How to build an agency profile that clients trust

Why the profile does the first meeting

A client who finds your agency in a directory is usually not ready to call anyone. They are building a shortlist, and your profile has to answer their first questions without you in the room. If it cannot, the client moves on to the next listing and you never learn that they looked.

Buying research from other sectors points the same way. In a TrustRadius survey of 1,036 business technology buyers, run in October 2019, 49% said they did not deal directly with the vendor's representatives at all, and the average buyer consulted 5.1 sources of information before deciding. Those are software and hardware buyers, not hiring managers choosing a recruiter, so treat the numbers as a direction rather than a measure of your market. The direction is still useful: much of the choice happens before the first conversation.

The competition on the page is also real. On Ramp.directory, more than 23,000 active agencies are listed under the recruitment industry alone. A profile that says what every other profile says does not get read twice.

What a client checks first

A hiring lead scanning a list asks three quick questions, roughly in this order: can this agency fill my kind of role, can it work where I need the hire, and is there any sign it has done this before? Your profile should answer all three within the first few lines.

• Specialism: the roles and sectors you actually fill, named in the words a client would use in a job brief.
• Locations: the countries and cities where you place people, and whether you work remotely across borders.
• Proof of work: the kinds of placements you have made, the seniority levels, and how long you have been doing it.
• How you work: permanent, contract or both, and what a client can expect in the first week of a search.
• Who to talk to: a real team or a named desk for the sector, so the client knows the profile is maintained.

Nothing in that list needs a large budget. It needs decisions about what your agency is, written down plainly.

Describe sectors and countries clearly

Sectors and coverage countries are the fields a client filters by and the first facts they see. They are also the place where agencies most often overreach. Ticking every sector and every country feels like it widens the net, but it tells the client that nothing in particular is your strength.

Pick the sectors where you could name recent placements without looking them up. Then describe each one in a sentence of your own, as in the comparison below.

Use the stronger lines only when they are true for your agency. The point is to replace a claim the client cannot check with a fact they can ask you about. For countries, list the ones you have placed in, and say separately where you only source candidates.

Show proof without breaking confidences

Clients want evidence, and agencies often cannot name the companies they work for. You can still show proof. Describe the work in a way that protects the client and the candidate but still lets a reader judge it.

1. Write two or three short placement summaries: the role, the sector, the country, and what made the search hard.
2. Give ranges rather than secrets, such as the seniority levels you handle and the size of company you usually serve.
3. Say what you do not do. A clear limit, such as no executive search or no volume hiring, makes the rest of the profile easier to believe.
4. Name the accreditations or memberships you hold, but only ones a client can look up.
5. Keep the dates honest, and remove a summary when it is no longer representative.

The TrustRadius survey found that 77% of the technology buyers asked said it was very important to understand a product's drawbacks before buying, while only 33% of the vendors thought buyers cared about that. Buyers in that study also said written feedback mattered more than an overall score. A recruitment client is not a software buyer, but the instinct to look for limits and detail rather than a polished claim carries over well.

Common profile mistakes

Most weak profiles fail in the same few ways. Check yours against this list before you change anything else.

• A description copied from the agency website's home page, written for candidates rather than clients.
• Every sector and country selected, so the profile matches every search and convinces nobody.
• Claims with no fact behind them, such as "leading", "trusted" or "best in class".
• Out-of-date information, such as an office that closed or a sector desk that no longer exists.
• No sign of how a search starts, so the client cannot picture the first step.

Fixing these does not change your agency, but it changes what a stranger can understand about it in under a minute.

Keep the profile working

A profile is not a one-off task. Put a review on the calendar every quarter, and check it whenever you open a new sector desk, enter a country or lose a specialist. Ask one recent client to read it and tell you what they would have wanted to know before the first call.

A profile clients trust is one piece of a wider effort to bring in new business. If you want the rest of that picture, our guide on how recruitment agencies can find and win new clients covers channels, first approaches and a weekly routine. The profile is what those clients will check when they look you up.