Temporary employment agency strategy: just 4 levers to activate to challenge your competitors

As an agency or network, have you taken the time to define a temporary employment strategy?

Your user companies are valuable customers. And as we all know, with over 6,000 temporary employment agencies in the country, competition is fierce and your customers can decide at any time to go and see your competitors if they are not fully satisfied with your services.

To avoid this happening, it's vital to meet their greatest need: the best candidate profiles, as quickly as possible. Yes, but you mustn't forget temporary workers either, whom you also need to attract in order to secure a quantitative and qualitative pool.

And to do that, defining a temporary work strategy will be your best asset. We've identified 4 levers for you to work on if you want to be at the top of the market. You'll see that including digital temporary work in your strategy is now a must if you want to stand out from the competition... but that's not all!

See all software Temporary Staffing

Lever no. 1: prospecting at the heart of your strategy

Step 1: define your objectives

This is the first step in any strategy. Defining an objective is essential, because to determine how to get somewhere, you first need to know where you're going.

But do you know :

• how many temporary staff you need to recruit?
• Over what period of time?
• What turnover are you aiming for? To achieve it, how many contracts do you need to sign?

💡 Tip: by determining the turnover you need to achieve, you deduct the quantity of sales you need to make to get there. From there, calculate the number of prospect companies you need to approach based on your average conversion rate.

Whatever your ambitions, set SMART objectives - precise, measurable and achievable - in order to define the relevant actions and methods to be put in place to reach your ideal customers.

Step 2: Identify your targets

Speaking of your ideal customers, do you know who they are? As a temporary employment agency or network of agencies, you need to focus on the two sides of your tripartite relationship:

• the user companies to whom you sell your services,
• and the candidates you need to recruit for them.

The better you know these targets, the easier it will be to reach them, convince them and turn them into customers.

We recommend that you go through the exercise of constructing a marketing persona to gather as much information as possible. You can base this on the profile of your best customer relations, for example.

Here is some information that might be interesting to collect:

• sector of activity
• the channel most frequently used to find a job or a candidate (social networks, trade fairs, classified ads, press),
• preferred method of communication (telephone, email, social networks),
• time slots available,
• potential obstacles to decision-making, etc.

💡 Tip: analysing the customer journey will enable you to answer many of these questions. This may even lead you to mix different approaches, whether traditional (telephone prospecting, fieldwork, trade fairs, etc.) or digital (social networks, mailings, etc.).

Step 3: Draw up an action plan

Now that you know your targets down to the last detail, you'll have a clearer idea of the action plan you need to put in place to reach them.

List the different channels and associated actions you are going to use, for example:

• outbound marketing → social selling, email campaigns, banner ads, social ads ;
• inbound marketing → content marketing, search engine optimisation, social networks ;
• telephone canvassing → qualified canvassing file, making appointments, follow-up calls; and
• canvassing in the field → canvassing company head offices, attending temporary employment fairs, etc.

Then, depending on how much time you give yourself to achieve your objectives, draw up a back-plan accordingly.

Step 4: Convincing (sales pitch, content, etc.)

Knowing your targets gives you every chance of convincing them to work with your temp agency.

However, different targets are not addressed in the same way. So you need to know how to :

• choose the right arguments to put forward, those to which each target will be sensitive ;
• adapt the tone, which can be more or less formal, depending on the preferences of the target audience;
• propose the most appropriate service offer that is likely to convert the prospect into a customer;
• personalise the content to make your message more impactful, especially when prospecting by email.

This stage 4 is essential, as it involves demonstrating to your prospects that you understand their issues and challenges, and that your offer provides solutions to them.

💡 Tip: to be more effective in this exercise, practise active listening and prepare in advance, particularly to counter any objections.

Step 5: Measure your campaigns

Measuring and monitoring the performance of your prospecting campaigns is a practical way of seeing whether the strategy you've adopted is the right one, whether you need to adjust it or change it altogether. If this is the case, it's best to find out as quickly as possible so that you can put things right.

This analysis will enable you to pinpoint what needs to be changed. With the right choice of indicators (KPIs), you'll know exactly at what stage changes need to be made. For example

• a low pick-up rate on initial telephone calls may indicate an irrelevant time slot,
• a low email open rate,
• A poor prospect-to-customer conversion rate indicates that the sales pitch or offer is not the most convincing.

Our article on building your sales dashboard by choosing the right KPIs will be invaluable in helping you create your own.

💡 Tip: to save time, you can simultaneously test different elements to see which ones convert best: this is known as A/B testing, and is widely used for digital marketing actions. For example, you can vary the parameters of an email and see which worked best (subject line, time sent, content, etc.).

