Staffing services and agencies must learn how to run profitably in the post-pandemic economy. The success will come from putting in that extra effort, creative thinking, and possibly reimagining the organization’s value. When considering the best ways to operate a staffing business in a post-pandemic economy, your clients will want to use strategies to increase their value and discover more staffing sales opportunities.
Strengthen Client Relationships
Your clients will need to analyze their clientele relationships, considering who is an essential partner to the organization and who is playing a strategic role in the talent management process.
To strengthen these relationships, staffing services can:
- Plan a meeting (or Zoom) to understand how the current economy is impacting their clients.
- Assess the depth of relationship with each client. (What is the percentage of their staffing business they obtain? Are there other departments or divisions that could use their services? etc.)
- Determine where you have gaps in relationships and develop a plan to expand and strengthen the network of contacts.
- Work with each client to outline a proactive workforce strategy so they can anticipate their hiring needs, proactively source the talent they will require, and effectively manage their temporary and full-time hiring needs.
Proactive Workforce Planning
It is in your clients’ best interest to help local employers create better workforce plans, which involves anticipating talent needs and then facilitating access to people with the right skills at the right time.
A workforce plan considers many factors and can include:
- Talent needs assessment (skills, level of experience, location, etc.)
- Sourcing onsite and remote workers
- Firing management
- Converting fixed overhead to variable cost
- Staff preparation for recovery
- Benchmarking top performers
- Updating position descriptions
- Ideas for bridging skill gaps
Your clients can provide workforce planning as a paid service or choose to offer it as a complimentary service to get in front of the line when hiring starts.
Better Online Visibility
Especially in a post-pandemic economy, they must master digital marketing. People are currently spending significantly more time on social media than pre-pandemic. However, too many agencies have cut their marketing to save money when they should be:
- Ensuring clients and prospects know they are ready to provide services
- Strengthening their positioning
- Increasing demand for last-minute fill-ins
- Cross-selling services
Best strategies for digital marketing to increase visibility:
- Create content that matches the target audience’s interests. (Blogs, videos, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, etc.)
- Share content on social media, company pages, and team member accounts.
- Create communities where clients and/or candidates can exchange ideas. This can be done on LinkedIn and Facebook groups, Slack, and other messaging platforms.
- Add paid promotion, so contact is better reached. This may mean advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- Bring people from social media and ads to their website so they can take action.
Remaining Valuable
Staffing services and agency’s value comes from filling defined needs for clients. However, it doesn’t stop there since many companies also provide higher-value services like onsites, MSP and RPO services, and product solutions or outsourcing. Remaining competitive in this industry means providing new services where you play a bigger role, taking on more responsibility for clients. Your clients should also secure staffing industry EPLI to protect their agency properly. More services your clients can consider offering include:
- Workforce planning
- Project solutions
- Training
- HR consulting
- Outplacement/career transition services
- Outsourced recruiting/workforce management
- VMS
- MSP
About World Wide Specialty Programs
For the last 50 years, World Wide Specialty Programs has dedicated itself to providing the optimal products and solutions for the staffing industry. As the only insurance firm to be an ASA commercial liability partner, we are committed to that partnership and committed to using our knowledge of the industry to provide staffing firms with the best possible coverage. For more information about Staffing Professional Liability Insurance or any other coverage, we have available to protect your staffing business, give us a call at (877) 256-0468 to speak with one of our representatives.