Success story

How JoinedUp transformed the UK’s largest temporary staffing agency.

November 23, 2022

Established in 1986, Staffline is one of the UK’s leading recruitment and training providers of flexible blue-collar workers.

The agency supplies around 50,000 workers daily to clients in agriculture, supermarkets, drinks, driving, food processing, logistics and manufacturing. High-profile clients include Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and online retailers Boohoo and Missguided.

Staffline comprises several specialist recruitment services, Techsearch, Staffline Agriculture and Driving Plus, which provide recruitment services for the technical sector, farming and transport sectors.

 

Staffline CTO, Chris Gleed, and other stakeholders recognized the need for an end-to-end workforce management system that would allow them to remain competitive in today’s tight, candidate-led market, while supporting the organization’s impressive 25% compound annual growth.
 
Staffline stats
  • Staffline is located at over 350 sites across the UK and Ireland
  • The company places +50,000 workers on shifts every day
  • Staffline’s database is made up of 1.2 million candidates and workers
  • Annual spend on temp labor is around $1.5bn.
Challenges

Stakeholders wanted a workforce management system that could ‘stabilize’ their existing data, providing finessed oversight and control of Staffline’s vast worker and client databases.

They were keen to adopt a system that could keep pace with the organization’s stratospheric growth, while still retaining the ‘human touch’ and ease of use that Staffline’s clients and candidates have come to expect.

Siloed data

Staffline relied on a collection of legacy systems to manage its shift-based workforce. Spread across so many systems, Staffline’s ‘siloed’ data proved difficult to access and slow to work with at scale.

Repetitive admin

Staffline wanted to do away with some of the tedious and repetitive administrative tasks associated with traditional recruitment—for both their internal teams and candidates.

Staffline recognized that a lighter workload was key to job satisfaction and a healthy work-life balance for their internal teams. Meanwhile, for the workforce, they felt a more efficient recruitment, and management processes would be essential to improved retention in today’s candidate-led market.
 
Personalization and diversity
 
Staffline wanted to improve automation while retaining a ‘human touch’. This would mean adopting a system that allows a high degree of personalization for a diverse workforce who interact with recruiters across multiple digital and real-world touchpoints.
 
The JoinedUp solution
 
For Staffline, holding data in one location and establishing a single source of truth proved instrumental in gearing the organization for transformation and continued growth.

Staffline got creative with JoinedUp by Beeline’s easy integration, designing innovative new ways for candidates to take ownership of their working lives. They also automated much of the administrative heavy-lifting like shift planning, fulfillment and recording. With JoinedUp, Staffline was able to:
  • Establish a single source of truth: For Staffline, JoinedUp removed the most significant barrier to organizational transformation by establishing an accurate, readily-accessible database that acts as a single source of truth for candidates, clients and internal teams.
  •  Eliminate time-consuming processes: Staffline made the most of JoinedUp’s powerful automation features across their complex workflow. They fulfilled thousands of shifts across hundreds of sites at the touch of a button. Integrated facial recognition time capture systems, talk in real-time with JoinedUp, to capture shifts without entering start and end times into multiple systems.
  • Get ahead of compliance checking: By integrating facial recognition technology, Staffline can automatically verify workers' identities on each shift and stay ahead of modern slavery compliance checking. JoinedUp also produces an audible data trail of licensing, and eligibility to work criteria, for thousands of workers.
  •  Improve accuracy across the board: Improved shift-capture technology and automated timesheet generation, allowed Staffline to calculate worker pay more accurately and efficiently. As a result, teams no longer have to manually adjust timesheets to account for late starts or overtime, and weekly payroll queries have been reduced to zero.
  •  Foster more transparent relationships: Staffline designed a portal for clients to input their shift requirements and view a detailed spend analysis. Clients can also start or stop the clock, approve pricing and - crucially - see that shifts are planned and filled up to a year in advance.
  •  Refine and personalize candidate experience: Staffline integrated detailed surveying at multiple touchpoints across the candidate journey, to gather actionable experiential data that has helped them refine and personalize the candidate experience.

They also designed FLIN—a sophisticated, multilingual chatbot that matches workers with shifts via social media messaging apps, and updates JoinedUp in real-time. FLIN has replaced the need for last-minute ring rounds to fill shifts, and gives candidates more options about how and when they communicate with Staffline.

Real-world benefits

JoinedUp has revolutionized Staffline’s approach to shift-based staffing provision,  freeing its temp workforce and internal teams of the repetitive admin associated with temporary work.

In doing so, Staffline has improved the experience and created a more harmonious work-life balance for all. The company has also generated impressive time and cost efficiencies that will sustain the organization’s growth well into the future.

  • Staffline uses JoinedUp to reliably plan, fill and record over 6 million shifts every year
  • The system is an efficient, accessible database for over 1.2 million workers
  • Staffline uses JoinedUp to reduce the interview screening and scheduling process time to under three minutes
  • With automated pay and charge calculations from JoinedUp, pay queries reduced from 50-100 per week at a single site to zero
  • On-site teams use JoinedUp to digitally onboard groups of 200-250 workers at a time.
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