When a big crunch occurs and you need more hands on deck than you have available, the smart money lay with a temp staffing agency. Whether you’re dealing with a single job with specific skill requirements that no one on your staff meet, a surge in business beyond what you can handle due to an ad campaign going viral, or predictable upticks such as those you might see during the holidays, temp staffing agencies offer the solution for all your staffing problems. They specialize in filling skilled labour positions in short order, then disappearing when their help is no longer needed without fuss, complaint, HR nightmares, or additional paperwork. That’s not the only use you might get out of such agencies, but it’s what we’ll be focusing on today: How to utilize temp staffing agencies when last minute staffing problems rear their heads and threaten your business.
What’s the Deal with Temp Staffing Agencies?
If you’ve never dealt with a staffing agency before, you may be at a loss already reading this article. So let’s talk about the bare basics of such companies. These agencies find and retain skilled workers looking for short-term assignments—those workers can be individuals that thrive on the variety of temp work or people looking for solid experiences and opportunities to find permanent positions. Typically, all the hard administration’s handled by the agency—you just pay for the service and receive your worker without all the HR overhead.
How Temp Workers Get Matched
Many temp agencies double as recruiting specialists, as their biggest challenge lay in cultivating a stable pool of skilled workers that can fill any position. As experienced recruiters, such agencies typically master the art of matching the needs and wants of a position to the skills and habits of a worker as cleanly and quickly as possible. You get a worker that fits your company and has the skills you need, they get a reputation for providing quality talent, and the worker is paid (and if you really like him or her, a permanent position). Win/Win/Win.
Why an Agency?
Of course, some question the wisdom of paying a third party to fill in short-term positions, when a company might approach the labour pool directly and resolve its staffing problems without the extra expenditure. But that’s ignoring the benefits of scale—a staffing agency is, essentially, an HR department you’re sharing with their other clients. You don’t have to pay your own HR staff to find new people, fill out their paperwork, fix the problems integrating them into the system, get them out of the system, etc. And keep in mind that the agency specializes in these tasks, and the workers specialize in showing up and getting the job done. People you hire directly for a temp position may not be as comfortable slotting in and out of your existing corporate machinery and project schedules. Bringing on more people isn’t worth it if they bog everything down because they’re not accustomed to mounting mid-gallop.
Other Considerations
Proper use of temp staffing agencies can resolve last minute staffing problems another way—by making sure they never happen. Utilizing staffing agencies to find perfect candidates for your company means that when that unusual request comes through and you need a certain skill, you already have it at hand. Highly skilled professional recruiters can do that. They can also get you better talent for less money than you might spend otherwise. Hiring is a skill, and these people get lots of practice. So even if you don’t have staffing problems today, consider investing in preventing them.
