Recruiting and hiring are common, recurring challenges for businesses. You want to find the best workers, but it’s difficult to identify high-quality candidates when you are sifting through impressive resumes.
Partnering with a trustworthy staffing agency can be one of the best ways of turning a lengthy and costly undertaking into a much more manageable and efficient process. However, some leaders may still wonder if they can trust their staffing partners to get the job done well.
As with most challenging situations, it can be helpful to better understand the stakes at play. Steve McNamara, Director of Talent Delivery at nTech Workforce, talks about the green flags and assurances to look for in your next staffing partnership.
The best place to start when looking to find quality workers through a hiring service is by doing your research. McNamara suggests seeking out “referrals from other companies, online research, and industry associations.”
Look for signs of dependable workers, strong hires, and successful relationships through an evidence-based search. As McNamara notes, “Some green flags to look for include agencies with a solid reputation, positive client testimonials, a transparent and thorough screening process, and a track record of successfully matching qualified candidates with suitable positions.”
Staffing agencies are experts in the field of hiring and recruiting. However, they may not be experts in the role they are hiring for like engineering or other technical jobs but that is why a strong bilateral partnership between a staffing agency and the client is crucial from the start.
“Staffing agencies find the best workers through a combination of rigorous screening processes, comprehensive qualifying calls, and skill assessments,” says McNamara. “This is all accomplished during the recruiting process by leveraging personal and professional networks, reputable job boards, an internal database of candidates, social media sites, and skills assessment software.”
The hard skills of certain jobs can often be quickly qualified through accreditation and experience. It is the locating, assessing, and managing that hiring services can excel at.
Having concern over talent quality and dependability oftentimes comes down to an issue of control. Quality can be more or less assured through the vetting process. But dependability can be a wild card where the unexpected is always a possibility, and trying to control workers is more likely than not to yield an unhappy result.
Nevertheless, “staffing agencies strive to ensure the quality of workers they provide to clients,” says McNamara. What is the quality assurance process? Staffing agencies implement quality control “by implementing stringent screening and selection processes to identify top talent, verifying qualifications and experience, conducting thorough interviews and assessments and checking references.”
The quality of the workers will depend on the quality of the staffing agency. As McNamara reports, “Contingent workers, when sourced through reputable staffing agencies, can be highly dependable. Staffing agencies have processes in place to carefully vet candidates, assess their skills and qualifications and match them with appropriate job opportunities.”
Specifically with contingent workers, McNamara says, “agencies often maintain ongoing relationships with the workers, providing support and guidance to ensure their reliability and job performance.” Companies can look forward to ongoing support and employee assessment too, as staffing agencies can also help with the management of employees.
As McNamara notes, staffing agencies often provide a value-add of “additional support, training, and supervision to contingent workers to ensure they meet the client’s expectations.”
Here are some common practices and services offered by staffing agencies:
It's important to note that the specific support, training, and supervision provided by staffing agencies can vary depending on the agency's policies, the industry, and the nature of the contingent work. Different agencies may have different approaches and levels of involvement in managing and supporting contingent workers.
A staffing agency warranty is not entirely out of the question either. McNamara says that “while specific warranties may vary between agencies, many staffing agencies offer guarantees or warranties on their hiring services.”
This means that any leaders unsure about a staffing agency partnership can rest assured that there may be contingencies in place. McNamara says, “These guarantees may include provisions such as replacement of a worker within a certain timeframe if they do not meet the client’s requirements or a refund of fees in case of unsatisfactory service.”
It is important to get a good understanding of expectations and provisions during those initial conversations so leaders can “discuss and clarify the terms of any warranty or guarantee with the staffing agency before engaging their services.”
If you are interested in hiring staff or bringing on contingent high-quality workers, partnering with a staffing agency is the way to go. Reach out to nTech Workforce for a free consultation today.