Recruiting In a Tightening Job Market

Who is the best person for the job? This question plagues hiring managers daily. As the job market continues to tighten, recruiting talent will be more challenging.

Staffing companies are experts in recruiting and hiring process management. They can provide a valuable service to a business by implementing customised sourcing and recruiting plans tailored to meet the companies’ specific employment needs, allowing a company to focus on their core business.

Additionally, employers can evaluate employees prior to making a full-time hiring decision.

Increasingly, today’s smart employers are using staffing companies, like Kelly Services, to supplement their recruiting strategy.

Staffing companies understand that finding talented employees is often a daunting and time-consuming task. By using a staffing company, employers can save time and money through an efficient screening process and reduction of expenses associated with the hiring process.

Communicating the Benefits
Businesses that choose to staff with a mix of permanent and temporary employees are finding this change results in a more efficient workplace. Initially, this staffing solution might be met with resistance. However, a company can reduce this concern by communicating to their employees how working with staffing specialists benefits the company, which in turn benefits the employees.

Here are some ways that a staffing services company can benefit business:

• A staffing company has extensive contacts with highly skilled temporary specialists. At times, specialised skills may be needed in the workplace to complete a specific project.
  
• Through its recruiting expertise, a staffing company can provide the best-qualified person for each project and lower the overall hiring costs for businesses.
  
• Staffing support is immediately available. A company might have a high-priority assignment to accomplish, but doesn’t want to pull its employees off their normal tasks. By hiring a staffing services firm, the business can use temporary workers as a cost effective way to complete the assignment and achieve workplace flexibility.
  
• Companies with a small human resource or recruiting department can rely on a staffing services company to handle their recruiting and hiring needs, which in turn allows the organisation to focus on their core business.
  
• Using skilled, pre-trained employees to supplement full-time staff can be an efficient solution during heavy work cycles. Businesses can work with staffing companies to forecast peak staffing needs and to determine the most appropriate staffing model.

Innovative Management
The change from a permanent workforce to one that includes more temporary employees has resulted in human resource managers taking innovative approaches to managing their blended workforce. Most importantly, businesses are creating a work environment that encourages all employees to work together to positively impact the company’s productivity and profitability.

The nature of the staffing industry is designed to meet the ebb and flow of work demands for businesses. Whether a company chooses to hire a full-time or temporary employee is unique to each situation. The company must consider if the open position is due to growth or replacement.

In today’s current employment market, Kelly Services is seeing many companies adopt the adage of “try before we buy” to ensure there is an established growth pattern in their business. As a result, employers are choosing more temporary, or temporary-to-hire, rather than direct full-time hires.

As the economy improves, employers are finding it more difficult to recruit employees. In any industry, temporary professionals can step in when the full-time staff lacks time to devote to a project, when specific technical skills are needed as a resource, or when a vacancy is created by the departure of a key person. Many temporary positions often lead to a successful full-time hire, after a company has had time to evaluate the temporary employees’ fit within the organisation.

Additionally, in today’s workforce the “free agent” culture, made up of individuals who freelance, work on a contract or temporary basis, or act as independent consultants, is contributing to a great deal of talent that is available in the temporary workforce.

Bottom line, businesses, both large and small, are finding recruiting employees through a staffing company is a good solution in a tightening job market.

This article was first published 2007.