r/RecruitmentAgencies

Looking at Source-whale, Spott and Recruiterflow. I need views on why I should not be looking the other one. I have understood the pros what wanted to understand the cons.

I want to start a staffing company. Currently, my biggest enemy is the telephone.

I’ve been seriously looking into starting a staffing company focused on helping high school and college students get into safe, entry-level work.

On paper, I understand the business model. Find employers with a hiring problem, build a pool of dependable workers, make the match, and earn a margin for solving that problem.

I’ve started calling local businesses just to validate the idea before I dump money into forming the company,
insurance, licensing, software, etc.

I’m trying to figure out whether businesses actually have a problem I could solve before building an entire company around my assumption that they do.

My problem is that I don’t really know how these early conversations should sound.
I don’t want to call and immediately say, “Hi, would you like to use my staffing company?” because I don’t even know what their staffing problems are yet. But when I try to make it conversational, I sometimes get lost halfway through the call.

So, staffing agency owners, recruiters, business owners who use staffing agencies, or anyone who has actually done B2B cold calling:

How did you get your first few clients?
More specifically:
What did you actually say when calling businesses?
Who inside the company did you try to reach?
Did you sell staffing immediately, or start by asking about their hiring problems?
What made employers actually give you the time of day when you had no track record?
How did you validate your niche before fully committing to it?
What did you completely misunderstand about the staffing business when you started?

And if you were starting from zero again, what would you do differently during your first 30 days?
I’m not looking for a “get rich with a staffing agency” blueprint. I’m trying to figure out whether I’m standing at the normal…

Feel free to tell me I’m doing it wrong. That’s partially why I’m posting.

Is it better screening, market knowledge, faster delivery, candidate relationships, or something else that makes clients keep coming back?

Hi! I’m looking for job sites/platform recommendations based on real results. Right now, I’m only using LinkedIn and Indeed. But we’re still looking to expand our pool of candidates.

What platforms are you guys using, and roughly how many applications do you get per day/week?

Would also love to know which ones you’d recommend vs. avoid, especially if you’re paying for a subscription or a one time fee. I’m trying not to waste money on platforms that don’t deliver, or are full of scams.

I’m just starting as a recruiter, so any strategies would also greatly help!

Thanks!

Applied to hundreds of roles via LinkedIn/Upwork/Indeed with a tailored, ATS-friendly resume, but mostly getting ghosted or hit by automated rejections.

I specialize in high-volume AR, NetSuite custom CSV imports/mapping, reconciliation, and troubleshooting of invoice discrepancies.

Traditional job boards feel completely broken right now. For those who landed remote ERP/NetSuite roles recently:

• Are there specialized agencies or direct recruiters you recommend reaching out to?
• What alternative channels or methods actually yielded interviews for you?

Any genuine insight or lead would be deeply appreciated.

I keep seeing how AI has been helping offload sourcing from recruiters and get excited because I hate sourcing but every product I try out seems to kinda suck.

I primarily use LI Recruiter/Google Xray for engineering (mechanical/industrial) searches. My Boolean is excellent and I'm extremely comfortable using AI. My problem is that I cannot get Pin, Juicebox or any others to provide results uncovering candidates that I missed. Even worse, they miss a lot of candidates that I found in fairly basic searches. It seems like they don't access all the data in LI profiles (about sections + other spots).

Is anyone else having these issues? I've even worked with their training staff doing live searches and came up with the same issues.

Any recommendations on products/tips you're using that truly shorten the search time while still being a comprehensive search?

My agency’s Li Recruiter deal expired last week and without much notice most of our company lost access to it and all our previous candidates. Not to be a negative Nancy but it was 100% a vital part of my workflow and 9/10 of my starts were found on there.

Is this common with other agencies? Seriously considering moving because of this. Had already started lightly sprinkling some internal applications but this really brought it to a whole new level imo

Does it actually work? I haven’t seen a single cold call turn into a client in 5 years.

As the title states, I just crossed $500K in billing and haven't even hit 7 months since resigning from my big agency and launching my business. This has been the best career decision I could have made and is going much better than I ever imagined. Initially, I told myself I would be happy if I did 400K in year one. It's looking like I'll be around 700K if I can keep doing deals. I started completely from scratch and did not take any of my clients when I left my old agency.

I'm writing this so that I can answer some questions - I will not answer DMs. If you have questions, comments, or want to share what's working for you, please do so in this thread.

The biggest catalyst to my success has been forming relationships and leveraging them. Asking for referrals has been crucial both on the client and candidate side - lots of new leads through referral, and 4 of my placements have been referrals as well.

From a tool standpoint, my annual expenses are around $55K with $42K of that being dedicated to Linkedin. I also spend $6K/year on Zoominfo, around $5K/year on my main BD tool (AI-based mailing service where i own 100 mailboxes).

I have been focused on public accounting with some construction mixed in. It seems like public accounting is slowing a little bit at the moment, and of course January 1st-April 15th or so will be very slow, so I am going to try to get some traction in Legal soon. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

If anyone has questions, I am happy to answer as many as I can. Please also share what is working for you in this thread and we can all help each other out.

