Strategies to Help You Excel Post-COVID

Your staffing agency has had to tackle some serious challenges since the pandemic first hit, and it’s forced changes into how you operate.

As unemployment rates soared in America, people were left feeling reluctant to change roles, with WaveTrackR reporting a 47% reduction rate in applications across all industries. This left 69% of U.S. employers struggling to find skilled talent for their jobs.

Your business has worked incredibly hard to speedily adjust and pick up the pieces, but where do you go from here? How can you ensure your staffing agency not only survives, but surges ahead of its competition in the new normal?

In this article, we outline some key pointers that you should consider to align with the new future for staffing.

Diversify Your Team

Having a variation of perspectives in your team will be hugely advantageous for the future of your staffing agency. Most notably, you should benefit from increased collaboration and mutual respect, helping to develop a positive and inclusive work culture.

Engender a diverse and inclusive culture, and ensure you aren’t missing the best staffing consultant because of unconscious bias.

Learn How Your Clients Have Been Impacted

A strengthened relationship with your clients is crucial. Avoid being an easily replaced vendor by becoming an essential partner in an organization’s future.

With every business impacted by the pandemic, ask how it’s impacted your client. Understand their past as well as their vision of the future, so you can jointly develop a strategy to help them reach their objectives.

Improve Your Technology

Technology deployment has advanced by five years in the space of one. And it’s proved hugely beneficial to staffing agencies’ business functions of:

• Marketing
• Sourcing
• Screening
• Interviewing
• Onboarding

A LinkedIn report has discovered that 68% of staffing professionals stated that investment in hiring technology is the best way to improve performance over the next five years.

Adopt and Adapt to Market Needs

The U.S. economy has changed. Many businesses have been lost, while others have begun or had to scale up their hiring to meet demand. Consider:

• Your team’s current and potential skillsets
• Who is hiring, and what talent they need
• Which industries are in demand
• Ad-hoc services you may be able to supply

Offer Proactive Workforce Planning

Consider offering a workforce planning service to your clients to help them cope with their own new changes and workloads. In addition to sourcing employees, you could implement:

• Talent needs assessment
• Redundancy and furlough management
• Conversion of fixed overheads to variable costs
• Preparing for staffing recovery
• Top-performer benchmarking
• Updates on skills required in job descriptions
• Ideas to bridge skills gaps

Ramp Up Your Online Visibility

Be the go-to resource for clients and candidates. Focus on your online visibility – social media usage has gone up by 200%. The benefits include:

• Service awareness
• Strengthened industry advantage
• Increased take-up on last-minute fill-ins
• Potential to cross-sell

To do this:

• Create quality content consistently
• Encourage your staff to share your content
• Create (or participate in) communities
• Set up conversion paths along your customer journeys

Implement Automation

Your staffing agency team is busy adjusting to new ways of working and adapting to meet demand. The mundane, repetitive tasks still need doing, but don’t let them sap your team’s motivation and productivity.

Ensure you automate as much as you can. It frees up your team to focus on the tasks they’re best at, and reduces the no-calls and no-shows for interviews and appointments by 25-30%.

Have the Right People on Board

Look after your staffing team by ensuring they have the support and manpower they need. Running them down to the ground on skeletal staff will be devastatingly damaging to the team, your clients, and the business.

Get on board with a specialist staffing agency yourself. Ensure you are maximizing your opportunities to access the right-match people to join your team, through direct hire or retained search.

It’s Time Your Staffing Agency Stood Higher Than the Rest

The key to your staffing agency standing out in the new normal is to create value:

• Value to staff, by bringing diversity, and giving them the tools that they need to enjoy their jobs and be successful in them
• Value to candidates, by seeking their pain points and providing services that go above and beyond
• Value to the business, by nurturing the very core of its mechanics: your staff

Your staffing agency relies heavily on the quality of your staff to adapt to the volatile and ever-changing current of the staffing industry.

Contact EnabledForce today. We execute a laser-focused hunt to bring the best staffing agency staff to you, through both direct hire and retained search.