We Agree – Vanilla Recruitment Agency Models Don’t Work
Over the course of the last 20 years working closely with our friends and colleagues leading Community Service providers we have heard it all when it comes to engaging Casual Labour Hire Agencies:
“We hate having to use Agencies”
“Agencies are a necessary evil”
“Agency staff are crap”
“Agencies can’t fill our shifts”
“We want to reduce Agency spend”
“We get the same casuals turning up to our shifts that are on the books of three Agencies we use, so they are doing shifts with us through three different Agencies”
“Agencies never deliver what we need”
“We are on a Net Zero Agency Use campaign”
“We think the Agencies we use are underpaying their staff to the Award as we heard entitlements like Overtime aren’t being paid”
…….. and the list goes on, trust me!!
Let’s Start with Logic – It’s Not Going to Work
Let’s look at the traditional use of casual labour hire agencies. Service Providers will typically have their own directly employed Permanent (FT & PPT) and Casual Support Workers. Providers procurement departments then will engage a “Panel” of casual labour hire agencies to backfill shifts in scenarios where they have exhausted all their directly employed Support Worker options.
So, eventually in the day-to-day rostering process you get to a situation where Agency is the go-to when a Service Provider desperately needs to fill a shift that they can’t fill with their own directly employed staff. Subject to the scale of the Service Providers operations, this may happen regularly or irregularly in any given day, all based on a wide range of ever-changing contributing factors.
Therefore, the casual labour hire Agency is waiting by the phone, not sure when the next call will come and what the requirements will be for that “body” needed urgently to fill the shift.
There is little to no chance that the “best-fit” casual Support Worker is sitting at home ready to go immediately to a shift when engaged this way.
As a result, it all just gets messy after this as both the Service Provider and Agency are scrambling to come up with something so that the end-client isn’t left without a Support Worker for the upcoming shift. Desperation then sets in which could cause a whole range of flow on actions and outcomes, such as:
The Service Provider will ring down the list of their Agency Panel hoping one of them will be their saviour. If the panel Agencies can’t fill the shift, they may even go outside of their “panel” and type in “recruitment agencies” in google and start randomly calling around to help solve their unfilled shift issue.
One of the Agencies may offer up a casual that doesn’t meet the requirements of the shift, but it is at least a “body” that the Service Provider will just take to fill the shift so they can move onto the next unfilled shift.
If the shift can’t be filled by the Agencies, then the Service Provider directly employed Support Workers will need to go into Overtime or Service Delivery Managers may need to work the shift.
You can see where this typical scenario ends up, it’s not pretty, as it creates a range of issues impacting; quality, governance, compliance, safeguarding, industrial relations, workplace health and safety, risk, and the list just goes on. Doing this at scale obviously only compounds the problems.
As it is difficult for the Service Provider to solve the complex unfilled shift puzzle, it is also difficult for the casual Agency labour hire panel member to be able to successfully deliver based on this engagement model.
There is a Better Way
Current casual Agency models need to be turned on their heads to break the negative cycle which is correlated with their use in Community Services environments. A supported independent living service is not a repetitious blue-collar processing line, so you cannot apply a typical labour hire model to Community Services.
Contingent and supplementary staffing models in Community Services can only work, if there is a systematic and tailored approach to support the achievement of strategic initiatives generating improvements for Community Services providers in key deliverables such as consistency of Support Worker allocations to participants, quality of Support Worker performance, cost savings, operating efficiencies, growth in revenues and risk mitigation.
The proven and trusted bespoke staffing model delivered by Support Worker Co to its partners in the Community Services sector is the preferred solution adopted by many providers resulting in “Net Zero” use of casual labour hire Agencies, and importantly, helps Community Services providers execute key strategic improvement initiatives to better enable them to achieve their full potential.
Author - David Cuda, Managing Partner – Support Worker Co.
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Support Worker Co. is a pioneering and bespoke Staffing Solutions and Workforce Consulting Services firm. Our solutions leverage a combined 100 years of expertise and insight our leadership team has in designing and successfully executing tailored Support Workforce-related services and solutions that drive results and solve complex and important Support Workforce-related challenges of Community Services providers.
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