I’ve been following this community for a while, and I think lack of trust has become a real problem.

New agencies struggle to earn trust from clients. At the same time, recruitment agencies are skeptical of external partners after a wave of overnight experts and magical vibe-coded SaaS. Everyone is looking for "the catch".

I experienced this myself when I started working with recruitment agencies on the business development side.

Being clear about what I can and can’t deliver worked for me. Transparency beats a perfect pitch.

What helped you build trust before you had a reputation or case studies?

Let’s leave some practical advice for people just starting out.

My friend and I are finally starting to get traction with sales. We have a few signed agreements now and a few more look like they’re ready to sign. Our niche is Aerospace, but to be specific CNC machinist and programmers. We’ve been trying out different Ai outreach tools like Apollo.io but we keep facing the same dilemma. We would like to start a mass outreach campaign to target CNC candidates and Apollo seems to have the basics to actually get that going. The ethical dilemma my friend and I are facing is, if we send out a mass email sequence, most of the emails on Apollo or roughly 98% of them are company emails. Is it ethical to send out an email campaign to these people (knowing response rates are going to be low) while at the same time trying to get business in said companies.
We’re in the boat of “well that is what recruiting is” but at the same time we feel like it’s a shitty way of doing business if we’re targeting everyone in the area and on top of that trying to get their business. We feel torn because Indeed is charging boat loads of money for subpar candidates and these people are already working so chances are they’re great machinist. What would you do?

Hello everyone,

I’m actively looking for opportunities in Data Center Technician / Data Center Operations roles anywhere in the U.S. I’m genuinely interested in building my career in the data center industry and am open to full-time or contractor opportunities.

I’ve been applying and working on improving my technical skills, but I’m still trying to get my foot in the door. If anyone is hiring, knows of upcoming opportunities, or can point me toward the right people or companies to contact, I would really appreciate your help.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

been looking at how much recruiter time goes into spoken English screening when hiring at volume
once a few hundred candidates come through at the same time, doing a separate speaking interview with everyone gets difficult pretty fast. automated assessments obviously save time, but then there’s the question of how much u can actually trust the score without checking it yourself.
we’ve been looking at a few options, including SmallTalk2Me, mostly to see whether an automated CEFR score can work as a first screening step rather than replacing the recruiter completely.
for anyone doing high volume hiring, how are u handling this rn? full manual interviews, automated screening first, or some mix of both?
and do u still spot-check some of the scores manually?

Having inboxes full of AI for recruitment slop pitches that aren't compliant and add no discernable value. Maybe if you could clean those inboxes out with your sass you could charge recruiters $30 a month.

Hi everyone! I'm an IT recruiter at a small staffing firm, and we currently pay for both Linkedin Recruiter and Dice.

We're trying to determine which platform consistently generates better candidates so we can potentially eliminate one of the two subscriptions.

I personally prefer Linkedin Recruiter. I like being able to see a candidate's full professional profile, mutual connections, profile picture, employment history, etc. I also feel like 1 run into fewer fake or misrepresented candidates on Linkedin.

My coworker prefers Dice. He likes having immediate access to resumes and feels it's easier to quickly identify candidates with the exact technical skills we're looking for.

For those of you recruiting in IT/tech, which platform have you had more success with: Linkedn Recruiter or Dice?

I'd especially love to hear your thoughts on:
- Overall candidate quality
- Response rates
- Fake/misrepresented candidates
- Ease of finding niche technical skill sets
- Which platform actually leads to more placements
- Whether you think one is clearly more worth the cost

If you've used both, which one would you keep if you could only choose one?

I am in my 30s and currently employed at a very large fortune 100 company as a recruiter.
I have been here for seven years and basically built an entire organization within the company being a SME with over 100 employees as well as working in around 10 other functions.
I have even won a very prestigious award at my company around the creation of a team that went to do incredible things. I have glowing reviews consistently from hiring managers, executives, and my candidates.
However, due to a huge disastrous restructuring, my team is absolutely terrible and we have had a ton of turnover. I really really want to leave and I do have a pretty good lead, but nothing is official.
I have applied to probably over 15 rolls in the last two weeks and have not heard back. It’s making me pretty nervous in general but I know how horrible this job market is.
I’m currently doing the role of around three people and I have the same pay as someone my level six years ago. I know this because she was a level above me at the time and told me what she was making and it’s literally what I’m making now. This is leaving me to feel very disgruntled and just upset.

My two mentors have told me that I should start my own recruiting agency, but I just don’t feel like I’m there yet. I want to still reap the benefits of a consistent paycheck and retirement matching from a company. I did see somebody say that you should always be working on your LLC.
Should I just be creating a résumé portfolio website to showcase all the work I’ve done with testimonials from previous hiring managers?
It’s a tough time to be a recruiter or maybe anyone

Just writing to get a better idea how everyone is running their desk (specifically UK recruiters)? I always feel like I'm just missing the mark, I get on the phone to candidates, I get on the phone to clients, I do all of this and still aren't billing good numbers and I'm not really sure what I can do to help change this? What are your daily KPI's? What's helped you become a better recruiter? Anything that clicked during your first year etc?