I recently hit a milestone – my 20-year anniversary in the recruiting and staffing industry – and have taken some time to reflect on the last two decades in the business. I’ve come to realize the most consistent thing I have seen is change. The clearest example of this that I can illustrate is the way new business is developed and how it affects client relationships.
When I started my career, getting new business was all about cold-calling. The only way we “warmed-up” a call was by having the biggest yellow page ad. (When is the last time you looked at the yellow pages?)
Let’s fast forward to a decade into my career. I am a business owner and working on how to drive business to my company. One of my partners at the time made a push to work with a firm specializing in digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
Historically, companies in the recruiting industry were not early adaptors for technology, making our goal to drive business through SEO and digital marketing quite a jump. In fact, this is not only the biggest change I have seen in my time in the industry, but the biggest game changer! I am certainly still an advocate for getting on the phone and trying to bring in new business, but it is amazing to see how new technologies can bring clients to you.
You can see our firm’s commitment to building relationships with our clients, not only in our dedication to SEO (which ultimately led to starting our own digital marketing agency – Parqa), but also in hiring tenured veterans in our industry who appreciate a relationship-based approach.
When you make a cold call and it actually works, it still takes a long time for your relationship with that client to go from a simple transaction to a trusted advisor, and finally to a trusted partner. By driving clients to our business, knowing they are already looking for what we deliver, it eliminates the transactional stage and provides a greater opportunity to partner.
Like I said, in the last 20 years the main constant has been change. This is just one example of how embracing that change can lead to great results.
To learn how Parqa can help your organization achieve the results you want, contact our team.
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