Too often, people report negative experiences with staffing agencies. This has led to many wondering “are staffing agencies legit?”
That depends. If run properly, staffing agencies can offer great advantages to both jobseekers and businesses, pairing up both of them with the right solution. However, on the flipside, a lot of staffing agencies seem like an undesired middleman who end up costing both businesses and employees on their books too much money.
So, what can your staffing agency do to be one of the good guys? Let’s get into it.
Are Staffing Agencies Good or Bad?
There’s no simple answer to this question.
Whether companies and employers have good experience with staffing agencies depends on many factors. However, there are some common challenges, many people working in the area have reported.
The first hurdle agencies face is communication issues. Especially when recruiters and applicants don’t negotiate details and don’t ensure everyone is on the same knowledge level, inconsistencies quickly arise. Also, things like invoices and payrolls can simply take too long, and employees leave the agencies frustrated with too many enduring processes.
Closely related to this is the suspicion that staffing agencies often hire many employees and just as many leave. There is very high turnover, resulting in slow and resourceful onboarding, as frequently new workers enter the workplace without knowledge of processes. What adds a strong aftertaste to fluctuation is that many agencies receive and accept too many applications. Losing the oversight over job postings, applicants, and resumes can lead to the best candidates getting lost in the shuffle.
However, doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re starting a temporary staffing agency, do it right. Adjust traditional processes and implement helpful software tools and you can help you fight this bad rep and show the world that job agencies are worth it. Here are some ways to do just that.
Best Practices For Improving Staffing Agencies Services
1. Automate Mundane Tasks
Often, employees of agencies have to deal with so many bureaucratic processes, including filing documents, and processing other trivialities. The end result is there’s little time to focus on what’s most important: creating a favorable agency environment.
That being said, by automating many of these mundane tasks, recruiters and administrative staff can reduce the amount of work and time wasted. In fact, there are many software options that allow salaries to be registered and paid automatically according to each employee’s contract and working hours.
An automated payroll allows you to schedule all payments to go out simultaneously and with 100% accuracy. The same principle applies to onboarding. Agencies can rely on digital signatures and automated contract generation software instead of fretting over all the paperwork.
2. Provide meaningful feedback
One of the reasons for high staff turnover in agencies is that employees are often not given a chance to recognize their own value in the organization. However, rapidly fluctuating staff led to lower quality and lost time, and should be avoided at all costs. To give people meaning in their jobs, it’s good to establish a helpful feedback system.
By working together with your clients and your staff, you can give constant feedback and set common goals for the companies and the employees. This will help keep motivation at bay and reduce attrition.
3. Track equipment
One issue that often also negatively impacts reputation is lengthy requests for company equipment or, worse, the loss of equipment. Especially in the case of temporary employees who work in different companies simultaneously for a long time, it is easy to lose track of which instruments/clothes/devices are in their possession. That’s why staffing agency teams need to constantly track the use of company equipment and require employees to sign in and out of usage times.
4. Facilitate Seamless Hiring Processes
When many applicants approach their agency, recruiters must keep a cool head. Not every blind chicken finds a grain of corn, and those who recruit should put up with several rounds of screening to hire the best talent. Since staffing agencies often advertise many different job openings, a correspondingly large number of applications can be found in their mailboxes.
It helps to pre-screen applicants and scan resumes according to essential criteria to weed out unsuitable applicants immediately. Only those who meet the minimum standards are then forwarded to the next round, and so on. Categorizing applications, and entering on-boarded employees in categories describing where their contribution is most valuable, is, as well, vital for staffing agencies.
Carefully document any decision, and ensure that each applicant can only apply once for a position. If you take this initial screening seriously and file your applicants by industry, skills, experience, and other factors, you will save yourself a lot of time later.
5. Track time
Even if this might not be the case, many firms hiring staffing agencies fear that they overpay. That’s why it is important to track exactly how much time each applicant spends working and how long their travel journey to the workplace takes. Though many agencies have previously relied on the honesty of workers to log in and out of systems and report their working hours accurately, there are tech solutions that can better ensure accuracy.
For example, biometric software helps track time clocks, and geofencing-powered apps indicate which employee was where. By implementing such software, agencies will benefit from less time spent on management and little to no distrust among workers, companies, and the agency.
Many of the small issues agencies face are not plucked out of thin air. However, agencies can save a lot of time and money by embracing technology and automation. By either acquiring individual software to manage those tasks or leaning on all-in-one HR solutions, agencies can target their effort to design a more attractive workplace.
Special reward programs, employee parties, and feedback spirals are not only helpful in revitalizing their organization. The whole agency will also be easier to manage when you don’t have to worry about the pesky little details.
Could your agency also benefit from improved efficiency and automated tasks? Take a closer look at Timerack’s management offerings.