Flexible Staffing

In the world of temp agencies, staffing firms, and recruitment, there are so many practices and techniques that you may not know what you need or how to get it. A flexible staffing strategy can be crucial to your business success. But first, what is flexible staffing?

At its most basic sense, flexible staffing is a practice by which you can fill vacancies in employment with independent contractors, part-time employees, or temp workers instead of hiring a new permanent employee right away. Flexible staffing workers are typically hired through a third-party staffing agencyor firm, and can be temporary employees or temp-to-hire.

This alternative to hiring permanent employees can help you pivot quickly in tough situations where you need a rapid response. By granting relief to your core team from time to time, especially when you have a thinned out workforce or are adding new roles, they can focus on their essential work and be more efficient. Using flexible labor staffing through a staffing agency such as Morales Group can take the headaches of constant recruitment off your plate, allowing your managers and HR team to focus on core work instead of dealing with turnover.

A flexible staffing strategy can be cheaper for you, saving money and time. If you pay only for the talent when you truly need it, you free up your full-time workers to tackle complicated challenges while temporary employees assist with daily duties – all while saving money.

If you only employ a rigid staffing strategy, an unintended consequence can be a cyclical pattern of hiring and reducing staff which is demoralizing at best and a reputation and productivity killer at worst. A flexible labor staffing strategy is a more holistic approach than constantly hiring more full-time employees, allowing you to easily stop engaging when your business need for more hands on deck disappears. Even better, flexible staffing professionals allows you avoid bad permanent hires, which are a grave drain on finances, and you can get specialized talent quickly.

Plus, an interim workforce can free up your permanent team to finally tackle long-term challenges. By providing tactical support for the daily grind of activities, your permanent team can shift their focus toward building up your organization for the long run.

There is also the obvious truth that finding talented and skilled team members isn’t as easy as we might like it to be. By employing a flexible staffing strategy, you no longer have to waste time, or potentially money, by making a bad hiring decision. It also takes the entire burden of constant cycling of recruitment off your plate.

Indeed

Indeed claims to be the number one job site in the world. It’s true that this website is a worldwide job search engine, with over 250 million visitors every month. Indeed is intended not only for job seekers, as a way to aggregate job listings from across the internet, but also for employers and recruiters. It’s the fastest way to reach the most job seekers from the most amount of countries in the world, so Indeed’s value as a talent pool is hard to match. It can also be a cost-effective solution, and posting jobs is free as well as perusing jobs.

However, at the end of the day, Indeed is a website. It doesn’t actively work for you. In this sense, Indeed is only part of a flexible staffing strategy and should be paired with other methods.

MI

Michigan (MI) typically makes it to the upper ranks as far as the best states to find a job, landing the 14th best spot in 2019. While in common thought the hotspots CA and NY are considered to be the best places to land a career, these places also harbor the most competition. MI is the tenth most populous state in the U.S. and is home to Detroit, which is among the country’s largest metropolitan economies.

MI has developed a diverse economy but is most famously known as the foundation and center of the American automotive industry. These days though, MI has expanded to be a hub for manufacturing, forestry, high-tech, agriculture, and other services.

MO

Missouri (MO) is solidly middle tier as far as the best states in which to find a job, landing around the 33rd spot in 2019. MO is the 18th most populous state in the U.S. and the culture blends the Midwest and South, especially when it comes to values, food, and even music. The major industries of MO include light manufacturing, electrical equipment, chemicals, foods and agriculture, financial services, aerospace, and more. The science field is growing.

Staffing Agencies

Staffing agencies can go by many names – staffing firms, recruiting agencies, employment agencies, flexible staffing companies, and more. For companies looking to partner with one of many staffing agencies, there is the golden opportunity to make connections with multiple hiring managers whose sole aim is to find the right people for your job openings and fill them in a timely manner.

When searching for “staffing agencies near me,” I might find a list of local Indianapolis staffing agencies such as Surge Staffing or Express Staffing – or, of course, Morales Group. There are multiple benefits to working with staffing agencies near me, especially the fact that I can trust that staffing agencies near me will know the market, know the pertinent pay rate information, and can take on the burden of recruitment and free me to focus on my core business objectives.

Elite staffing agencies employ many recruiters who will work on my behalf to fill the positions at my organization, no matter the openings – they can handle entry level to executive level and can handle any required specific skills or knowledge.

While Surge Staffing, Express Staffing, and other firms do have the local insider know-how, Morales Group as a Minority Business Enterprise can offer multilingual recruitment, diversity, and cost reductions for hiring an MBE.

Staffing agencies are a core component of any flexible staffing strategy, allowing me to employ an interim workforce that is adjustable to my seasonal business needs. A bonus is that “temp agencies” are constantly growing and evolving, many of which are able to offer a consulting role when it comes to human resources and acting as thought leaders in the field of workforce development. By liaising with a staffing agency, the burden of recruitment is off my plate, since agencies often handle the full load of cyclical recruitment, background checks, drug testing, screening, interviewing, and even training for the specific skills I need for my positions.

Many companies see boosted productivity when they partner with a staffing agency, since the firm’s contract depends on delivering quality talent. These firms can handle flexible workers, part-time, seasonal, and temp-to-hire, even direct-hire. Agencies also may handle their own payroll and marketing in-house, making life even easier for the clients with which they partner.

Since agencies are often experts at impacting productivity rates, managing turnover, and increasing retention, they can usually offer advice to a business if they are seeing any of these issues, and provide a solution that works for everyone.

Flexible Work Arrangements

The term “flexible work arrangements” refers to when employees and members of the workforce have greater scheduling freedom than a traditional 9-to-5, 40-hour work week. There are many flexible work schedule examples, including the flex time, reduced hours, compressed work week, telecommuting, work from home, job sharing, hour banking, leaves and sabbaticals, gradual retirement, etc. These alternative work arrangements typically improve recruitment and employee engagement, which in turn show positive effects on attendance and productivity.

A flexible work from home policy can be very attractive to many employees, especially those who are working parents. This flexibility can take many forms, including but not limited to staggering shifts, rotating days or week of in-office presence with working from home, and other creative options.

When it comes to flexible work arrangements, it’s essential to have work from home policy samples to create a procedure that works for your organization. These may include specific requirements for whatever flexible work schedule policy you are choosing to implement, such as how many days’ notice, trial arrangements, eligibility such as length of continuous employment with the company, department need, and more.

It may also be helpful for your HR team or liaison to research 40 hour work week schedule examples or other work schedules examples to figure out how to best begin executing alternative work arrangements within your organization. Getting a taste for what success other companies are finding with a flexible work schedule policy can point you in the right direction, and taking a gander at their work from home policy samples may be the best way to begin.

Telecommuting and remote work are two of the most popular flexible work arrangements, but condensed work weeks and customized working hours are two creative options that are recently becoming more popular. A condensed work week means you maintain a 40-hour week but workers can be flexible on where and when those hours are spent. Customized working hours can help orient workers to start their day when they are most productive – typically by offering starting times in a 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. window.