Making the Switch: When Your Back Office is Swamped

As a recruitment agency grows, it’s important for the agency’s personnel to expand with it. It’s important to expand at the right rate – don’t swamp out growing profits by adding in too many extra salaries.

The trickiest part of all this can be making sure that your recruiters and your back office both grow at the right rate – and we often hear about that going wrong.

The Capacity Problem

Too many back office staff for your recruiters, and you’re spending more money than you need to on administration, cutting into profits. Too many recruiters for your back office to handle, and you run into capacity problems.

Timesheets may not be reviewed in time to raise invoices and secure finance in a timely manner. Contract review may not take place in time, resulting in candidates starting work without a signature on the contract – which can mean no money for the work you did.

There are many other risks when you overwork your back office, but these are the ones that can’t be undone. Issues like falling behind on your accounts or monitoring your dunning cycle can be caught up – but at a cost, and only by asking your back office to work longer hours – which is where errors can start to creep in.

The TBOS Factor

We hear from agencies with this problem quite often. It’s not a smart move to limit the number of placements your recruiters are making. However, once your back office has become too small, it gets swamped – and catching up can be a nightmare.

That’s when many come to TBOS. If your back office is over capacity, there are two things you can do – recruit, or outsource.

We’ve found that a lot of larger recruitment agencies, when they hit a capacity issue due to outgrowing their current back office, look at services like TBOS Complete again – and, when they’ve run the numbers, find that outsourcing the back office for a recruitment agency offers the same or better service for a better price.

We even offer help with the transition to an outsourced back office for existing recruitment agencies.

If you’re worried that your back office is stretched too thin and that you may be over capacity soon, get in touch. We’ll be happy to talk through your needs and work out how we can help.


Stewart Roberts

Written by Stewart Roberts

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