Junk Your Staffing Agency’s Clunkers – Start a New Staffing Industry Trend!
January 11th, 2010Last year the government completed another one of its ingenious ways to stimulate the economy – the cash for clunkers’ program. A number of people actually made out pretty well trading in one of their old jalopies for a newer fuel efficient model with the Federal government contributing $4000. Since all of us were not able to benefit from the program, we came up with a clunker program of our own that will produce some real hard cash for you and your staffing companies – stuff you can put in your bank account, or buy one of these babies…!
A not-so-fuel-efficient clunker replacement!
First let’s define what “staffing industry clunkers” are – activities performed by your staff that suck precious time and resources away from the activities that produce money and value, and accelerate the success of your staffing business.
Clunkers leading the way in staffing industry trends include:
- Trying to fill orders for clients who don’t give a crap about you. This belongs on the top of the list. Check out this post on segmentation strategies and how they save time and money, How Your Staffing Agency Can Divide and Conquer to Win the Margin Battle.
- Trying to fill orders for clients who care about you, but not enough to give you profitable business (Yeah, I’ve heard that they cover your overhead – forgetaboutit, drop ‘em).
- Getting into long phone conversations when an e-mail will do. Or slaving over a tedious email when a quick phone call would clear up everything.
- Not having automated ways for clients and employees to get answers to the repetitive questions they ask, which takes up everyone’s time to answer; and you can never answer fast enough.
- Manually attaching timeslips to invoices – check with your staffing software vendor to see if they have this capability.
- Making sales calls to unqualified prospects that are not using staffing and never will.
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Here is a big one – hiring the wrong person for a position – especially in sales because it takes months to find out you’ve got a dud.
What additional clunkers do you see topping the list of staffing industry trends? Add them to the list by commenting on this blog – we’d love to hear from you!
Dave Reiss
Founder and CEO
Applied Systems Technology (AST)
