Start your own: Recruitment business

Tips and advice

• Always interview your candidate. While some recruitment businesses don’t see the necessity of meeting their candidates, Tim King believes it’s essential. “You usually have to explain to the client, coherently and concisely, why the candidate is good for the job. I think you can only do that when you’ve met the candidate,” he says.
  
• Make sure you’re passionate about the industry you’re working in – you will be responsible for a major element of the lives of the workers you place. “At the end of the day, you’ve got people’s careers on your hands,” says Kevyn Robins. “You need to live it and breathe it, really. You can’t go into recruitment thinking it’s just a job.”
  
• There are lots of ways to diversify your income. “Some people branch out into HR consultancy,” says Anne Fairweather. “Some go into companies and manage the entire HR process for a company internally. It’s called recruitment process outsourcing.” HR consultancy isn’t the only option, though. “There are a lot of different ways people can take a pure agency model and develop it if they want to, and do what their clients want as well,” says Fairweather. “Recruiters tend to be very adaptable people. They don’t  just have one business model and stick to it – they’re very responsive to client demands.”
  
• Get in touch with the REC’s start-up service. The Recruitment Industry Taskforce for Enterprise (RITE) service is there to help you all the way through the process of starting up a recruitment agency, from writing your business plan to finding your first clients. The service, which will help you work out financing, sales and marketing strategies, and even supply you with a mentor, was launched by the REC in January 2005 as the UK’s first ever industry-specific enterprise support service. Find out more at www.rite.uk.com.