How To Surpass Your Largest Competitors

With the right mix of speed, timing, and guts, smart founders can profit hugely from their much, much, much larger rivals’ misfortune

- Kris Frieswick

Daniel Miller is at a disadvantage. As the cofounder of Empowered Staffing, a boutique recruitment firm in Evanston, Ill., he has to go head-tohead with giant rivals who have greater name recognition and a bigger media presence—not to mention resources that his tiny team of seven will never be able to match. To keep his pipeline filled, he has to get creative. When Miller kept seeing the same jobs being posted by one big rival over and over again, he decided to find out why.

After some sleuthing, he discovered that his rival was having problems. It was assigning inexperienced recruiters, who, Miller says, weren’t getting adequate training, to large client accounts. As a result, the candidate selection was consistently missing the mark, causing the job searches to drag on and on.

Miller smelled an opportunity. To find out who his rival’s client was, he copied the language from the job posting, googled the exact words, and found the listing on the client’s in-house career site—verbatim, which was part of the problem. (Good recruiters, Miller says, know how to tweak job descriptions to attract the right talent.) He reached out directly.

“I said, ‘I know you guys are working with this firm,’ ” recalls Miller. “ ‘I’d love to have a chance to work with you. You don’t pay us until you make the hire. Compare our candidates to theirs, and if you like ours better, let us have a chance to fill more positions.’

The pitch worked, and Empowered won the client’s business. Miller went on to poach a number of large clients this way, including one that boosted his company’s revenue by more than $500,000 in a single year.