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Most staffing companies work like this in the US as well. There are a couple of ways they maintain their middle man status. 1) most of the jobs they provide pe

by S_A_P 6y ago

Most staffing companies work like this in the US as well. There are a couple of ways they maintain their middle man status. 1) most of the jobs they provide personnel for are not overly specialized and the client is happy to no have to hire for and deal with hr issues around these positions. 2) the staffing firms often oversell their role to contractors in how difficult it is to make sure they get paid in a timely manner/offer “career development” training (e.g. letting the contractor work) 3) staffing firms often do a lot of client wining and dining to maintain favorable status. 4) staffing firms often hire young and attractive reps to distract.

mehrdadn 6y ago
I thought the only service being provided is just basically insuring the income. If they have to deal with finding/maintaining contractors/clients and other kinds of overhead then of course that changes things—I just didn't infer that was the situation in Canada from the comment.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
> staffing firms often hire young and attractive reps to distract. LOL, what? "The only reason we used staffing firms was cuz them reps be dummy thicc". I worked for a small/medium ISP for a while and did a lot of hiring for entry-level and mid-level roles. If we threw an ad up on Craigslist for DC, NYC, or Baltimore we would get back, easily, 500+ responses. The signal-to-noise ration was insane. A huge chunk of the responses would be spam or automated-resume-slinging-bots, and like 30-40% would be immediately disqualified for being in different states/countries or being wildly unqualified. Even after adding a few homemade filters and a basic online tech quiz, we'd still end up with like 40 candidates to screen further. The viability of these candidates was... not great... and a lot of them tended to split after a couple years, and several didn't last 6 months. Then we started using a headhunting firm and they did all of the sorting, vetting, and gave us a great 3-to-6-month hiring window. We could ask them for 3 decent clients -- "decent" was relative sometimes -- and have them in a couple weeks, get them hired comparatively quick, and turn them to full-timers in 6 months if they were good; usually we did. Some of the hires were for very specialized roles (frame relay/fiber optic types) that often took a while to source or had to be lured out of other places, and they were generally good at doing that too. I'd never want to be one of the contract-to-hire candidates again (once was enough) but I'd be hard pressed dissuade others from using them.

by S_A_P 6y ago

mehrdadn 6y ago

I thought the only service being provided is just basically insuring the income. If they have to deal with finding/maintaining contractors/clients and other kinds of overhead then of course that changes things—I just didn't infer that was the situation in Canada from the comment.

blaser-waffle 6y ago

> staffing firms often hire young and attractive reps to distract. LOL, what? "The only reason we used staffing firms was cuz them reps be dummy thicc". I worked for a small/medium ISP for a while and did a lot of hiring for entry-level and mid-level roles. If we threw an ad up on Craigslist for DC, NYC, or Baltimore we would get back, easily, 500+ responses. The signal-to-noise ration was insane. A huge chunk of the responses would be spam or automated-resume-slinging-bots, and like 30-40% would be immediately disqualified for being in different states/countries or being wildly unqualified. Even after adding a few homemade filters and a basic online tech quiz, we'd still end up with like 40 candidates to screen further. The viability of these candidates was... not great... and a lot of them tended to split after a couple years, and several didn't last 6 months. Then we started using a headhunting firm and they did all of the sorting, vetting, and gave us a great 3-to-6-month hiring window. We could ask them for 3 decent clients -- "decent" was relative sometimes -- and have them in a couple weeks, get them hired comparatively quick, and turn them to full-timers in 6 months if they were good; usually we did. Some of the hires were for very specialized roles (frame relay/fiber optic types) that often took a while to source or had to be lured out of other places, and they were generally good at doing that too. I'd never want to be one of the contract-to-hire candidates again (once was enough) but I'd be hard pressed dissuade others from using them.