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How To Get The Staff You Need When HR Is Too Busy

When HR is busy, everyone is busy.

If they can’t help you hire for that vital role you need to fill, it leaves you with a serious predicament. The work can’t stop and your strategic objectives have to be met. It’s worse when there’s a shortage of skilled applicants and your job posting has been open for months.

What do you do?

At this point, it’s time to look outside the bounds of traditional hiring. Clearly, that route isn’t working for you and is leaving you high and dry when help is needed the most. Perpetually open job postings and an HR department who can’t plug the holes are the permission you need to look at hiring alternatives.

Temporary Compromises To Traditional Hiring

The traditional hiring process involves two main ingredients:

  1. Time
  2. Money

These might not be in abundance for you right now.

In a good year, when there’s not a labor shortage, hiring can take up to three months. And unfortunately 20% of new hires leave after only six months, forcing you to repeat the process over and over.

Time is consumed by posting jobs, taking applications, conducting interviews, and then onboarding and training. All of that has a price tag too, and a freshly hired team member comes with salary and benefit costs, which means HR has to be involved somewhere in the process.

Clearly, hiring alternatives are necessary.

Some employers are finding new ways to hire using the structure of the traditional hiring model, but approaching it from different angles and using tools to shave some of the time and cost off of it. But that’s only a partial solution.

Some turn to freelancers or virtual assistant agencies, but much of the time people are using temp agencies as the go-to hiring alternative, if they have someone available. 

Temp agencies interview and hire staff, creating a pool of available workers for clients to access. When you’re desperate, the savings of time and cost is clear. You contact them, and they pick the next available worker from the pool. They send someone over to help.

You avoid interviews and all of that fuss, and get someone to at least partially fill the gap pretty quickly. Plus, if you like the temp worker well enough, maybe you’ll treat a temp agency as a place to find trial employees and offer someone a full-time job down the road.

Problem solved, right?

Except it isn’t. Temp agencies operating on the “pool” of workers approach often aren’t giving you the best fit for what you need, and the quality of staff is often only just passable. Additionally, there can be inefficiencies that come from relying too much on temporary workers. 

A temp agency and other temporary solutions, you see, doesn’t solve the temporary problem, that pesky issue where a large percentage of new hires leave and force you to onboard someone new. And even if you’re using them as a way to try out potential employees, you’ll still get stuck with the costs that come with hiring an employee.

Temp agencies mostly solve the problem of needing someone fast. Even freelancers and virtual assistant agencies have this same downside: it might be a bit better than traditional hiring in some areas, but not much better in others.

That’s why you need to turn to a remote staffing company instead.

Why A Remote Staffing Company Is The Best Option

Sometimes money can’t help when there’s a skill shortage. In May 2019, the marketing department of one of the world’s largest beverage companies was given a vital strategic project to complete. Already over-stretched they needed help and fast, but HR were unable to find anyone on a time-frame that would make a difference, and so the marketing team reached out to Boldly.  Initially skeptical that we could help, that all changed when, in less than 5 days, we matched them with one of our team, an experienced marketing professional with 20 years experience at Pernod-Ricard. In the words of their marketing director, “I almost fell off my chair. I could not believe that they not only had someone to fill our role, but someone far better than we could have found if hiring directly.” They worked together for nearly 2 years.

A remote staffing company like Boldly, which offers subscription staffing, is your best option when you need highly-skilled long-term staff at short notice. It checks off all the boxes that the temp agency and those other options do not, and then some.

Let’s look at some of the characteristics of subscription staffing through a remote staffing company.

  • Remote location. Instead of your new team member working in the office, they work remotely. Not only does this open the door to great talent around the country instead of being limited to your location, but it gives you more flexibility in how and where you work.
  • Compliance with the law. Like some temp agencies, our team members are our full W2 employees. We take care of all the tax and compliance issues so you don’t have to worry about whether you’ve run afoul of the law by using a 1099 independent contractor incorrectly. 
  • A-list talent. We field tens of thousands of job applications each year. Remote work is the trend, and while many want to work from home, we have extremely strict standards. Only the best applicants, with incredible skills, and often experience in Fortune-500 and C-suite work, are brought on board. We’ve handled all the interviewing and screening. You don’t have to worry about getting the best of the best.
  • Permanent culture. Because we aren’t a temp agency, we make sure our team feels permanently connected via our work culture. It’s not easy creating that for a remote team, but we’ve been doing it since 2012 and have a decade of experience creating a culture that binds our team together. 
  • Subscription staffing. With a temp agency, and even other remote staffing companies, you might have to sign a contract for X number of hours whether you know you’ll need that much or not. We like flexibility, and we offer the subscription staffing model instead. You pay for what you need making one payment each month, without dealing with payroll, contracts, or other legal issues. 
  • Longevity. Most of our team members stay with clients for years, on average 2-3 years, which is practically unheard of in the temporary staffing industry. They become a legitimate full-fledged team member that you can rely on and really trust, since you don’t have to worry about them abandoning you shortly after you’ve started working with them.

Here’s how we see it: you’re not looking for a temporary worker, because that’s a temporary solution. You’re looking for a long-term solution, without all the up-front headache.

Get A New Team Member In Days

Hiring during a labor shortage is difficult. Hiring when HR is too busy or not even convinced you need to bring on a full-time employee is frustrating. You’d like a new team member ASAP, not a temp, but there’s no joy coming from HR.

You feel stuck.

That’s why a remote staffing company, offering subscription staffing, is the perfect solution. And it’s incredibly easy to get started. 

When you contact us, we listen to you tell us what you need. We match you with someone who not only has the skills and experience, but also the personality and work style that fits best. When everyone is sure it’s a good fit, you’re off and running. We make sure everything is going well. You subscribe to the hours you need, knowing you can adjust that over time as needed.

You get an incredible new staff member with zero hiring headache and cost, along with total flexibility and no budget-busting contracts locking you into hours you don’t need.

Instead of three months and thousands of dollars for a new hire, you could be up and running in a few days. Ready to get started?

Topic: Remote Staffing

About the author Sandra Lewis is the Founder and CEO of Boldly. She's passionate about helping Businesses, Organizations and Executives increase productivity and move their work forward with the right skills and resources. Setting an example of the efficiencies gained working remotely, she’s been leading her entire team on a virtual basis for the past decade.

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