Staffing: Insane or Not?

? Dan Curtis 2018

Good morning! Today I could use assistance from my fellow LinkedIn networkers to help resolve a conundrum. The staffing industry has some strange aspects, and it would be useful to hear perspectives from people both on the inside and on the outside looking in. Keep in mind the verdict of this discussion may well have a correlation to a relative sanity diagnosis of those who inhabit the staffing field. (Therapists, this is a potential source of new clients.). Are my peers and I sane or not?

Before deciding, consider some unusual characteristics of the staffing industry:

1. Low entry and exit requirements: To oversimplify things, it takes a computer, a phone, and a means to do payroll in order to enter the staffing field. Many businesses require complex manufacturing equipment, expertise, and personnel that are not so easily found or left behind. This means just about anyone can start a staffing business. It also means no shortage of competition, which leads straight to the next point.
2. Extreme competition: Each job opening is likely to have 15 or more agencies working to fill the same opening. As in sports, some of players play by the rules and some do not.
3. Front-loaded work: Before billing the client a single dollar, most of the heavy lifting has already been done. This includes research (often nearly arcane), sourcing, communicating, networking into the furthest corners of the net, selling, negotiating (convincing the candidate to take a lower pay rate or a contract position), and interview coordination (aka, aligning planetary bodies).
4. Frenzied pace: Since all the suppliers are using the same pool of candidates, each job opening is really just a race to find the right person and submit a job candidate to a client within hours of a job opening, before 10 other recruiters call the best candidates. While working on a single job order like this, be sure to handle the other ten orders also waiting for candidates, plus interview coordination, questions from candidates, managers, sales people, and the random lost paparazzi without letting anything/anyone slip through the cracks.
5. Ambiguity-extravaganza: Uncertainty starts when a client communicates a need to fill a role, and the agency representatives have to decipher the hieroglyphics to make sense of it, hoping the client actually knows what they need. It continues into communication with the job candidates and through preparation phases to determine what a candidate really wants, and if they will actually show up for an interview or a job. It keeps going as hiring managers provide zero or cryptic feedback on candidates’ resumes they reviewed. The greatest ambiguity appears over the course of the job itself: a recruiter can work hard full-time, but never knows which few days of the month are actually going to have an impact on the revenue of the business, namely securing a new hire.
6. A success rate of 5% is considered good: Yes, that figure is accurate, but is it right? Ninety-five percent of the work has zero direct impact on the bottom line. If it is any consolation, then at least the effort has some indirect impact on building the company's brand/ market presence.
7. Help people achieve their dreams: It sounds trite, but a person’s employment can be life-changing. It’s hard to put a price tag on that kind of job satisfaction. Even so, most recruiters make a modest base salary, plus commission per hire.

Contribute your two cents: What’s your verdict on the staffing business?

#staffing #recruitment #hiring