A couple of days ago I got an e-mail from the American Staffing Association urging me to contact my Representative and Senators and “Tell them to vote ‘no’ when the bill comes up for a final vote.”
Now, let me be clear, I do not think this blog is an appropriate place to discuss the merits of health care reform. One, it is too much of a hot button issue for discussion here and two, I am not educated enough on the matter to post a blog that would comprehensively cover the topic. I do understand the fear that must be present in this industry surrounding health care legislation. Regardless of how you come out on this issue I am sure that you would agree that for a temporary staffing firm the thought of adding an additional annual cost of $2000 per employee (that you do not know if you can recover) would be a daunting position.
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Last post I wrote about how in the midst of this economic recovery companies are adding and keeping temporary workers and consultants in lieu of making direct hires. Within the financial services sector I suspect that this trend will continue well into the recovery.
Before the economy crashed, we had a client who had a particularly interesting philosophy of hiring. The principals of this small fund realized that they needed a significant amount of flexibility with their business and therefore their employees. If they needed to change their investment strategy they wanted to be able to do so and quickly bring on employees who had experience in implementing the new strategy. Out of 7 employees, 2 were the Fund’s principals and the rest were Wall Street Services employees. On at least one occasion they were able to make significant staff changes and be up and running in under two weeks complete with analysts and accounting professionals who had the specific expertise to meet their new objectives.
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Last Friday, employment numbers came in and the number of individuals under the temporary-help service sector increased for the fifth straight month. This is not surprising; in fact it is a typical response to the tail end of a recession. At the beginning of a downturn, companies stop using temporary workers before layoffs, but as things pick up they realize they’ve cut too deep and hire temporary workers to meet the needs of their growing business until they are able to hire full-time roles.
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Last post I discussed a relationship with a client that is very expressive of their appreciation of what we provide and how that translates into Wall Street Services working harder on their behalf. I contrasted that with our experience with our large clients who outsource the management of their temporary staffing to a Vendor Management Solution provider (VMS.) It is my experience that the very nature of the VMS client relationship is antithetical to Staffing Companies having an experience of being appreciated. VMS providers are hired to improve efficiency and reduce cost and they do so by interacting with their Vendors as if they are providers of a commodity. As they are not part of the company they are managing staffing for they also do not have sufficient access to the information necessary to have their staffing vendors really successful.
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