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How a Focus on Retention can Transform Your Recruitment Business

If your recruitment business engages contractors, you will be used to a certain amount of turnover. It’s normal and expected for contractors to move on, but given the effort required to recruit new talent, it makes sense to keep them with you for as long as possible, and encourage them to return throughout their contracting career.  In this article we’ll look at how focusing on retention can help your recruitment business succeed.

Why retention matters to recruiters

Many contractor recruitment agencies focus on sourcing new talent for their clients. This is understandable, because the defining feature of contracting is that it’s temporary; contractors want and expect to move on, and your clients’ needs will change. In this transient environment, a focus on retention may seem like a strange thing to advise.

But what if your contractors wanted to keep working for you, even as they moved from one assignment to another? What if they returned again and again throughout their career, earning ever higher fees as their skills and expertise developed? What if your contractors effectively recruited themselves, and considered your competitors only after speaking to you? 

By focusing on retaining as well as recruiting contractors, you can become their agency of choice, even as they move from role to role and develop their careers. This in turn will make it easier to source the high-quality talent your clients need, even when key skills are in short supply.

What you can do to retain your contractors

There are two main ways that contractors can drop off your books – by leaving contracting altogether, or by choosing a competitor’s assignments over yours. Your mission, in terms of retention, is to both encourage your contractors to stay in contracting, and to ensure they prefer to work with you whenever they can.

You can achieve both of these things by working to give your contractors a positive experience of contracting, and helping them to achieve their goals. Your contractors are less likely to consider alternative assignments, or indeed an alternative career, if their expectations are being met.

This obviously means that you need to know what your contractors’ goals and expectations are. Why did they get into contracting? What do they want and need from their working life? What do they hope to achieve in the future? What are the challenges associated with those goals?

Once you have answers to these questions, you can collaborate with them to help them succeed, and with your expertise and support behind them, they’ll want to keep working with you.

How Orange Genie can help

Partnering with an experienced contractor management company like Orange Genie will help you to deliver that positive contracting experience. Whether your contractors are mostly Limited company directors or umbrella company employees, our expert teams will make sure they have all the information and support they need to succeed.

Our umbrella company employees also have access to our extraordinary employee benefits platform, with benefits and services designed to help them make their money go further, care for themselves and their families and get more out of contracting. This has been proven to improve engagement and retention for our agency partners. 

If you have questions or if we can help in any way, please call our expert team on 01296 468483 or email info@orangegenie.com.

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