By | Akhila
If you think hiring professionals is expensive, wait until you try hiring amateurs.
A staffing agency is an essential middleman between employers and employees. If employees are the lifeblood of an organization, a staffing agency is the medical professional you call to perform a blood transfusion to save your company’s life.
The Indian Staffing Federation estimates that staffing services make up to $270 billion in revenues yearly, and the whole industry is poised to grow 12% by next year[1].
Let’s take a deep dive into the world of staffing agencies to see why they’re doing so well in today’s market.
The strongest performing employees in every sector turn to staffing services for better opportunities
39% of Indian employers consider hiring good talent a massive, almost insurmountable challenge[2]. This is despite the fact that India is home to some of the most educated employees in the world.
Why is it so?
Despite a massive population size, only 2% of employees are estimated to possess the required skills.
This poses a nigh-impossible challenge for in-house recruitment teams as they are expected to comb through hundreds of thousands of candidates to find their perfect match.
This is what makes head-hunting the perfect employee an impossible game to win for most in-house recruitment teams. It is infinitely easier to sit in a staffing firm and wait for the employee to come to you instead.
This is because high-level candidates often rely on staffing agencies to discreetly find them opportunities to grow their careers, as they don’t want their employers to know they are actively seeking out offers.
Staffing agencies do so much more than recruitment
Staffing agencies offer free training for candidates to help them secure the jobs they are after. In addition, they help enhance abilities and talents and even perform a GAP analysis on candidates to see what additional certification and training can help them grow in their careers.
This free training is available for students taking their first few steps in the corporate world and hardened veterans looking for an edge over their competition.
Staffing services are privy to every interview tip and technique you can think of and will help negotiate salary and non-monetary perks on the employee’s behalf.
Staffing agencies allow access to the hidden job market
The hidden job market is every job opening that does not have a public listing for whatever reason.
An overwhelming majority of jobs don’t get public advertising, partly because many such listings require money to advertise. And despite today’s modern digital age, there are positions and openings known only to those who regularly speak with businesses and cater to their needs. This shows how enduring that old proverb is- “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”
Staffing agencies are more affordable than in-house teams
When a business is looking to fill a position, they need to consider a few factors:
The compensation offered
Background checks
Skill tests
Job postings
The time spent screening/interviewing candidates
The entire onboarding process
When a business has a dedicated in-house team to address all of these matters, the cost of hiring falls on the business.
But staffing agencies already have the necessary workforce, infrastructure, and knowledge bases to handle the entire recruitment process end-to-end. And all of the hiring costs fall on them instead.
As a business owner looking to spend valuable money expecting a reasonable return, where would you spend your money?
This doesn’t even include the costs incurred hiring a bad candidate, a ghost candidate, or a charlatan looking to commit fraud.
And once the right candidate is hired, what exactly do you do with all the money spent on recruitment infrastructure? Never use it again?
If that wasn’t enough, staffing agencies tend to offer guarantees and conditions if the candidate doesn’t work out. The risks of a bad hire are financially accounted for and adjusted.
Staffing agencies comprise one of the few pandemic-proof industries.
In 2021, the Flexi Staffing Employment Research Report revealed that India’s staffing agencies grew 4% amidst a turbulent time when dozens of industries were collapsing in an accelerated free-fall[3].
With work-from-home proving as popular as it is, most employees are discreetly turning to staffing agencies to abandon out-of-touch, old-fashioned employers. Flexible employment schemes are seeing a 31% growth across all formats in all verticals in India as working from home remains the most popular non-monetary perk universally sought after by employees.
The best and brightest employees are the quickest to jump, as anyone experienced in an employment agency will tell you. That means the best staffing agencies have their pick of the best-qualified candidates in the market.
If you’re not convinced, combining your in-house team’s efforts with a staffing agency, in the beginning, can be a good idea. However, it is ultimately up to you to decide how much you want to involve a third party for your organization’s unique and particular needs.
