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Home » HRM Business Opportunities » Your New Recruitment Agency » Recruitment Agency Business Plan » Recruitment Agency Business Plan: External Competitors Analysis

Recruitment Agency Business Plan: External Competitors Analysis

The other recruitment agencies are an extremely good source for the business ideas for your own recruitment agency. The competitors on the market create the market and they create the background to differentiate.

The recruitment agencies are very common and you can find a lot of recruitment agencies in every bigger city around the Globe. The main competitive advantage is the proper differentiation from the other recruitment agencies and this competitive advantage should not be based on the pricing. The pricing competitive advantage is not the best for the future of the recruitment agency as it limits its growth.

The businessman should do the following:

1. Make a proper market research;
2. Visit several recruitment agencies as a job applicant.

Proper recruitment agencies market research

The market in your local area has to be researched to find the most significant competitor on the market. And not just the biggest recruitment agencies should be analyzed; the number of new entrants with interesting ideas should be covered as well.

The research should start with the look into the phone directory of the area to have a basic idea about the number of recruitment agencies operating in the area. The number can be really high and it can be about several hundreds of the recruitment agencies operating on the market. In reality, many of them are very occasional start-ups, which do not exist anymore.

The focus should be then on the most active recruitment agencies and their behavior on the market should be analyzed. The analysis of their websites can bring a lot of potential knowledge about:

• Number of job openings they have in monitored period
• Potential success rate
• Primary functional area
• Number of clients
• Best clients

The basic numbers are fine, but they should be confronted in the interviews with friendly HR Recruiters. The HR Recruiters usually provide with the most important information as they know about the recruitment agencies and they really understand their internal processes as they can easily observe and ask questions. The HR Recruiter can provide the “internal” information about the service level and the development in the recruitment agencies.

The other sources of the information are the real job adverts of the competitors. They can show a lot of information about their internal processes and why their job postings are attractive to the job candidate to apply for the positions of their clients. It is very important not to forget about the main task of the recruitment agency – to find a suitable job candidate at affordable price and in defined quality.

Recruitment Agency Visits

The recruitment agency business plan should have some information about the current recruitment process practice at the competitors and the best way to find out this information to become part of their own selection procedures. The recruitment agencies should be measured on their responsiveness; time to provide feed back from the client and the overall process. It can also provide very important information about job candidate monitoring and testing and this can be very important part of the overall business concept of the new recruitment agency.