The “temporary help” industry has
grown up. From its origins in clerical
and light industrial, the business has expanded to almost every professional
position. Unfortunately, the process of
identifying and hiring the right temporary
professionals into these positions has not
grown up quite as fast.
“People can get a whole lot better at hiring temporary staff,” says Joel Adams,
CEO and founder of Devon Consulting.
“Neither the clerical temp model nor the
permanent professional model is optimal
for professional contract assignments.”
Smart Business spoke to Adams about
the mistakes buyers make and how the
right process can mean the difference
between hiring the right person for the
project or making a very expensive mistake.
What are some of the mistakes companies
make when looking to bring on temporary
professionals?
Looking for the wrong things — Some
customers get so focused on measuring the
agency, they forget to notice how the temporary professional actually performs.
Sometimes agencies are measured on how
many résumés are submitted and how fast,
but not on how many people were placed
or how many of them completed their
assignments. Value should be measured by
the performance of the worker. That isn’t
always easy but it is a far more relevant
measure.
Cutting off communications — Too
many companies set up processes that
eliminate direct communication between
the hiring manager and the recruiter at the
agency. All job orders being sent to agencies and all résumés going to the manager
are required to go through one central
point. This can quickly become a bottleneck, but that is not the biggest problem.
The subtleties of the job requirements and
the particular strengths and weaknesses of
the candidates do not get conveyed. The
dialogue is lost. Mistakes multiply and suboptimal solutions become the norm.
Relying on the paperwork — People are not paper and cannot be adequately
represented by a resume. And jobs are far
more multi-dimensional than any job
description can capture. Senior recruiters
are valuable resources because of their
years of experience in understanding the
subtleties of candidates, jobs and work
environments.
Putting the wrong people in charge —
I frequently see processes being developed
and implemented by individuals who have
no hiring experience. People are not widgets and professional staff is not the same as
clerical. It takes hiring experience to do it
right.
Ignoring relationships — People want
to buy from people they like and trust. And
they particularly want to do business with
people who have previously performed
well in similar transactions. Setting up a
process that eliminates previous good suppliers or stripping agency identification
from the candidate, takes valuable choices
and information away from the decision
maker.
Ignoring the real costs — I have heard
clients say that they have solved the price
or rate problem by locking the vendor into
long-term contracts with guaranteed rates.
But if you hire an engineer who is not quite
right for the job, it could take months to discover this. And by that time, a company
may have so much invested in the worker
that it is very difficult to replace him with
someone else. The total cost of that contract worker will be higher either in terms
of the time it will take to complete the job
or in the quality of the work.
Too many agencies — If a new temporary position is given to 10 agencies, each
agency thinks that if it does a great job finding a candidate, it will still only have a 10
percent chance of making the placement.
Hence, each agency will take a quick look
through its files, submit a resume and
move on to an order that has a higher probability of generating income. This puts the
burden of sifting through résumés on the
client and the best candidate may not have
even been submitted.
Not enough agencies — Around the
turn of the millennium, many companies
were seduced into selecting a ‘prime vendor’ or ‘vendor on premises’ for all of their
temporaries. But Milton Friedman was
right: free markets work and monopolies
don’t. Over time, when one side has a
monopoly, costs go up and quality will go
down. Some companies are now ejecting
or losing 40 percent of their professional
temps before their assignments are completed.
What can companies do to set up a good
process?
Once you identify a need for supplemental professional staff, insist on more communication between the agency and the
hiring manager, not less. Take advantage of
existing experiences and relationships by
giving exclusives to your best suppliers.
Take advantage of the free market by dealing with more than one supplier. Rate the
actual value received. It may require a subjective measure of the individual’s performance, but it is still the most relevant
measure. Then give out more or less work
to your preferred suppliers based on their
actual performance.
JOEL ADAMS is CEO and founder of Devon Consulting. Reach
him at (610) 964-5703 or [email protected].