The (not so) hidden cost of temporary agency management

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Fixing the problem: Indeed Flex offers job seekers greater flexibility and choice (iStock)

Indeed Flex is a Business Reporter client.

A blended workforce benefits workers and employers – but only if hiring managers can bridge the tech gap

The biggest obstacle to increased profits for many large companies in industries such as hospitality, retail, logistics and care is often not competition, but their own reluctance to adopt workforce technology.

Every day, businesses lose a small fortune because of overstaffed shifts, excessive temp agency fees and lost productivity. This is the legacy of using inefficient systems that cannot support a truly flexible workforce.

Hiring managers are flying blind

The business case for relying more heavily on a flexible workforce is clear: fluctuating consumer demand means staffing requirements across industries such as retail, hospitality and logistics change on a near-daily basis.

Companies that match supply with demand gain huge efficiencies that can compensate for these industries’ low margins and reduce the impact of high employee turnover.

This explains why 65 per cent of global businesses plan to increase their use of temporary workers in the next two years, which creates a whole new set of problems.

Standards and processes for recruitment vary wildly between agencies. For example, while one agency might put candidates through multiple interviews to ensure they meet the expected high standards of an employer, another might not even request more than one reference. Worse still, most businesses struggle to identify the source and cost of their temps, with staff very often tracked using old-school methods – spreadsheets and paper timesheets.

The net result? Leaders lack visibility of their overall spending, with temporary staffing costs quickly spiralling out of control.

Closing the yawning tech gap

The lack of visibility when it comes to temporary staffing and associated agency costs is a product of the “tech gap”: a fundamental disconnect between companies’ stated business objectives and their investment in technology to meet those goals. Companies want to become more flexible, but their existing processes leave them wading through treacle.

Think about it from an employee’s point of view: temporary work gives them control over when and where they work, allowing them to balance earning with other commitments. But in reality, working with agencies often involves endless back-and-forth phone calls and a lack of transparency about available opportunities.

How Indeed Flex bridges that gap

Indeed Flex was created as the antidote to the temporary job industry’s limitations. Our co-founder experienced the lack of flexibility and visibility for jobseekers firsthand, and saw how employers also struggled to access reliable, high-quality workers for their staffing needs.

Recognising an opportunity to disrupt the market, he built a platform that empowered both parties – offering job seekers greater flexibility and choice, and providing employers instant access to a pre-vetted, committed, on-demand workforce.

As this vision expanded, we uncovered broader workforce management issues across multiple locations, leading to the development of Indeed Flex Plus.

Introducing Indeed Flex Plus

Indeed Flex is a comprehensive, end-to-end temporary workforce solution. The platform enables businesses to:

• Quickly onboard and offer shifts to their own employees, reducing agency dependency and spend
• Access the Indeed Flex Marketplace, a pool of 165,000 pre-qualified temporary workers (we call them “Flexers”)
• Use our smart-matching system to find suitable, local Flexers to fill shifts
• Onboard their own agencies or tap into our agency network for additional shift coverage for hard-to-fill locations
• View and analyse the performance and cost of their entire blended workforce through a single digital platform

Ultimately, this allows companies to identify skills gaps, optimise costs and adapt their workforce strategy in real time – and it has proven to help companies cut agency costs by up to 40 per cent.

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Click here to discover Indeed Flex.