People are the most important assets of any company. No matter how perfect the business strategy is, or how many investments you put into it, nothing will work without the right people occupying the right positions. Finding the right talents is especially important in the IT-sphere, where most processes are done by hand, and even automated ones are still initially created by humans.
Hopefully, today there are many different services, including IT recruiting companies and staffing agencies. Both are extremely useful and are much better options than doing the respective processes yourself or creating a dedicated department. But what’s the difference?
Staffing vs Recruiting
Recruiting
The first and foremost goal of IT recruitment is to find employees for a long period of time. Businesses that turn to an IT recruitment company expect to find true talents that will be glad to work for their company for many years, developing themselves both professionally and personally. It’s a kind of long-term investment that pays off for itself.
Of course, finding the right candidates usually takes a significant amount of time. Ask any IT recruitment agency and they will tell you that IT recruiting can take from several weeks to months. All that just to find the perfect fit for a particular position. Because if an IT recruiter did their job right, the talent they found could bring impressive amounts of profits to the company, with the use of their skills and experience.
Staffing
Staffing, while still being a process of hiring people, has a slightly different goal. Unlike IT recruitment services, staffing companies usually find employees for short periods of time. The reasons for a business to hire people for short-term may be different:
- Some enterprises are season-based, and only need workers for a certain part of the year, usually 3-4 months.
- When a company can’t meet the initial requirements and/or deadlines, it can use staffing to fulfill its needs. The workers will only work until the goal is achieved.
- Sometimes, a company may require a specialist with particular expertise to aid in certain processes in a niche sphere. In such cases, it’s much more logical to turn to staffing services to find a temporary consultant, rather than hiring a full-time worker with the help of IT recruitment firms.
- One of the biggest challenges when dealing with the best IT recruitment companies is the price and time required to find the needed talent. In some cases, such expenses may not be worth the potential profits, so staffing is a better option.
How Does Staffing Work?
The collaboration between the staffing agencies and customers, just like in any other service, starts with communication. Customers need to find the right company for their needs, by comparing and researching the available options on the market. Then, the requirements and job description must be negotiated. At this point, the customer can also get information about the estimated price for the services. After all the requirements and other details are clear, the staffing professionals will start their search.
During the search, there will be many applications. Don’t worry, it’s the hired service’s responsibility to read and analyze all of them. Only the best and the most fitting ones will be shown to you, and only after approval by the company’s own experts. In some cases, you may even give specialists the liberty to make all the decisions on their own, reporting to you only after they find perfect fits for every position.
In general, such details can be personalized as much as you want. That means, you determine how often the hired specialists need to report to you, and on what occasions. Also, keep in mind that many companies that do IT staffing are also IT recruitment consultancies, so you might want to take a look at long-term offers and promising talents.
So, after you get the list of the best candidates for your available positions, it’s time for interviews. As an employer, you might want to take part in the interviews, to get acquainted with your potential workers. However, as staffing is applied to short-term positions mostly, this isn’t as crucial as in IT staff recruitment. Now, after the interviews, you’ll have your pool of candidates. It’s time you decide whether they truly fit the job opportunities you offer, or there’s a need to search again. If everything is alright, the only thing left to do is to sign the contracts and give tasks to the newly hired employees.
Responsibilities
Now, let’s take a closer look at the list of the most important responsibilities of any staffing agency.
1. Calculating the workload inside the company.
After the customers provide them with the needed numbers and information, it’s on staffing specialists to determine how many employees need to be searched for, and what their field and level of expertise should be.
2. Searching for the candidates.
From the basic things like posting, job offers on the dedicated resources to contacting each specialist separately. All the communication is done by the hired services unless the customer wants to participate in the process.
3. Narrowing down the pool.
Usually, the number of candidates is 20-100 times higher than the number of available positions. Sometimes there can be 1000 or more applications for a single job, especially if it’s a high-ranking position. The company’s responsibility is to narrow down these numbers as much as possible.
For that, they will check all the available information and talk to the job-seekers, to reveal their personal qualities and professional abilities. In some cases, there can be 10 people that fit a position perfectly, so you’ll need to interview and decide for yourself, but there are also situations where there are no fitting candidates at all.
4. Interviewing
As said before, the interviews are usually held by the hired agency too. You don’t have to participate in them, as it’s just another process to test the skills and experience of potential employees, and reveal their strong points, weaknesses, and communication skills.
5. Ensuring Security
This is a very broad term, but it means that any good staffing agency will do its best to ensure maximum security in all aspects. It starts with some basic background checking of the job-seekers.
Moreover, the company you hired will also likely discuss the needed legal information with the candidates, so you will never have to worry about that. The contracts will be written by them too, under the customer’s supervision, to make sure everything not only suits the demands but is also legally right.
6. Monitoring Performance
Of course, only the customer can fully determine whether the service they turned to did a good job of finding the right people. However, the said services will also monitor the performance of the people they found. Why? Because it was their responsibility to provide true professionals. Therefore, they must ensure that they meet the initial requirements, which is another responsibility itself.
Summing Up
No matter whether you need to find workers for a week that will help you to meet the deadline, or promising young talents that you’ll invest in for the next few years, there are many companies out there that will be glad to help you. The only thing you need to do is come up with a list of precise requirements, and find the perfect company for your needs. So, we hope that this article helped you to understand how staffing agencies work, and we wish you good luck in your search for the ideal employees. If you eventually decide to outsource your HR, an EOR company can help you.
