‘Being a recruiter is just like running your own business’ said every manager to every recruiter ever. Which it is, sort of. You have to BD to find new accounts, keep your current accounts happy, deliver the service you’re selling and keep the thing you’ve sold happy. You’re busy. 

Which means that it can feel like there’s not much time to be strategic. When it comes to business development, consultants will have targets to hit to make sure they do that bit of their job. X calls, X emails, X conversations. But when the ‘what’ is the only focus, the ‘who’ falls by the wayside.

And the ‘who’ is really important. It’s what makes you literally all of your money. That’s why it’s mega useful to have a target audience. Like, a real, niche, target audience. It means you can focus on delivering value to them and serving them. 

The reluctance I hear to niching down is “well if I say I only work with these companies, it might mean that those companies don’t want to work with me’. But that’s only a problem if you have the capacity to service all those companies. Which you don’t.

For example, there’s a lot of ‘tech recruiters’ in the world. But let’s pick a segment of it, HR.

The HR Tech market was valued at $31B in 2022 and is expected to be worth $53B by 2028. That is massive. Niche it down to the UK, where the HR Tech market was worth £1.4B in 2023. Still massive. Niche it down to sales/marketing/product/engineering roles within that sub-sector and we’re finally getting towards something that looks, sounds and smells like a target audience.

Disclaimer: I don’t recruit in HR tech. If this example is terrible because of XYZ market condition, or ABCorp taking over and having a PSL, please don’t come for me. As you were.

Point being, that doing something that might feel brave is actually just common sense. Here, I’ve put some thoughts down as to how you can figure out who your target audience is in terms of industry and individual using info you already have.

Companies/ Industries

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Follow the money.

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Simple, really. Look through your invoices for the last 18 months and look for the commonalities there. Who do you actually work with? Because if you’re saying you work with everyone, but you really, really don’t then you might be missing an opportunity.

People like logos and clinging on to that one placement they made with Salesforce/ Shell/ Coca Cola 5 years ago. But that might be putting people off who have money to spend. 

If all of your actual, paying, clients are small SMEs with a really niche focus then you should probably cater your offering to them instead of showing off about that rep you specc’d into Nestle in 2018.

You’re so often bogged down with individual placements and units, it’s hard to see the bigger picture. But zooming out and taking a holistic view of your entire client base will be enlightening. And may cause you to think again about the industry you put on your website when you started up years ago.

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Individuals

When you’ve thought long and hard about your industries, jump down another level and think about the individuals you’re working with.

First, remember that not all individual clients are created equal. Here we’re looking for people who give you jobs that you actually fill. Too often, a consultant has a ‘great client’ but they’re only a ‘great client’ based on metrics that make that consultant look good in the super short term. Ie they pick up the phone, read CVs, give them jobs and interview their candidates. But we only care about the ones that actually give us money.

So, go through that and see who you get your jobs from that get filled. You might find that you ‘always go to the line’ but that 75% of your money making jobs come from TA/ HR Managers. If so, they’re your target audience because they’re clearly the people you can help. 

Then, we all of a sudden have a brave, target audience. “We work with talent acquisition teams in the UK HR Tech market on their commercial hires”

Sounds good that, doesn’t it? Let me know how you get on, kris@wearekitto.com

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BONUS CONTENT

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Got on a roll here, so thought I’d include this bit. Once you’ve identified your target person, speak to the consultant who should be good mates with them:

Tell me about X person. What are they like? What do they like in their candidates? Do they want lots of calls, no calls, video calls, face to face meetings? Have you asked? Do you send formatted CVs, unformatted CVs? What are their goals/ challenges? What do they always moan about? 

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If they can’t answer those questions but that client is paying you money, they need to be able to. 

If you can answer all those questions then not only do you have a good idea of who your customer base is, you’re well on your way to creating a marketing strategy. But that’s a blog for another day...