Purchase Staffing Solutions Like You Purchase Capital Equipment – With a Process

August 20, 2013 | Staffing Blog

When you get ready to purchase capital equipment for your business you explore all facets of the decision. Ultimately, you want to ensure this significant expenditure will lead to better efficiency and a cost savings down the road. This procurement process is all about maximizing value for the dollar. It’s about total cost of ownership – especially in a business where efficiency is key.

To do this you conduct a thorough evaluation of potential products or equipment, ask questions and probably involve multiple key personnel from multiple departments in the decision-making process. 

That procurement process is simply a good business practice. But do you employ the same process when it comes to hiring a staffing agency? Do you engage the appropriate departments, ask the right questions and fully vet each staffing company? Or, was HR given the task of hiring without the full knowledge of how to measure success? 

You’ve seen how a detailed process results in a successful capital purchase. The same should be applied to hiring a staffing company. That expenditure, same as a piece of new equipment, could cost several hundred thousand dollars and yet it doesn’t get the same level of attention. 

If you put out an RFP to staffing agencies simply asking how many branches they have and whether they are minority owned you’ll get a proposal based solely on price. You haven’t given any indication of your desired outcomes or measures of success.

 

If your temporary staffing solution isn’t meeting your needs, review your procurement process and start buying staffing like you do everything else – with a focus on total cost of ownership.

The result may be a 10% savings on the cost of staffing but what happens when that 10% (and more) is eaten up by increased cost of overtime, training, turnover and problems related to inaccuracy? It would have made more sense to have gone through the same procurement process to hire a staffing agency that you use when shopping the market for products.