Marketing for staffing agencies

How does your story differ for candidates and clients?

A staffing agency sells to two completely different people. The candidate wants to know what it pays, when they can start, how far the commute is and whether the work is manageable. The client wants to know how fast you deliver, what it costs and whether your people actually show up.

Yet on nearly every staffing agency website you find one story trying to do both. The result is a site that is too corporate for candidates and too vague for clients.

Separate them. Separate pages, separate campaigns, separate channels, separate numbers. Only then can you see which side of your business marketing actually delivers on.

• Candidates want: pay, start date, commuting distance, type of work, how fast they hear back.
• Clients want: delivery speed, rate, reliability, proof that you have done it before.
• Same ad budget, two separate campaigns - otherwise you optimise toward an average that appeals to nobody.

How do you get candidates?

Volume and speed decide everything in staffing. Leave a vacancy open for a week and the placement goes to another agency.

• Job Marketing Campaigns per role and per region, adjusted daily on applications instead of on reach.
• Multi-Channel Job Distribution: every vacancy automatically to 15+ job boards, measured per channel.
• One landing page per vacancy, built for applying - not your general vacancy overview.
• AI Sourcing for the roles nobody applies to: continuously scanning LinkedIn and automated outreach.
• Automated follow-up, because most candidates drop off between interest and interview.

How do you get clients?

At most staffing agencies the client side is left to cold calling: dialling until someone says yes. That works, but it does not scale and you cannot steer it.

• ICP Outreach: define exactly which type of client you want, and approach only companies that are demonstrably hiring.
• A B2B advertising engine on Meta and Google that keeps your agency visible to those companies.
• CRM automation so follow-up does not depend on who happens to have time.
• This is what we call CAS, and it delivers 5 to 20 qualified client leads per month.

Where do you start if you are just starting out?

With a new staffing agency the question is always: candidates first or clients first? The honest answer is that it depends on what you already have.

• Do you already have assignments but cannot fill them? Start on the candidate side.
• Do you have people but too few places to put them? Start on the client side.
• Neither of the two? Start on the client side, and only recruit candidates against concrete assignments. Building a pool without placements costs money and returns nothing.
• Pick one niche or region. A staffing agency that does everything is nobody's obvious choice.

What does it cost to leave vacancies unfilled?

The Dutch Recruitment Key Figures Study - Intelligence Group with Compagnon, Werf& and the Academy for Labor Market Communications - found that agency recruiters filled 59% of their vacancies, against 87% for corporate recruiters. Well over four in ten assignments went nowhere. Average cost per hire came out at €3,818 for 2020.

For a staffing agency an unfilled assignment is more expensive than those figures suggest: you lose the margin, the hours you put in, and often the client too.

We work on a monthly or annual retainer plus implementation fee, with a guarantee on the agreed lead volume and a 7-day delivery guarantee.

Sources

• Recruitment Kengetallen Onderzoek 2021 - Werf&