Many staffing agencies could be reducing their profitability and thwarting their growth by relying on manual processes and spreadsheets.
JoinedUp’s end-to-end shift-based staffing solution creates efficiencies and automates monotonous tasks to help staffing agencies seamlessly scale and develop closer relationships with hirers.
In our examples, small agencies could grow profit by thousands of pounds per consultant, per week – just by using a solution like JoinedUp.
The number of temporary workers registered with agencies has skyrocketed over the last two years. Following The Great Resignation, the rise of flexible working and a renewed focus on organizational agility, agencies and businesses that efficiently manage their shift-based workforce could be set to benefit the greatest.
The UK is a testament to this. The number of agency temps working in the UK is on the rise; the latest ONS figures show a rise of 34.2% in temporary agency workers to 302,000 in October to December 2021, from 225,000 in the same period in 2020.
The rise is part of a shift towards more informal ways of working that saw a 10% rise in the overall number of temporary workers to 1.71 million in 2020-21.
This is great news for agencies and the hirers and workers who rely on them — and it highlights the crucial role the staffing industry will play in the move towards a more casual labour market.
While the workforce is changing, staffing agencies haven’t moved with the times. Many still rely on photocopied timesheets, spreadsheets and management tools that offer little real-time control or sharing and limited communication.
Administering such systems hampers their ability to react quickly to clients’ dynamic labor demands and offers a poor user experience for workers.
It’s also time-consuming and expensive.
End-to-end staffing solutions, like JoinedUp, can vastly simplify agencies' work by giving consultants access to a live, centralized dashboard to oversee the management of their workers from recruitment to end-of-contract.
In doing so, even smaller agencies will drive financial efficiency and quickly achieve a return on investment. The benefits are even more impressive at scale.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the costs of managing shift-based staff and use JoinedUp’s online calculator to see how it pays off in practice.
Examining the costs
Agencies’ reliance on outdated systems makes consultants’ work needlessly complex.
They often spend a disproportionate amount of time on data input and the monotonous task of updating various management systems, scheduling tools and shift calculators that don’t communicate with each other.
That’s costly when it comes to managing hiring organizations and workers efficiently. Outdated systems give rise to problems like over-hiring and under-hiring. They can also slow the recruitment and retention of labor to a standstill when it’s needed most.
Our online calculator weighs consultant costs and management efficiency against agencies’ gross profit per-worked hour to show the return on investment from using an end-to-end management system.
We’ve used a conservative 0.75p per hour in the examples below, but you can adjust the calculator yourself to see how it pays off for your agency.
Example 1: The small agency
Our first small agency employs three consultants to manage a 100-strong workforce of shift-based staff.
Workers carry out an average of 35-hours per week, which results in a gross profit of £2,625 per consultant.
Using JoinedUp boosts that net profit by +£918 per week to achieve an impressive £47,775 annual increase per consultant and £143,325 for the branch.
Example 2: The big agency
For a larger agency where ten consultants manage 500 shift-based workers, each consultant generates a net profit of £13,125.
Adopting an end-to-end system like JoinedUp boosts the weekly profit per consultant by £4,593 to generate £238,875 of efficiencies over the year and £2.3m for the branch.
Capitalising on efficiency
In both cases, JoinedUp allows consultants to manage more workers comfortably.
A year-two increase of just 100 workers for each recruiter boosts the smaller agency’s overall gross profit by £50K to £286,650 while the larger agency receives an impressive +£500K uptick to £2.8m.
It’s easy to see why JoinedUp is a powerful shift-based workforce management system and an indispensable growth accelerator for agencies.
Real-world data from JoinedUp clients
The examples above, and our calculator, have been formed using real results from JoinedUp clients. Using JoinedUp, our clients:
- Sped up payroll: making a 2 day task, into one that takes as little as 30 minutes.
- Removed as much as 90% of their onboarding admin for candidates.
- Increase their productivity by, on average, 27%.
- Can grow by as much as 35% without adding headcount.
- Save up to 12-hours of work per week, just by using JoinedUp.
- Facilitate a 25-35% growth in the number of candidates per consultant.
- Reduced worker payroll queries by 90%.
Try the calculator
JoinedUp makes shift-based staffing management simple. It lets agencies streamline and centralize their worker data and achieve complete control over time-consuming tasks, scheduling, rate calculation and more.
Visit our site and try out the calculator to see how a JoinedUp approach to shift-based workforce management could work for you.
