• i3-Blog | Staffing

Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup, said with a certain seriousness: “To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.” It’s not just prophetic; it teems with absolute meaning. If the workplace’s ecosystem has no place for the productive environment, then marketplace victory is as distant as the farthest galaxy. Since employees are the actual performance enablers, more than machinery they form the real mainstay of that workplace. It’s then easy-to-understand why 52% of respondents have considered staffing as the most important HR function.

However, for many companies, the task of finding the right candidates is like a daily ordeal. It gets further exacerbated due to changing natures of projects and job roles. But considering that employees stand at the front end of revenue funnel, this ordeal needs to be thinned out. That’s where staffing agencies, with their sharpened and experienced paraphernalia, can become the much-needed silver bullet for companies. This is how staffing agencies can counter the most common staffing ills.

A) Legal Compliances:

The more porous geographical borders are the offshoots of enhanced globalization. It’s natural for companies to have footprints in multiple countries and continents. Companies are left with no option but to hire local talent. But there is nothing like universal employment law. Different countries brandish different employment rules and regulations. And much to the irritation of companies, they keep changing. Since the core skills of companies don’t dwell in the labor laws, it becomes almost impossible for them to keep track of changing milieus of labor rules. If companies decide to push them under the carpet, then it can directly mean audits, lawsuits, jail terms, and even the premature demise of their prospects.

Generally, staffing agencies have legal experts at their disposals who keep eyes on regulatory landscapes day in and day out. Note that there are regulations on everything from hiring practices, to wage payment, to workplace safety. A well-oiled staffing agency, through its immense legal know-how, can raise alarm bells when risk is in sight and guide you in taking prudent and safe staffing decisions. It’s especially important when willful violators can be fined up to $10,000. A second conviction may result in a jail term.

B) Time Consuming Method:

Launching the search, reviewing resumes, interviewing, negotiating, and sending out an offer letter – hiring is a complicated and long task. If the required position demands a hard-to-find skill set, its filling can take months. As HRs have to shoulder other internal responsibilities as well, it’s unlikely for them to stay persistent with the talent hunt. Considering that the best candidates are off the market in 10 days, companies may find themselves deprived of deserving candidates.

Owing to the acute awareness of different trends and changes in the industry, an experienced staffing agency can cut short the hiring period. It does so by recruiting people based on different industries’ current state an hour of need. If the market is not stable and promising for new employees, it suggests only the required number of employees for the company. Rather than putting the onus of handling paperwork and other recruitment related tasks on companies, staffing agencies undertake them carefully.

C) Cost:

Many individual costs, like advertising costs, in-house recruiters’ salaries, travel expenses, sign-on bonuses and employee referral bonuses, get incur during the hiring process. In some cases, employee relocation costs chip in. That’s why the bottom-line figure of hiring, once all line item costs get factored in, is staggering. The total cost of hiring one new employee could be as high as $5,000. It can be more in a professional or manufacturing industry. In a service related industry, a new employee hiring can cost more than $1,000.

Since staffing agencies know how to hire the right candidates, they can take away some of the recruitment costs. Along with taxes, payroll, worker’s comp and other benefits, they eradicate the costs of listing jobs and the cost associated with the time it would take your internal hiring manager to recruit new staff. Due to their ability to manage the entire employment process, they also relieve employers of costs related to pre-employment testing, background investigations, and drug screening. Moreover, they also help you onboard your new members to reduce costly downtime.

D) Wrong Hire:

According to the Harvard Business Review, 80% of employee turnovers are due to bad hiring choices. It’s a result of mismatched expectations, ambiguous job descriptions, lack of enough background check, and overestimating the quality of candidates. Companies need to send them back as they are not good-fit. By forcing companies to re-activate their hiring activity from scratch, wrong hiring can pose a serious blow to their economic backbone. The U.S. Department of Labor says that it can cost an average of one-third of a new hire’s salary to replace them. SRHM puts the price tag of a failed hire at up to five times an employee’s salary.

Staffing agencies can overcome this menace of wrong hiring mainly due to their well-spread network. This network of available workers is much broader than that of the HR department of most companies. This wider grasp allows them to be in contact with workers whom they identify as dependent, versatile and fit for the job. Unlike HRs and companies, who have to wait for months just to get the required number of employees, they don’t have to advertise, follow the interview and screening processes. Through them, vacancies can get filled quickly with the right candidates. Consequently, there will be a significant reduction in wrong hires and thereby, churn out rate.