rely heavily on companies just like yours—an opportunity!

Similarly, knowing how to pivot your staffing business development efforts is important. We can understand this by looking at staffing spend received by occupation.

Let’s say your efforts have been in the healthcare sector, but you want to know if demand is greater elsewhere. You ought to be able to figure this out with ease. For the Dallas market, we see that the healthcare sector only receives $7.2% of the total dollars spent on staffing. In this case, your company may want to explore the light industrial sector, where more spending occurs.

Just like that, your strategy for growth opportunities is backed by data!

This information also helps your recruiters. When you know the total addressable market for different regions, you can set your team up for success by determining the appropriate amount of time, resources, and overall load to distribute. Now your recruiters can optimize their output, increase their percentage of fillable reqs, and ramp up retention rates.

Targeting Potential Clients

Using the same example, we can look at how job postings data helps target new clients. 

Say your staffing company is having success filling reqs for nursing assistants and you want to find opportunities to saturate that market. To do that, you’ll need to know who the top employers are, where they’re located, what their advertised wages are, and how recently they’ve posted.

This information helps you determine which of those clients poses the best potential for you to target next. 

Land and Expand

It’s all about relationships. Don’t stop at landing new clients. Look at that connection as an opportunity to expand your footprint throughout the company.

For example, say you handle the engineering job postings for a company that you have a great relationship with. An inside look at other jobs they are posting for such as marketing, human resources, or IT can arm you with data to break into hiring for all departments within the company. Because of that great relationship, you can go to the company with an impressive plan on how you can help with those other roles they didn’t first consider you for.

Staffing business development can also happen by location. For example, you might initially be hired to staff picker/packer jobs for Amazon’s fulfillment center in Phoenix. Upon further digging, you see they also have a fulfillment center in Glendale. Discoveries like this lead to opportunities for expanding relationships—and business.

Weaponize data. Grow your business.

If you actively look for staffing business development opportunities, your business will grow. Finding ways to saturate markets, optimize recruiters’ output, target new clients, and expand relationships bolsters your company’s reputation to get the job done. That reputation will land you more clients and diversify your portfolio. 

Want to learn more about how Emsi can help your staffing business development goals? Visit our website.