Global Staffing Industry Is Changing: Adapt Or Disappear

The global staffing industry is worth €457 billion. The industry is growing at an average rate of 13% year-on-year. It has drastically evolved in the last 5 years with changing dynamics of talent needs across the industry. New age technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and automation are rapidly changing the way we work and make decisions today.

Gone are the days where the organization would just expect pumping of resumes from their staffing partners with basic operational coordination. Need of the arc is to overcome the prevailing clutter of manpower consulting firms in the market and attain the “Go-To-Partner” status through exemplary value additions in shaping company’s workforce. So, the question is how do staffing firms attain the “Go-To-Partner” status? The answer lies in the adoption of new age technologies to attract, engage and retain top talent for respective organizations.

1. Recruitment BOTs:  A BOT doesn’t need to take a smoke, lunch or a restroom break. It can work 24x7, day and night identifying top notch profiles across multiple channels of sourcing inclusive of job portals, developer communities like GitHub, Stack Exchange as well as your internal database. Recruiters on an average spend 70% of their time in sourcing and less than 30% of their time in engaging with candidates. Through the adoption of BOTs, candidate engagement will increase, so is the candidate experience, resulting in better quality hires. BOTs can also work on multiple requisitions at a same time, reducing the TAT by more than 50%.

2. Virtual Bench Concept: Today organizations are looking to hire resource which can join them immediately, but most of the MNCs have a notice period of 60-90 days. This problem is solved by implementing “Virtual Bench Concept”.  All the leading staffing players have a large pool of contract employees across categories and geographic locations. There should be a resource optimization teams in place which shall manage and monitor the contract duration of each temporary employee, classify them into different skills buckets, map them to new projects/ job opportunities and deploy the resources accordingly. This entire process must be managed through an ERP system, governed and owned by senior executives. If properly implemented there will be no need to have a physical bench of resources and “Just-In-Time” hiring can be achieved with significant cost saving.

3. Gamification Tools to Engage: In today’s highly competitive market top talent is a scarcity and every organization wants to attract and hire the best resource. Gamification tools are so vital to enabling the same. Candidates need to relate themselves to the employer’s brand and feel motivated enough to join the organization's post selection. A common problem which all the organizations encounter today is that of a high percentage of offer dropouts. Recruitment partners should have an in-house gamification platform which can be customized for respective clients to ensure candidates are continuously engaged post section and offer rollout till their onboarding.

4. Virtual Technical Assessment: Today one of the key challenge organizations have with their staffing partners is the quality of resumes shared with them. Most of the staffing firms dump resumes without having any kind of a technical assessment for sourced candidates. New age staffing companies are implementing processes wherein the moment candidates apply for a job posting either on job portals, social media pages or on the career section of company’s website; an automated technical assessment test link is triggered to their respective email-ids prompting them to complete the test. Based on the performance and results of the test, the candidate’s profile is shortlisted and processed further for the client’s interaction

5. Leveraging Social Media - Connect with Passive Talent: Today one of the major challenges for staffing organization is over-dependence on job portals, limiting their talent pool which can generally be categorized under active job-seekers with potential chances of window shopping for job offers with higher compensation packages. This issue can be resolved but leveraging social media platforms and developer communities like LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Exchange where a continuous dialogue and consistent communication will help to connect and attract passive talent, resulting in stable and quality hiring. You don’t need a staffing vendor whose only channel of sourcing is your regular job portal.

Author Bio

Harshal Goyal is Head of Sales, India, at Apar PeopleWorld. Harshal is a multi-faceted management professional with over 7 years of work experience in the staffing industry, defining talent solutions to help firms shape their workforce strategies to attract, retain and engage top talent and build a performance driven culture. Connect Harshal Goyal Visit www.aparpeopleworld.com