Business staffing needs can vary for lots of reasons. Retail businesses almost always need temporary staff during the holiday seasons, while construction sees peak need in the summer. Other companies find they need to fill a critical position because an employee leaves abruptly or a new project demands a new skill set. These needs can lead you to make fast hires that don’t work out. A staffing agency can help you meet your needs while avoiding common problems. Let’s look at a few of the reasons why.
1. Speed
It’s taking longer and longer for businesses to hire new employees. Some of this is driven by extra requirements, such as skills or drug testing. Some of it stems from the time investment. Even if your HR department handles some of the preliminaries, a manager or panel of them must carve out time to conduct interviews. If you’re already short-handed, that makes it even more difficult for people to break away for hours of interviewing. A staffing agency can handle most or all of the pre-screening, screening, and testing requirements. That lets you jump directly to final interviews.
Takeaway: The staffing agency handles the tedious, time-consuming part of the process.
2. Quality
Whether your business is a manufacturing concern or an IT service provider, you don’t deal with hiring full-time. It’s not your area of expertise. Staffing agencies excel at the hiring process because it’s precisely their area of expertise. Just as importantly, they usually serve a small handful of industries or sub-industries. That means they have a deep understanding of your industry needs and can weed poor candidates out of the pool before they send anyone your way. Instead of picking one good candidate out of a lot of bad candidates, you pick the best fit from a group where everyone is qualified.
Takeaway: Outsourcing to specialists often gets you better results.
3. Flexibility
When most businesses go through the hiring process, they want a full-time employee. The process is generally too time-consuming and costly to use it for a 6-month or 1-year contract position. With around 20% of the workforce now operating as temp or contract workers, though, you can miss a good fit by focusing on full-time hires. A staffing agency can help connect you with these temp or contract workers without the huge resource costs of an internal hiring process. It also gives you the chance to test out an employee for culture fit without providing the full range of benefits from day one.
Bonus Reason #4 - Quality Staffing Companies invest in safety!
Takeaway: You can always offer a contract employee a full-time position if you like them.
A staffing agency provides you some key benefits over an internal hiring process. It’s usually faster. You see more qualified candidates because staffing agencies specialize. You even get more hiring options, such as temp or contract workers. That lets you stay focused on the day-to-day operations of your business.
Struggling with a peak season or critical hiring situation right now? Reach out to Timpl and let us find the right candidate for you.