Our last blog focused on the top three questions your prospective staffing agency should be asking you, when they consider engaging to meet your needs. The analogy is simple, you are interviewing the agency, and they should be interviewing you in return. (There’s some ironic analogy here in this is the basic process of agencies finding the right applicants, and applicants finding the right staffing agency that fits them.)
Today’s blog focuses on this observation on process. Typically, the HR manager, CFO, or Finance Manager, and sometimes a divisional or operational leader in charge of the P&L or more than one of these is involved in the decision making process for choosing a new staffing agency. If your company takes the time to put a process in place to do this, so should you expect to see a process behind candidate staffing agencies, and how they will work for you.
We’ve shared the process that Barton Staffing Solutions uses in an earlier blog post: Recruitment Process – Attention to Detail Saves Time and Money. We focused on the four key steps required to meet our client’s needs for temporary staffing. Discovery, Recruiting, Selection and Quality/Follow-up. This is our unique process, and deep inside one of these larger order steeps comes sourcing resumes. A process framework provides the necessary structure to enable efficient response to your needs. Carefully assess how your staffing agency responds when you ask “what is your process?”
The point of today’s blog is to ignite your thinking about what it is that makes a great staffing agency. It is, process. Anyone can hang out a sign, call themselves a staffing agency, and send resume’s over the wall to you – but a long-term relationship that develops into a collaborative partnership for successful staffing takes process. It stands to reason that a great staffing agency also has the best temporary workforce – the kind of people you want to have working in your company.
It’s easy to take the short-cut route, ignoring alignment with your company goals, fine-tuning the character of your temporary staff with your company’s code of business conduct, safety initiatives, and overall customer experience and service levels your employer needs to maintain to stay in business. The character of your temporary workforce affects these business factors. One bad mistake with a staffing firm can make all the difference to the perception of your brand and business success in gaining the cost and operational benefits from a temporary staff workforce.
If you are in charge of this decision for firm, break it down and choose a company with a collaborative and aligned process wisely.
Barton Staffing Solutions is ready to help you move forward in 2014 implementing staffing as a key component to your business success. Call us today.
