When you’re growing a recruitment business, your back-office needs to scale too. But how do you do this cost-effectively?

After all, there’s no point in increasing your revenue if the additional income is simply going to be absorbed in higher costs.

For many businesses, the answer lies in outsourcing their back-office. It’s a simple solution that can flex as your business grows and changes.

But we often hear of concerns – will I lose control? How much will it cost? Is it better to have back-office expertise in-house? In this article, we answer some of these concerns so you can think about the best back-office set-up for your growing business.

Building a team of back-office staff can give you a sense of control. These are people you’ve hand-picked to work in your business and they’re with you day in, day out, navigating the challenges of running the company.

But as you’re likely already aware, recruiting, managing and retaining staff isn’t easy, and it’s expensive.

A good outsourcing provider will work with you to create an SLA (Service Level Agreement) which specifies exactly how your back-office service will be delivered. This allows you to ‘plug and play’ into the outsourcing provider’s systems and processes whilst factoring in the nuances of your business.

The result is a more reliable back-office , you’ll have consistency in service with a lot more experience working for your business with no risk for downtime during absence or sickness.

The main saving is on staffing costs but with a strategic provider you will also make other savings.

• Business process efficiency – a slick outsourced back-office will free up your time to focus on fee-earning tasks and business development
• Tech platforms – providers like us enale you to to plug into our tech platforms for pay and bill and CRM solutions. This means you don’t need to select and manage the various platforms required to run your back-office, or worry about the integration with other systems nor legal long period term contracts.
• Complimentary services – there are a myriad of other tasks that take up your time – from compliance to credit control, bookkeeping and financial reporting.. A well-packaged outsourcing solution takes these time-consuming and non-fee earning tasks away so you can simply focus on your growth goals.

The more services that are packaged the more likely you are to save because you eliminate the need for various back-office expertise and the unquantifiable cost of mistakes that inevitably occur. Generally speaking, clients save at least 30% – 40% in back-office costs when they outsource with us.

The core competence of a recruitment business is recruitment, so that’s the best place to focus time, effort and energy.

Of course, back-office services are critical in a healthy recruitment business. The right back-office expertise comprises a good Chief Technology Officer, Financial Director, Payroll Manager, Credit Control Manager and others. Then you need reliable executors working for these people.

As a small or even medium-sized business, having all this expertise can be very expensive, and requires significant management time to ensure all people operate effectively to deliver a common goal.

With outsourced back-office solutions, you get all this expertise in a scalable way, effectively paying for just what you need rather than full time salaries for individuals that may not necessarily be needed full time.

We offer a range of outsourced services, from funding the contract payroll, credit control, and management and statutory accounts.

It’s difficult to know which service provides the most value because it depends on what the agency’s biggest challenge is. There is no one-size-fits-all, the value of what is outsourced depends on the challenges the agency is facing. For example, introducing a good pay and bill system rather than just having an accounting package like Sage might have the biggest impact on one agency whilst better credit control management might be more helpful to another where debt is soaring and cashflow is becoming a problem.

Many larger recruitment businesses can afford to hire the expertise they need in-house, but that doesn’t always solve their problems because of important issues such as systems integration. Getting a pay and bill platform to work seamlessly with a CRM system could solve a myriad of headaches with data consistency and accuracy and prevent problems downstream with pay and bill and financial reporting.

So the solution isn’t always people, it’s a mixture of systems and processes, which is where an outsourced solution really comes into its own. The outsourcing provider solves the systems and processes problem and provides the right people at the right time.

Ultimately, the biggest benefits of outsourcing are achieved by understanding the pain points within an agency and tailoring a solution to ensure they are addressed.

Find out more about our outsourced solutions or book a discovery call with a member of our team.