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Filling the gap where recruitment and temp-agencies fall short
Editorial by Christian Saint Cyr
National Director / Canadian Job Development Network
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While we get together each week to discuss job development within education, social services and government-funded employment programs, we sometimes forget there is a giant sector doing much of the same work.
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The work of employment placement an recruitment companies in Canada is valued at $23.1 billion, which increased 17.7% between 2021 and 2022, just as we were emerging from the pandemic.
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By comparison, the Government of Canada spends just over $2 billion, or less than 10% of what companies spend to have recruitment companies provide many of the same services.
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According to a recent survey commission by Indeed Flex, 68% of employers use staffing firms to recruit new staff, cover seasonal workload fluctuations and fill in for absent permanent employees.
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As it turns out, employers are not particularly happy with the service these costly companies are providing. Seventy per cent report low fulfillment rates due to difficulty finding the right workers.
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The survey found that 61% of businesses that use staffing firms report working with two or more providers, but 61% of hiring managers felt these companies lacked visibility into performance and costs.
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Top reasons why businesses use staffing firms include:
- To recruit new staff, 44.5%
- To cover seasonal fluctuations in workload, 43.4%
- To fill in for absentee permanent employees, 38.6%
- To find specific skill sets, 32.6%
- To reduce labour costs, 29.1%
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When asked about the frequency of staffing firm use, 53.4% of businesses cited occasional to frequent use, 14.4% said they rarely use staffing firms and 32.2% reported not using them at all.
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As to why employers would choose to pay for these services over using government-funded employment programs, a number of possibilities emerge. These include: the perceived quality of candidates; the value of 'purchasing' expertise; and the underlying assumption: 'you get what you pay for'.
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What can the career development sector do to address these concerns? It certainly doesn't hurt to remember that there is a growing dissatisfaction with placement and temporary firms. It's also extremely valuable, when you engage employers to remind them that with rising inflation and employer costs, recruitment through a funded organization can provide tremendous financial benefits with little or no cost.
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Beyond this, it's important for us as career professionals to focus on perceived value in our services. Just like we should be encourage clients and students to believe they are fortunate to be able to utilize our services. We should adopt a mindset of 'scarcity', suggesting to employers we have a number of employers we are marketing our clients to and we might be able to persuade them to work for one employer over another.
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Even as we say this, you might be resistant or even think that employers you are working with wouldn't buy into this paradigm, but I will remind you of one underlying notion. Professional sports- and talent-agents believe in and regularly sell their clients' services to potential customers. They are singularly focused on their clients strengths and they do tell potential companies that they would be lucky to be working with their clients.
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In the career development sector, it's easy to be tentative when we extol the skills and abilities of our clients.
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Believe in your clients! Mitigate their challenges, focus on their strengths and always market them as someone who will make a contribution far and beyond what the employer is expecting.
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By the way, even as I wrote this, I originally wrote "might make a contribution," and then changed it to "could make a contribution," and changed it again to "will make a contribution," because even in writing this I was being tentative.
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Can you imagine a lawyer speaking to a jury and saying, "it's entirely possible my client didn't commit this crime." We couch our pitches to employers because we want to guard against things not working out.
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Instead, market your clients with conviction, take every step you can to ensure their success and if things don't work out, deal with the fall-out rather than laying the ground work for future challenges even before your client has even been hired.
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We’ll be discussing the benefits of increased productivity at our #MotivatingMondays meeting of the Canadian Job Development Network, Tuesday Sep. 30th at 8:30am Pacific; 9:30am Mountain; 10:30am Central; 11:30am Eastern; 12:30pm Atlantic and at 1pm in Newfoundland.
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On the morning of Tuesday September 3rd, 'Click this Link' to join the session on YouTube, this week only.
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