How to Grow Your Recruiting Agency with Offshore Talent

I've spoken with close to 100 recruitment CEOs in the last 4 months across the USA, Canada, and the UK.

Team sizes ranged from 1-10, with the majority being under 5 people.

85% of the recruitment founders I spoke with are looking for ways to bring consistency to their business development efforts - pivoting back and forth between candidates sourcing and client prospecting creates inconsistency that cascades through your entire business.

Inconsistent prospecting --> inconsistent client meetings --> inconsistent job orders --> inconsistent deal flow --> inconsistent revenue --> inconsistent profits

Over 50% are having issues with their business development strategy, meaning, they haven't figured out a repeatable process for acquiring new clients, regardless of market conditions.

Around 15% of recruitment CEOs have the opposite problem - they're overrun with clients and job orders, but find it difficult to consistently deliver for most of their clients. Not because they're bad at recruiting, but they just don't have enough time to recruit on all of their open roles.

Over the last four years, through lots of trial and error, I've (mostly) solved these problems for my direct hire recruiting agency.

The short answer isn't as sexy as "buy this new AI tool" (which a lot of software engineers are pushing these days), but it works, and it comes down to 2 things:

1. Developing a winning strategy and well-documented processes for client acquisition, candidate sourcing, and business ops
2. Hiring cost-effective, offshore talent to run those processes

Recruitment, regardless of your market/sector, is a labor-intensive business.

Most recruitment CEOs don't have a technical/software problem...they have a labor/time problem. You need to leverage the time of actual humans (who can make smart decisions) to do the work.

Several years ago, I was staunchly against hiring offshore talent for several reasons, mainly ethical concerns and work quality. Long story short, I realized that my concerns were due to my limited perspective. The more I learned, the more I realized the incredible value and potential for my recruitment business.

Here's how we're currently structured and why it works so well:

Team of 2 in the USA -

1. A senior recruiter, who handles all candidate prescreens, interview prep, interview debriefs, pre-closing, and offers
2. A salesperson/account manager (me), who handles all client meetings and account management

Team of 7 in the Philippines -

1. 4 talent sourcers, who work in our time zone and spend all day researching and pitching candidates via LinkedIn and email on open roles with our clients. This is the most time-consuming and repetitive aspect of recruiting.
2. 2 business development reps (BDRs), who also work in our time zone and spend all day researching and pitching potential clients via LinkedIn and email. This is the most time-consuming part of sales.
3. 1 digital marketing manager, who's helping us improve our inbound marketing and content strategy.

For all of our staff, we have extremely detailed documentation that covers every aspect of our strategy, including example candidates who our clients would be interested in, and explanations on why.

Our senior recruiter spends almost all day speaking with/submitting candidates, and rarely gets on LinkedIn Recruiter to source candidates of his own.

I haven't had to do market mapping or pitch prospects in the last couple of years, and I have new client meetings every single week.

Earlier this year, mostly through conversations with a couple of my friends who also have recruitment businesses, it dawned on me that other CEOs might benefit from a similar system. But two challenges came to light very quickly:

1. Where do you find offshore talent (that you can trust) to handle very important aspects of your business? Freelancing sites like Upwork and Fiverr have some decent talent, but most of those people are juggling a bunch of clients at the same time and work quality is inconsistent.
2. How do you build winning strategies for business development and candidate sourcing?

So I started Ataraxis to address these problems for other recruitment CEOs.

My initial goal was to work with a handful of other CEOs on a consulting basis to see how well this would work outside of my own business.

One of the CEOs I worked with started getting client meetings in her second week...she had zero meetings the entire month prior.

Another CEO went from being glued to his desk, to now being able to take a short vacation, knowing that his business would continue to move forward without him.

Based on the initial results, I decided to expand further. In the last 4 months, I've been meeting with recruitment CEOs almost every week!

There's a whole lot more I'll share in the coming weeks, but I'll conclude for now by saying I went from being completely against offshore hiring 4 years ago, to a raving fan, and now an advocate.

Have you considered hiring offshore talent? I'd love to hear about your experience and compare it with mine. Get in touch with me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email at [email protected]

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