Starting your own recruitment business is an exciting step – the chance to take command of your financial future and channel years of experience into a company that you own and control.
But the process of starting up can be clouded by lack of information, misconceptions and inaccuracies.
RecruitHub works daily with experienced recruiters who are exploring their options in entrepreneurship, fielding hundreds of questions on the best way to start and scale a recruitment business.
To help bring clarity to the process, we’re sharing our conversations and tackling 10 of the biggest myths about starting up, head-on.
Without further preamble… let’s get stuck in!
Myth #5 – Trial and error is the best way to learn
When starting a new company it can feel natural to want to try things out and make mistakes along the way – it’s how we’re conditioned to learn in many areas of life.
But in business, things are different – because the cost of each ‘error’ is much higher than in other situations.
Most people wouldn’t take a ‘trial and error’ approach in their personal lives – to their health, their finances or their families – why do so in a business in which they work 60+ hours a week, which is their primary investment and source of income?
When the impact of a wrong decision can be tens of thousands of pounds, or years of lost time, it becomes far less advisable to ‘learn by doing’ for a business owner than it might be for a recruiter or manager in a salaried job.
Examples abound:
- Developing, training and then losing staff or closing offices through poor employee performance management and retention can set a company’s growth back by many months, if not years.
- Mismanaging finances, investment or employee compensation drains management time and can put a company under severe financial strain.
- Structuring teams incorrectly causes personnel issues that take huge amounts of time and investment to resolve, damaging team morale in the process and letting competitors into the market.
- Branding, market segmentation or business model errors can irreparably limit an agency’s growth potential.
- Gaps or weaknesses in employment or director contracts lead to vast legal bills and huge distraction, or to the loss of key personnel or customer accounts.
- Ineffective technology planning and poor data management throttle a company’s ability to scale, creating ticking time-bombs that explode later down the line, diverting management attention and company funding away from vital growth projects.
In these scenarios and scores more, the rationale for ‘trial and error’ fades away – it becomes far more advisable for founders to work with experienced partners who can inform their decision-making, helping them get critical steps right first time and avoid unnecessary cost and delays.
This article is an excerpt from RecruitHub’s Top 10 Recruitment Start-up Myths, breaking down 10 of the most commonly-discussed misconceptions around starting a recruitment business.
