The (not so) hidden cost of managing temporary employment agencies

In fact, Flex is a Business Reporter client.

A blended workforce benefits workers and employers, but only if hiring managers can close the technology gap

The biggest obstacle to increasing profits for many large companies in industries such as hospitality, retail, logistics and care is often not competition, but their own reluctance to adopt technology for the workforce.

Every day, companies lose a small fortune due to overstaffing, excessive temp agency fees, and lost productivity. This is the legacy of using inefficient systems that cannot support a truly flexible workforce.

Hiring Managers Are Flying Blind

The business case for relying more on a flexible workforce is clear: fluctuating consumer demand means that staffing requirements in industries such as retail, hospitality and logistics change almost daily.

Companies that match supply with demand realize enormous efficiencies that can offset the low margins in these industries and reduce the impact of high employee turnover.

This explains why 65 percent of global companies They plan to increase the use of temporary workers in the next two years, which creates a whole new set of problems.

Hiring standards and processes vary greatly between agencies. For example, while one agency might put candidates through multiple interviews to ensure they meet the high standards expected of an employer, another might not even ask for more than one reference. Worse still, most companies struggle to identify the origin and cost of their temporary contracts, and too often staff are tracked using old-school methods: spreadsheets and paper timesheets.

The net result? Leaders lack visibility into their overhead, and temporary staff costs quickly spiral out of control.

Closing the huge technology gap

The lack of visibility when it comes to temporary staff and associated agency costs is a product of the “technology gap” – a fundamental disconnect between companies' stated business objectives and their investment in technology to achieve those objectives. Companies want to become more flexible, but their existing processes leave them in treacle.

Think about it from an employee's point of view: Temping gives them control over when and where they work, allowing them to balance income with other commitments. But in reality, working with agencies often involves endless back-and-forth phone calls and a lack of transparency about the opportunities available.

How Indeed Flex closes that gap

In fact, Flex was created as the antidote to the limitations of the temp industry. Our co-founder experienced firsthand the lack of flexibility and visibility for job seekers and saw how employers also struggled to access high-quality, reliable workers for their staffing needs.

Recognizing an opportunity to revolutionize the market, it built a platform that empowered both parties: offering job seekers greater flexibility and choice, and giving employers instant access to a pre-vetted, engaged, on-demand workforce.

As this vision expanded, we discovered broader workforce management issues across multiple locations, which led to the development of Indeed Flex Plus.

Introducing Indeed Flex Plus

Indeed Flex is a comprehensive end-to-end temporary workforce solution. The platform allows companies to:

Ultimately, this allows companies to identify skills gaps, optimize costs and adapt their workforce strategy in real time, and has been shown to help companies reduce agency costs by up to 40 percent.

Click here to discover Indeed Flex.