Achieving your workforce targets is complicated, time-consuming and expensive. That’s why many organizations turn to the help of staffing agencies to save money, improve workforce quality and speed up hiring times.
Yet to realize the true potential of your staffing agencies, it’s absolutely crucial that they are managed effectively.
That’s why in this blog we’re going to take a look at everything you need to know about staffing agency management. We hope the information here can help you improve your talent acquisition and, as a result, better achieve your overall business goals.
What is a staffing agency?
A staffing agency is a vendor that acts as a middleman between an employer and workers, helping to match qualified candidates with organizations that are looking to fill current job vacancies.
While staffing agencies typically fill open positions with contingent workers, they can also help businesses find permanent employees as well.
There are a range of benefits that businesses can realize from working with staffing agencies, including saving the company time, reducing hiring costs, and improving talent acquisition results with well-qualified candidates.
What is staffing agency management?
If your organization uses staffing agencies to hire contingent workers and permanent employees, then you'll know that they are a great resource for achieving your workforce targets. But, on the flip side, you’ll also understand that the ROI you get from your staffing agencies is only as good as your staffing agency management.
Staffing agency management is a strategic program that is designed, planned and implemented to improve all aspects of how you manage your staffing agencies - from sourcing staffing agencies, negotiating contracts, standardizing rates, cost management, mitigating risk and evaluating performance.
It also involves collecting staffing agency performance metrics to gain insightful data into how your contingent workforce program is performing.
In recent years, organizations are using more staffing agencies than ever before. With the large global staffing agencies proving to be outdated, slow, cumbersome and unable to respond quickly to the rapidly changing job market, companies are instead casting a wide net with a blend of niche agencies that focus on the specific skills and locations required.
To ensure your contingent workforce program is successful, it’s crucial that you are managing these staffing agencies correctly to maximize ROI.
3 key aspects of managing your staffing agencies
The problem is that managing staffing agencies is time-consuming and complex. It requires a team of experts to build a strategic program, technology to centralize the entire program and processes that are mandated across all hiring managers.
The vast majority of businesses do not have the experience, resources or expertise to implement an effective staffing agency management strategy. Here are the three most important aspects of managing staffing agencies:
There are a huge number of processes that must be implemented to manage your staffing agencies successfully, from sourcing vendors, negotiating contracts, onboarding externally-sourced workers and vendor performance evaluations. Having a strategic plan for all of these processes will save time for your employees, allowing them to focus on more valuable tasks.
A Vendor Management System is a crucial component of staffing agency management. By centralizing and automating all processes around managing your staffing agencies, a VMS ensures you have all of the information you need, in one place, to improve how you manage your vendors. The result? Complete visibility and control over how your staffing agencies are performing, leading to program improvements moving forward.
The data and performance reporting you receive from an optimized staffing agency management program will ensure your business is able to identify challenges before they become real issues, address areas that need improvement and discover opportunities where you can improve talent acquisition and spend.
How you will benefit from improved staffing agency management
When you implement a program that allows you to successfully manage your staffing agencies, your organization will be able to fulfill its workforce targets and, as a result, achieve your overall business goals.
Do you need help managing your staffing agencies?
Are you looking to improve the workforce quality and reduce spend when it comes to your staffing agencies? Contrax can work with your organization to design a staffing agency management program that simplifies the entire process, saves your business money, and improves workforce quality.
With expertise and years’ of experience in contingent workforce management and talent acquisition solutions, we’d love to help your organization realize greater ROI from its staffing agencies.
Want to find out more? Book a meeting with our team of staffing agency management specialists today.
