This all starts with a Hypothesis I had: the majority of people who have utilized the services from traditional staffing agencies have had, at one point or another, a bad experience.

To test this hypothesis I would start by cold-calling on C-Level Executives, Operations Professionals, HR Professionals, Technology Leaders, and other Hiring Managers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. This was how I opened up the call:

“Hi Mr./Mrs. Smith, we don’t know each other, but I was just wondering whether I could have 10 seconds to ask you a quick question?……(overwhelming ‘yes’ response to this)…I was just curious if you have ever had a bad experience working with a traditional staffing agency?”

Typical responses included: “Of course….”, “That’s a loaded question”, etc. Occasionally, someone would tell me that they were genuinely happy with the level of service they were receiving from their agency – this makes sense because I know a lot of people in the agency world who go above and beyond to serve their clients – but, overall, more than 90% of the people I spoke to told me that they had a bad experience working with tradition staffing agencies.

My hypothesis was correct.

I wanted to dig deeper, I needed to understand what had caused these bad experiences. So, doing what I do best, I turned these cold-calls into meetings. The main purpose of these meetings was to understand what people disliked about the traditional staffing agency model. Over time, this turned out to be a pretty long list, but there were some things that I heard over and over:

1. “I have no idea what process Staffing Agencies go through before presenting me with candidates.”

2. “Staffing Agencies do not take the time out to meet and screen the candidates they send me.”

3. “Staffing Agencies do not do enough to verify the abilities/skills of their candidates.”

4. “Sometimes the candidates that Staffing Agencies send us are good, other times they are not.”

5. “Staffing Agencies can tarnish our company brand by not providing a quality candidate experience during the recruitment process.”

I plan to address these issues individually in upcoming posts, and I will offer potential solutions to these problems.

Cheers,

Nick Howser