Staffing Industry

As has been the case with many vertical markets, the staffing industry has been shaken by the ever-increasing take up of technology and automation. This impact is not reserved to specific parts of the process chain but to all components of the staffing companies’ value delivery.

To pick a few examples we can observe that, from a sourcing perspective, new online classifieds sites, call center applications, internships, etc; have redefined how people attract personnel. Similarly from a application management perspective, innumerable tracking systems promise to keep tabs on candidate processing at all time. Even processes such as on-boarding and induction supported with online training and other HRIS systems and ATS software.

The effect of technology on how the staffing industry delivers to its clients and candidates is therefore undeniable. What is worthwhile considering further is if these repercussions have all been positive, or if they ‘fell short of the promise’ in specific areas of the value chain.

The positive impact areas for technology:

• Dealing with volumes; technology has certainly enabled scale to levels perhaps unimaginable a few years back; contact management systems, mobile applications, etc. all allow say a longer candidate reach whilst also producing efficiencies in the value chain
• Coping with demands for speed; whether it is email, SMS or IM on your Blackberry; immediacy is now a business as usual that would have been pretty unusual in the age of the hardcopy memo and snail mail
  

The core area where technology did more damage than good

• In replacing what needed to be kept ‘human’. The staffing and recruitment equation has people on both sides (clients and candidates); the workflow still requires entities having face to face or even phone conversations. As in other industries, to talk to a consultant is qualitatively better than to deal with an answering machine
• In the creation of artificial elites, which supports the belief that staffing industry companies with ‘superior’ technologies will by default produce superior results in the eyes of its customers and clients. In practical terms, niche players who work the phone and their outlook directory can indeed derive profitable results for themselves and higher client and applicant satisfaction
  

Areas where technology does not have a chance of making a positive difference are

• When the process is kaput; technology will not fix broken value chains. As a crass example, if a candidate report is still required for a two-day assignment as a personal assistant, then there is no system that will produce one quickly enough to beat the competitor uses the phone to close the same requisition.
• Technology does not repair twisted business fundamentals, whether they relate to the company culture, its reward systems, go-to-market approach or its internal organisation. There is no candidate relationship system that will make up for a commission-based pay structure that offers higher bonuses for the larger number of transactions without it being indexed for a client satisfaction or quality component. It can be seen that in this case, technology can even exacerbate the issue for the firm’s stakeholders
  

Does this mean that technology as other progress ‘forces’ produce benefits and compromises?

Staffing Industry

The staffing industry has acted for the last few years as one of the major elements in the economical developments of countries worldwide and some could even say it has turned into a trend. Staffing industry goes hand in hand with the interdependency imposed between countries from all over the World by globalization. As a matter of fact, staffing industry is simultaneously a result and a leading agent of this social and political phenomenon called globalization.

If at the beginning of the 1970s, such concept as staffing industry was meaningful only to few actors on the markets, nowadays it has turned "global." As it proved already its usefulness in USA and some of the most developed European countries – United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands – it was little by little adopted all over the Old Continent, including after the fall of Communism Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Latin America and East Asia.

The staffing industry is important to the economy in general because it affects, positively, the efficiency of any company's activities. The improvement of a company’s efficiency through staffing industry is possible thanks to its understanding of how competitiveness works. This mainly has to do with identifying talent in itself and its usefulness for a company’s well-being. The special knowledge of talented people can and should be transformed by a company’s management team into its secret key to achieve the competitive advantage so necessary to surviving on the market. This means finding the right people, for the right positions, for the right time. Such a goal can be attained either by assigning extra tasks to persons already working for the company, or by temporarily hiring extra people.

Staffing industries are directly connected to the activity of the staffing firms which provide consultancy as for work force solutions in general, including staffing software solutions as well. Such specialized firms are also very useful when it comes to assessing the employee productivity – due to their objectivity, which cannot be guaranteed if the job would be assigned to an in-house department –, or training – which requires teaching experience and skills, apart from the knowledge of a certain field, and which for sure are features difficult to find in the case of the previously hired personnel. In the case of recruitment, as statistics show, staffing agencies should work hand in hand with in-house personnel in order to identify the person who fits best the nature of the job.

Staffing agencies assure full responsibility for their services and in order to assure the highest quality of the consultancy provided to their customers, they had to specialize. This is how, nowadays there are staffing companies specialized in fields such as health care, information technology, administration and secretariat, management, engineering and research.

In the developed countries, nowadays there are not only specialized staffing companies, but also specialized publications in both printed and electronic format, there are laws especially designed so to regulate all aspects related to this field of activity, there are associations and affiliated members dedicating their time to the existence of this industry. Little by little, the concept of staffing industry is also spreading into those areas of the world with a lower economical development and which follow in most situations the example of their "big brother."



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