It can be difficult to differentiate your recruitment firm in an industry where there are so many different types of recruiting agencies. There are recruitment firms that are retained or contingent, generalists or specialists, and large operations and niche boutique firms.
At Naviga Recruiting & Executive Search, we are a retained, boutique firm that specializes in Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Executive searches. Over the years, we’ve put processes in place that have helped us differentiate our business and attract global clients from the Fortune 50 to companies hiring their first salesperson.
If you would like to learn more about how Naviga differentiates itself in the recruitment industry and has increased its retained business, then check out the ‘Differentiating a Recruitment Business’ podcast with Tony Restell and Naviga CEO, Kathleen Steffey.
In the episode, Kathleen shares the advantages of being a retained firm, her high-level approach on how to differentiate your recruitment firm, and her process once a new client signs the contract.
Top Tips for Differentiating Your Recruitment Firm and Increasing Your Success:
- When you’re a retained search firm, and large companies and small companies from around the world are paying you upfront, you’ve got to make sure that you have differentiation in your selling process. Companies value our process in order to feel comfortable paying us upfront.
- The minute a client or prospect calls our business to find out more about us, they see the differentiation because we immediately ask questions in order to determine if we want to do business with them. For example, what are the gaps in their business, learning about strengths and weaknesses in their sales, marketing, and operations departments, and things of that nature?
- Once you have a process down, make sure you’re sticking to it. I find that if you deviate from a process you get in trouble. Even when you think you have it down in the busiest of times, you can still get too comfortable and deviate from a known process.
You can watch the full interview here or read the full interview below.
Tony: Hi everyone and thanks for tuning in to today’s video interview. Tony Restell here from Social Hire and delighted today to be joined by Kathleen Steffey. Kathleen, would you like to just start by telling us about yourself and your business and thanks so much for joining us today?
Kathleen: Thank you for having me. I’m Kathleen Steffey and my business is Naviga Recruiting & Executive Search. We’re in the United States in Florida but we serve companies around the world. We place sales and marketing and operations people. We’ve been around for 18 years and loving it.
Tony: Brilliant. And I know that you place a lot of stalk in differentiation and differentiating your recruitment firm in the market. How do you think that’s best achieved and what kind of upsides do you see from doing that?
Kathleen: Yeah, for sure. Well in the recruiting world you can either be a contingency firm or retained and Naviga is retained. And when you’re a retained search firm, and companies – very large companies and small companies from around the world are paying you upfront, you’ve got to make sure that you have differentiation and a process.
They value our process in order to feel comfortable paying us upfront. We’ve learned how to communicate this process on social media and on the web so that when we speak to them, to get them comfortable, they know they’re going to be taken care of.
Tony: So in terms of upsides, you get the work retained, you get paid upfront, and any other advantage you get from that, would you say?
Kathleen: Oh definitely. More business, more visibility in the marketplace based on communicating our process out there, we’re creating more value, we’re seen as relevant in the marketplace, on-trend, things of that nature so just our process plays a huge piece of the puzzle when the marketplace is looking at our business compared to others and deciding what they want.
Tony: So a couple of different things from what you just said there. There’s the whole piece on the high-level overview of how you approach differentiating your recruitment firm and then you’ve mentioned processes a good couple of times there. If we start just from a high level of how you go about approaching differentiating a business, what would you focus on there?
Kathleen: Yes, back to process from a differentiation standpoint. The minute a client or prospect calls us to find out more about us, they see the differentiation because we immediately ask questions in order to determine if we want to do business with them.
Even if they are a massive global multibillion-dollar Fortune 50 business, we’re asking questions of them to learn if we want to do business and what’s going on in their business to make them call us.
What are the gaps in their business, learning about strengths and weaknesses in their sales, marketing, and operations departments, and things of that nature?
So starting with that first phone call and creating value and showing them and communicating what our process will be, which I can explain to you, is a huge differentiator.
Kind of taking control on that first call and we’re very blessed they come to us. All leads come to us from what we’ve done from a marketing standpoint. We have to be careful that we don’t get so excited about every lead coming in. We have to show value on the front side and discern who they are as well.
Tony: Sounds really powerful that your essentially qualifying in and out who you’d like to work with rather than coming across as desperate for any business you can possibly get.
Kathleen: Yeah, it is very powerful and I’m really grateful for it. It didn’t happen overnight.
Tony: I can imagine. So in terms of processes and tips for getting those processes right and you’re pursuing this kind of approach, any particular ideas that you would share with others?
Kathleen: Yeah for sure. I mean stick to the process. You know, once you have a process down, make sure you’re sticking to it.
So, an example of our process as well, I’ll elaborate a tiny bit is, once we sign that contract we’re having an intake call. We have an Intake/Calibration Call with our customer to really learn about them. That’s about an hour-long, we’re really learning, and then we create what we call a Professional Overview of what we’ve learned, and we send it to them, and we get confirmation that we’re on the same page before we actually go and work on a search.
And in a process in a retained recruiting firm, you have to have a project team as well. We have a Sourcer, we have a Director of Accounts that works with them, we have a Recruiter that’s interviewing and discerning candidates and we have a Marketing person that’s actually marketing the position out there to the world once we have it.
And this is everything going on in our process before we actually submit somebody to our customer.
So having that process down and sticking to it even though you’re really really good and maybe doing this for 25 years, I find that if you deviate from a process you get in trouble. Even when you think you have it down, you miss little steps, right? You don’t cross the t’s and dot the i’s. And I do that sometimes. I think I know a lot because I’ve been around and sometimes I miss when I get too comfortable and I tell my team that too.
So I would say stick to the integrity of the process overall and life will be beautiful.
Tony: Sounds like it must be a real training exercise as well when you bring on someone new to make sure that they’re following all of that you know.
Kathleen: Oh I know. Yep, it’s definitely a process, if you will, of trial and error and learning by fire in my industry because you gotta move fast and things of that nature.
Tony: Yeah it’s funny because, in the social media agency world that I’m in, it’s exactly the same. We get to know clients upfront really intensively and then you have to have processes that you follow to get things done. Kathleen, been really interesting today. Thank you so much for taking the time.
