8 ways my Company can help your HR Consultancy

Written by:Adrian McDonagh, Founder/Chief

Ideas Officer EasyWeb Recruitment 2016

Why we stopped cold calling and started helping companies

In 2009, the economy was flat after the recession of all recessions. EasyWeb Recruitment was 4 years old and had seen strong initial growth taper off into no growth. We had a good base of happy clients, but for obvious reasons they were not recruiting as much as they had been. We had to do something different. We decided to ditch what was our traditional route to new clients. The cold call.

We threw all our efforts behind a new strategy of running free online recruitment training events. Initially, this was via workshops and then webinars and more recently also includes networking events. Subjects included recruiting with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Glassdoor, Indeed, Google Analytics, Job Boards and CV Databases.

7 years on we have trained countless HR professionals. It really is countless, as in all the excitement we forgot to keep a count of the total figure. According to our Eventbrite account1 we have run 484 events and we only started using Eventbrite 5 years ago. We run over 100 events per year to well over 1,000 HR professionals, in-house recruiters and SME business owners. We have developed a reputation for delivering fun, interesting, valuable training sessions. We’ve also grown the business, a lot.

The moral of the story is that by suppressing the urge to sell first and add value later we were able to win the trust of many new clients.

The HR Partner Programme and our latest free productFor years we have partnered successfully with independent HR Consultants and HR Consultancies. We have been able to support them in a number of ways from advice and expertise, training and the ultimate goal of filling their client’s vacancies whilst reducing their overall recruitment spend.

This worked well but as we took time out this year to plan out the next 3 year plan, we realised that we want to have more HR consultants/consultancies as partners. Talking to our current partners about some of the issues they had, it became apparent that for many, knowing how to market the business to get talking to new clients was the primary concern. This was especially true for new consultants just starting out on their own.So we wanted to do our part to help them offer a wider range of services. Especially free services that would easily add value to their clients. We then decided to offer HR partners the option to work with us on joint marketing initiatives. We have a fantastic database of contacts and lots of in-house marketing support to implement these campaigns.

So after months of hard work. Everything is ready. You can see below on how we have added to our original core offering to HR consultants/consultancies:

1. Training on Online Recruitment MarketingWe offer a wide range of free training webinars and workshops for HR consultancies. This helps keep them well informed about all the latest tools and techniques in the online recruitment area. For more information on this see our Eventbrite page1.

2. Reduce the costs of your client’s recruitment For over 11 years we have been helping SMEs, Multi-nationals and Not for profits to reduce their recruitment costs. We do this by offering flat fee recruitment campaigns at competitive prices and we work hard to ensure that they really work. You can read more about this here: http://www.easywebrecruitment.com/.  

3. Support for your client’s vacancies from our in-house recruitment agencyNobody is excited to use an agency. So when we launched our own agency service last year we wanted it to be a little different. You can read more about them here: http://www.easywebagency.com/.

*

Here are the new services we are able to offer HR consultants/consultancies: 4. Training on how to market your HR consultancy businessWe have designed a training course that looks at some of the simplest and most effective online marketing strategies you can implement to help market your business. We understand many HR consultancies are one person businesses so we focused on what you can do with just 1-2 hours per week. We are planning to run the first version of this course as a workshop at our offices for up to 10 HR consultants on Thursday 15th December2. For those who cannot attend the workshop we will repeat the session in the form of two webinars (Basic & Advanced Marketing) at 10am on Tuesday 20th3 for the Basics and Wednesday 21st December4, for the more Advanced strategy.

5. Free employee engagement surveyWe know SMEs don’t survey their staff. Due in part to time and a lack of expertise. Many would love to outsource this task to a 3rd party but this is traditionally an expensive exercise. We have worked with our own HR Consultant who is a massive employee engagement enthusiast and our techies to produce a free employment engagement survey. We think you’ll like our tool but we suspect you might want to add your own perspective to it. That’s why we made sure we can easily customise it so you can add your own additional questions and we can even brand it with your company logo. You can read more about this exciting new product here: http://www.easywebengagement.com/. 6. Free recruitment software for you (and possibly your clients)If your clients have less than 50 staff then they are perhaps too small to see real benefits from recruitment software. In January, we plan to release a HR consultant specific version of our software which will allow them to manage all their applicants for all their clients in one system. Easily sharing to a portal or emailing relevant applicants to clients, booking interviews, confirming offers etc. They will also be able to create a jobs page for each of their clients (for free) and publish jobs to it. All their client will need to do is add a link to their existing website to create the new jobs page. Here is a link to our jobs page as an example: http://easyweb.livevacancies.co.uk/.

7. We can work with you on joint marketing initiatives to help you win new customersWe recently tripled our marketing team (from one to three people). We have a very large marketing database and lots of ideas on how we can create some joint initiatives to introduce you to them. We are already working with some current partners on campaigns and we plan to share and repeat our successes with the rest of the community of partners.

8. HR Alliance LinkedIn GroupWe have just launched a LinkedIn group to help support independent HR consultants and consultancies to develop their network, knowledge and client base. The ultimate aim is to build real networks of like-minded consultants via the online group and regional face to face networking events specifically for HR consultants. You can join this group here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/12019258/profile.

If you have larger clients who would benefit from their own system, and if they are using our recruitment campaigns or agency services they will likely qualify for their own free recruitment system. We then also provide a free additional license for the HR consultant to also login to this system and help process jobs/applicants.

You can read more about our recruitment software here: http://www.easywebats.co.uk/.

There is no catch. All we ask of our HR consultants is that they give us a chance. Refer the services that they think will add value to their clients. We don’t expect to be referred all the time to all of your clients. Recruitment is unpredictable. We know we offer a great service but we appreciate you are representing your client and will make the right call for their interests.

The catch

The costThere is no cost to you. Hopefully you will refer us business where you see a relevance and even then our costs to your clients are very competitive. More importantly, we get the jobs filled so your clients see a solid return on their investment.

The contract All of the above services are free for HR consultancies we are partnered with. We don’t expect a minimum amount of revenue or vacancies referred to us and we don’t ask you to sign a contract to be a partner.

What’s nextSo now you know a little more about us. We would love to hear from you and understand a little more about you.

So I have one last question for you……(sorry could not resist)

If you were affected by the subjects discussed in this article, feel free to reach out to the author. He will be happy to hear from you.

adrian@easywebrecruitment.com / 01933 667126

Links

1 http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/easyweb-recruitment-3208181162 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/northampton-marketing-your-hr-consultancy-workshop-tickets-29329257599 3 http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/webinar-marketing-your-hr-consultancy-business-the-basics-registration-29330251572 4 http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/webinar-marketing-your-hr-consultancy-business-advanced-registration-29332063993