Staffing World 2018: Apps are here to stay, Uber enters staffing
Originally published on the TimeSaved Blog
Staffing world takeaways
It became clear after last year’s StaffingWorld conference that the industry is shifting to become mobile first. This year, the takeaway was a much more urgent one.
Large staffing companies have been building their own apps and this is going to have big consequences for smaller agencies. TrueBlue has built Labor Ready, Adecco has built Adia, and these companies are now armed to siphon workers from the already depleted talent pools of smaller firms.
And it’s not just staffing companies either. Tech giants like Uber and Google are looking to enter the staffing game. Some of them are already there.
Uber waited until the end of the biggest staffing conference of the year to announce that they would be entering the staffing game by testing a new “on-demand labour service, sort of like a temp agency.” Beginning in Chicago, Uber will be providing on-demand temp staffing for events and corporate functions. The intent is to emulate TaskRabbit, a company that has grown its worker pools more than 1,000% over four years.
Uber is already in the hands of many of your workers, and now they will be expanding their offerings beyond just transportation. If they were once a nominal threat, they are now poised to grow into the biggest threat your staffing company may face in the coming years. And they have been perfecting a mobile-first approach for a decade.
But while Uber might be able to get into some of the more simple forms of staffing, we both know staffing companies possess the institutional knowledge required to handle more complicated issues. You are better prepared to manage relationships with your workers while juggling jurisdictional regulations. You are better prepared to take candidate engagement to the next level.
What’s important to takeaway is that, in the fight for talent, it’s going to be more important than ever for staffing agencies to put the power of an app in the hands of each of their candidates.
Why apps, why now
At this year’s TechPark, ASA board member Jim Essey showed off the TemPositions’ new client and worker app that allows their clients to self-serve. The app resulted in a 65% reduction in traditional operating costs. What’s more is that TemPositions is now reinvesting these savings into areas that are going to be important for them to remain competitive in the future, like upskilling their workforce.
Essentially, companies who’ve developed apps now have more time to sharpen their competitive edge and will only become more efficient in the future.
Apps have completely changed the customer/candidate experience, transforming industries in the process. No one can deny the impact Uber and Airbnb have had on customers and competitors. The players who did not understand this have fallen by the wayside.
Now to stay ahead, you need a mobile app. But building a custom solution that caters to your needs is difficult and requires a deep bench of resources. It involves a multitude of steps from research and pre-planning, to assessing technical feasibility, prototyping, design/development, coding, testing, refining and then launch and maintenance. There are other associated costs such as legal, software licensing fees, accounting costs, administrative and maintenance costs. The Tempositions app has over 30 developers working continuously on it. The question is, do you have the resources to do the same?
How can you compete
It became clear at StaffingWorld this year that up until now, it’s been the big companies with these resources who have had the best chance to truly compete in the mobile staffing space. And now tech giants from other industries are coming in for a piece of the pie.
