Temp agency strategy: just 4 levers to activate to challenge your competitors

As an agency or network, have you taken the time to define an interim strategy?

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

To prevent this from 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 of candidates.

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

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 your destination.

But do you know :

• how many interim candidates you need to recruit?
• Over what period of time?
• What sales are you aiming for? To reach it, how many contracts do you need to sign?

💡 Tip: by determining the sales figure 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 to approach based on your average conversion rate.

Whatever your ambitions, set SMART objectives - precise, measurable and achievable - in order to define the actions and methods you need to 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 play on both 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 building 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's some information you may find interesting to collect:

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

💡 Tip: analyzing 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 shows, 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're going to use, for example:

• outbound marketing → social selling, email campaigns, banner ads, social ads ;
• inbound marketing → content marketing, search engine optimization, social networks ;
• telephone prospecting → qualified prospecting file, appointment setting, telephone follow-up ;
• field prospecting → canvassing at company headquarters, participation in temporary employment fairs, etc.

Then, depending on the time you give yourself to achieve your objectives, define a backward schedule 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, more or less formal, according to the preferences of each persona;
• propose the most appropriate service offer likely to convert the prospect into a customer;
• personalize content to make your message more impactful, especially when prospecting by e-mail.

This step 4 is essential, because it's about demonstrating to your prospects that you understand their issues and challenges, and that your offer provides solutions to them.

💡 Tip: to increase your effectiveness in this exercise, practice active listening and prepare in advance, particularly to counter any objections.

Step 5: measure your campaigns

Measuring and tracking the performance of your prospecting campaigns is a concrete 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 soon as possible, so 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 phone 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 how to build 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 called A/B testing, widely used for digital marketing actions. For example, you can vary the parameters of an e-mail and see which worked best (subject line, time sent, content, etc.).

Lever #2: visibility for your agency or network

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

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

But how? Here are a few ways to increase your temp agency's visibility:

• work on your natural referencing, mainly by writing articles on the issues faced by your targets, but also by optimizing 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 search pages;
• take care of your local referencing (Google my business to make your agencies known to your nearby targets);
• communicate on social networks, where your customers and candidates are very present, either to look for a job or to gather information on the sector;
• participate in specialized trade shows.

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

• via the publication of expert content that will lend 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 temps 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? Yes, it often takes a lot of time and energy to find and convince them, whereas it's much simpler to maintain customer relations.

What's more, you don't want your hard-earned customers and temps to flee to your competitors (they won't!).

➡️ How to win the loyalty of your user companies:

• offer them fast, relevant recruitment,
• offer complementary services (administrative, etc.),
• offer more attractive rates than the competition,
• be available 24/7,
• maintain the relationship by meeting companies on a regular basis to collect and better anticipate their needs, reminding them that you're there to help them,
• provide close, long-term follow-up to ensure that the profiles you integrate match expectations.

➡️ How to retain your temps and reduce turnover:

• find them interesting assignments in line with their desires,
• offer training sessions to maximize their employability,
• offer social protection and salary benefits,
• offer a digital customer experience so they can interact with us independently,
• share high value-added content on social networks,
• collect regular feedback to improve performance.

See all software Temporary Staffing

Lever n° 4: integrate digital into your temping strategy

In 2021, it has become essential for temporary employment agencies to go digital. In fact, it's fair to say that digitalization is enabling smaller players to hold their own against the behemoths at the top of the temping agency league table.

The use of a specialized digital platform enables us to be more responsive to the needs of our corporate clients and candidates. Customer satisfaction is enhanced.

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

This allows you to act on two levels:

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

This gives you many advantages:

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

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

• A digital recruitment platform, Beetween centralizes and optimizes all the activities of recruiters, whether they're in a temp agency or a company. It helps you gain in efficiency and focus on the essentials: taking care of the relationship with your customers and with temporary candidates, in order to enhance your employer brand. Features include
  • multi-broadcasting of your vacancies on all the main job boards (150+ to choose from!)
  • easy tracking of your recruitments thanks to a clear, structured pipeline,
  • the creation of a career site to develop your visibility,
  • collaborative features to rate and share feedback on candidates,
  • specialist support to boost your campaigns,
  • advanced recruitment statistics (analysis of resumes 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. Features include
  • digitization of customer and applicant information flows,
  • automation of certain processes,
  • more fluid exchanges that improve the tripartite relationship,
  • personalized 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 a suitable tool, such as a temporary staffing platform, you'll be able to take your digitalization to the next level seamlessly, and optimize your temporary staffing strategy to the full.

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