The staffing industry has seen many ups and downs in its history. Typically after a recession or downturn, it comes back with stronger demand than before.
While this can be challenging, using these downturns as a time to reevaluate your technology can be an important opportunity to set yourself up for success on the other side.
What to expect from the “next wave” of staffing
Recessions tend to hit the recruiting industry especially hard. This industry is a bit like a microcosm for the overall economy, and what happens to the whole country happens here first.
But, after every recession there has been a boom in business. And as employers refill positions, there is more and more preference for flexible work models. This time will be no exception, with workforce sentiment continuing to favour flexibility and convenience, especially in the wake of COVID-19.
And with countless new tools enabling flexible workforce models, staffing agencies should be using this time to evaluate any changes they may want to make to their tech stack so they are well positioned for an economic rebound.
What agencies should be thinking about
In the era of flexible work, agencies need to be thinking about how they are going to rise to meet that challenge in a few key areas.
1. What are your plans to be mobile friendly?
- Can a candidate of yours quickly and easily find work on their phone? Can they onboard themselves, find jobs with automated matching, and reach out to their recruiters?
2. What are your plans to keep your brand top of mind in the market?
What touch points do you have with your candidate (and client base). Are you leveraging all possible channels (social media, job boards, job fairs, website optimization, branded technology solutions, etc..
3. How are you staying connected with and differentiated with your customers (especially dormant ones)?
- What are you doing to nurture your client relationships, especially ones that may not be making placements with you right now. What can you offer them that other agencies can’t?
4. How agile are your processes?
- Are you creating processes that can scale up and scale down as demand rises and falls.
Pro tip:
Use staffing platforms to effectively scale your operations. It can provide the scalability needed to ramp up operations during peak seasons or scale down during slower periods.
This flexibility allows your agency to meet ever-changing demands, ensuring efficiency and competitiveness in the staffing landscape.
Before diving into any new tool or process assessment, think about these top level problems in the context of your current reality and how to transition that to a time when you’ll see increased demand in the market. This will help you be in a position to capitalize on that increased demand.
How to prepare your team for change
There are a lot of challenges that come with implementing something new. Here are two pieces of advice from Sara Luchsinger of Staffing Ideation Group based on common roadblocks:
1. Understand the fear of change
New tools often come with a fear that they will replace jobs (one need only look at all the chatter around AI to understand this). But more often than not, it has the reverse effect. Instead of making positions redundant, it refines them and makes them more valuable and diverse. The staffing industry has feared many tools that ended up making it more valuable overall (like job boards).
Make sure this is clear to your team. If a tool that enables automated job matching saves them 20% of their time, give some suggestions about where they might redirect that 20% to further refine their skills.
2. Invite all voices to the table
It’s important to understand the temperature of your team and plan accordingly. You will have people who are excited about new technology (champions), people who don’t seem to care (indifferents), and people who are against it (dissenters). Make sure you are conversing with all three camps before making widespread changes – they all have something important to offer.
Your champions will help you raise the profile of the new solution across the organization, your indifferents will help you understand what’s needed to take apathy to excitement and your dissenters will force you to plan for any gaps.
The process of refining your tech stack is an involved one. Make sure you’re spending time thinking about the kind of future you want for your agency, the problems you need to solve to get there and how you will sell your team on the solution. Book some time with our team to learn more.
