As any good recruiter knows, client relationships are the lifeblood of successful recruitment services. For agencies offering temporary recruiting services, one of the clearest benefits is your clients have an ongoing need for new staff. This gives you and your team the opportunity to establish and build a long-term relationship. At TempWorks we know the recruiting process can be time-consuming and tricky to manage. With so much going on, it’s imperative that client relationships are at the forefront of everyone’s mind. By instilling the right mindset in your team and by using the right tools, positive client relationships will become second nature, and clients will keep coming back for more. With that in mind, we’re going to cover some of the tactics you and your team can use to ensure you’re building great client relationships.

Understanding the brief

Getting the brief right is a stage of the recruitment process that is fraught with difficulties. Your recruitment team will need the experience and confidence to consult on a client’s hiring needs. Less experienced recruiters have a tendency to blindly listen to a brief, often lacking the industry knowledge to push back when needed. Unfortunately, this can lead to a situation where recruiters over-promise and under-deliver.

Experienced recruiters on the other hand are more willing and able to discuss a client’s brief, and are comfortable enough to advise them on the state of the playing field for the talent they’re looking for. To gain this confidence and local knowledge you and your team will need to keep up to date with what’s going on in the industry, especially when it comes to hiring trends and salaries. Attending industry events, networking meetings, and setting up email alerts for your industry can be a great way to top up industry knowledge, and the resulting learned confidence along with coaching will help your recruiters agree on a realistic brief early on.

In addition to setting realistic expectations, your recruiters will also need to concentrate on understanding the client’s culture. Be sure to find out how they like to operate. Are they a dynamic employer that needs employees to think on their feet? Or, do they prefer to take a more measured approach by following strict policies and procedures? Understanding an employer, how they work, and what they pride themselves on will help you to deliver the employees they need.

When it comes to ongoing briefs, it’s worth bearing in mind that a client’s needs will change over time. Even when a client is hiring for the same role, it’s essential that you reconfirm the details of the brief. While the job spec might not have changed, there could be some wider company changes that need updating in the brief. It is your responsibility to ensure that everyone in your team fully understands their brief and is aware of any changes. By investing the time in getting the brief right, and keeping that brief updated, you’ll foster a smoother workflow and facilitate ongoing successful hires. To help your team keep abreast of changes, consider using a good CRM system to help you build a complete profile of your client that your whole team can access.

Communicate effectively

A happy client is one that has a clear understanding of the hiring process going forward. By keeping them fully informed of what they can expect and when, they’ll feel looked after and there will be no room for doubt about your agency’s ability to deliver.

Your team will need to educate them on what is needed from them, and how quickly they might need to move to secure the talent they need, especially in a competitive market. If you’re using staffing software to manage communication or documents, it’s essential that you spend time with your client, demonstrating how it all works and explaining the benefits to them.

Evaluate client satisfaction

Evaluating client satisfaction of the service provided is essential. You can only improve by knowing how to improve, and you’ll only know how to improve if your clients tell you! Asking clients for their feedback shows that you care, and could be the one thing that keeps them working with you in the future.

Where possible take a qualitative and quantitative approach to feedback. Using scorecards to assess the success of a temp can be a great way to get a snapshot of whether you provided the right talent for your client’s needs. Back this up with open and honest dialogue about each stage of the process. Find out whether there were elements they were unhappy with, or moments where they felt unsupported. Once you have this information, be sure to discuss these learnings at a team level to see if any trends emerge, and establish what changes you can implement to help improve your service offering. By empowering your clients to shape the process they want, you’ll undoubtedly build a trusting relationship that means they come to you first with their talent needs.

Get in touch to find out how you can streamline your temporary recruiting process with our innovative staffing software.