Most recruitment founders start in roughly the same place.
You’re a great recruiter.
So one day, you hang out your own shingle and think:
How hard can this be?
Then you discover something…
Running a recruitment agency is your old job + a business operation.
You’re still running a desk.
Except now you’re also the marketing department, sales director, tech support, finance team, compliance officer, strategist and person wondering why your website won’t load.
No wonder it can feel overwhelming.
One survey by The Alternative Board of small business owners found 72% felt overwhelmed by their roles and responsibilities, and more than half were losing sleep over their business several nights a week.
So if that’s you, you’re in good company. (That doesn’t mean you should stay!)
👇 Over the years, I’ve found a few things that make a disproportionate difference to how overwhelmed I feel and how much useful work I actually get done.
1. You’re either recruiting or working on the business. Never both at once.
This was a big one for me.
Trying to squeeze “running the business” into the gaps between candidate calls, client emails and filling jobs is a recipe for getting to 5pm wondering what you actually achieved.
→ Every switch costs you focus.
→ So draw a line.
→ When you’re recruiting, recruit.
→ When you’re wearing the founder hat, you are just focussing on bigger picture activity.
2. Get everything out of your head. Then get ruthless.
“I’ve got so much to do.”
I’ve said it. You’ve probably said it.
But so much isn’t particularly useful.
→ Write it all down and suddenly you’re dealing with actual things rather than one enormous cloud of STUFF following you around.
Then ask:
→ What genuinely needs doing now?
→ What can wait?
→ What am I doing that doesn’t need doing at all?
→ And how long will each thing actually take?
There’s something strangely comforting about discovering the task that’s been haunting you for three weeks will probably only take 30 minutes.
It goes from THING I MUST SORT OUT to in 30 minutes I’ll have it off my plate.
Much easier to deal with.
3. Find the thing that’s actually making life difficult.
Every business has bottlenecks.
Sometimes they’re obvious.
→ But sometimes the thing you’re blaming isn’t actually the problem at all.
→ Maybe you’re convinced you need more leads when the real issue is that you’re not following up with the ones you’ve already got.
→ Maybe delivery feels chaotic because you need another recruiter.
→ Maybe you’re spending hours every week doing something that could be automated in 20 minutes.
→ Find the real thorn in your side and deal with it.
→ If you know how to fix it, fix it.
→ If you don’t, learn, ask someone who does, or hand it to someone better equipped.
If your car’s dirty, you can wash it.
If it’s got a dent in the side, maybe call the panel beater.
Not everything needs to become your newest skill.
4. Stop doing things simply because you’ve always done them.
This one is particularly relevant right now as AI gives you so much leverage here.
There are probably things in your agency you’ve been doing the same way for years.
Reports. Admin. Research. Data entry. Candidate follow-up. Meeting notes. Moving information from one system to another.
Some still deserve your time.
Some could be done differently.
And some should have disappeared from your week about three AI tools ago.
As you work over the next few days, start noticing them.
Ask yourself:
→ Does this actually create value?
→ If not → bin it.
→ If yes → could I make it simpler, automate it or give it to someone else?
One survey of talent professionals found 45% spend more than half their working hours on admin that could be automated.
That’s a lot of very expensive human beings doing work a machine could probably handle while they’re asleep.
And this, I think, is one of the great advantages of being a small, founder-led agency.
You don’t need a committee to change something.
You can notice what’s not working on Thursday and be doing it differently by Monday.
Use that.
→ If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now, don’t try to overhaul your entire business.
→ Give yourself a couple of hours. Coffee. Notebook. Laptop.
→ Look at what’s actually taking up your time and put it into three piles:
→ Keep it. Improve it. Bin it.
→ Then pick one thing.
Because growing a business doesn’t have to mean carrying more and more of it around with you.
Sometimes the smartest way to grow is simply to get rid of some of the weight.
And if you’d like another pair of eyes on what’s creating the bottlenecks in your agency and what I’d tackle first, that’s exactly the kind of thing I help recruitment founders figure out.
So feel free to reach out any time.
Have an amazing week.
BK
This week’s traction is proudly brought to you by GTM Digital.
A specialist international Go-to-Market recruitment firm running their entire agency on AI and helping other leaders do the same.