Lever no. 2: visibility for your agency or network

It's not always easy to get noticed among the many players in the temporary employment market, is it?

When you're a small player, that famous visibility becomes crucial. You know deep down that your expertise and your services are up to the job, so you're going to have to make them (up to the job) to make yourself visible!

But how can you do this? Here are a few ways to increase the visibility of your temporary employment agency:

• work on your natural referencing, mainly by writing articles on issues that your targets encounter, but also by optimising the pages of your website;
• invest in online advertising, the most classic being the purchase of keywords on Google ads, to appear at the very top of the search pages;
• look after your local referencing (Google my business to make your agencies known to your targets located nearby);
• communicate on social networks, where your customers and candidates are very present, either to look for a job or to gather information about the sector;
• taking part in specialist trade fairs.

💡 Tip: once you've developed your visibility, make sure you also keep an eye on your e-reputation. Here's how:

• via the publication of expert content that will give you legitimacy,
• by responding transparently to reviews and questions left on the web,
• by publishing positive customer testimonials as proof of satisfaction with your services.

Lever no. 3: building loyalty among temporary workers and user companies

Are you familiar with the adage that recruiting a new customer costs 3 to 6 times more than retaining an existing one? That's right: it often takes a lot of time and energy to find and convince them, whereas it's much easier to maintain customer relations.

What's more, you don't want your hard-earned customers and temps to run off to your competitors (no, they won't!).

➡️ How to win the loyalty of your user companies:

• offer them fast, relevant recruitment
• offer additional services (administrative, etc.),
• offer more attractive rates than the competition,
• be available 24/7,
• maintain the relationship by meeting companies regularly to collect and better anticipate their needs, reminding them that you are there to help them,
• ensure close monitoring over the long term to make sure that the profiles hired match expectations.

➡️ How to retain your temporary workers and reduce staff turnover:

• Find them interesting assignments that match their desires,
• offer training sessions to maximise their employability,
• offer social protection and salary benefits,
• offer a digital customer experience so they can interact with each other independently,
• sharing high value-added content on social networks,
• regularly collect feedback to improve.

See all software Temporary Staffing

Lever No. 4: integrate digital technology into your temporary employment strategy

In 2021, it has become essential for temporary employment agencies to go digital. It could even be said that digital technology is enabling smaller players to hold their own against the behemoths at the top of the temping agency league table.

Using a specialised digital platform means you can be more responsive to the needs of client companies and candidates. Customer satisfaction is improved.

If you're not yet convinced, you should know that by 2025, 75% of the workforce will be made up of millennials (INSEE). So if you don't want to miss out on three quarters of candidates, you need to go digital.

This will enable you to act on two levels:

• Recruitment processes can be automated. Candidates can respond to advertisements on their own, and if their profile is relevant to the vacancy, they will be automatically matched with the company. They can then sign the contract remotely, quickly and securely using the electronic signature.
  
  
• Functionalities that analyse all candidate data to select the most relevant profiles, whatever the time of day.

This gives you a number of advantages:

• faster turnaround on your assignments, for greater customer satisfaction;
• more time to devote to higher added-value tasks (maintaining relationships, making follow-ups, leveraging training, advising customers);
• improved quality of service , with more relevant candidate selection;
• a continuous service offering that extends beyond your branch's limited opening hours.

🛠 To digitalise your temporary employment agency or group, here are two online platforms to help you improve your day-to-day management:

• A digital recruitment platform, Beetween centralises and optimises all the activities of recruiters, whether they are in a temp agency or a company. It allows you to become more efficient and focus on what's most important: maintaining relationships with your clients and with temporary candidates, in order to enhance your employer brand. Features include
  • multiple posting of your vacancies on all the main job boards (150+ to choose from!)
  • Easier monitoring of your recruitments thanks to a clear, structured pipeline,
  • create a career site to boost your visibility,
  • collaborative features, so you can rate and share your feedback on candidates,
  • specialist support to boost your campaigns,
  • advanced recruitment statistics (analysis of CVs received, average recruitment times, etc.) to improve your processes.

• An all-in-one tool, Troops is one of those platforms specially designed to support temporary employment agencies in their day-to-day work, which is often fraught with administrative formalities. Its aim is to save you time so that you can excel in your business and develop your agency network. Its features include
  • digitisation of customer and applicant information flows,
  • automating certain processes
  • more fluid exchanges that improve the three-way relationship,
  • personalised support to build a digital strategy for agencies,
  • intelligent matching of candidates and assignments,
  • automatic contract generation with secure electronic signature.

By equipping yourself with the right tools, such as a temporary staffing platform, you can move to the next level of digitalisation with complete fluidity and optimise your temporary staffing strategy to the maximum.

Good news for your business, your candidates and your customers!