Staffing at its roots is an entrepreneurial industry. Some of the most successful staffing companies can point to strong leadership, aggressive execution, and ambitious production personnel as keys to their success. It is an industry defined at many levels by its shear will to succeed, and through the nineties that seemed to be enough. Over the last decade, we have seen massive changes in the competitive forces that impact the industry. These changes have allowed buyers to become increasingly sophisticated on how they engage and manage their relationships with staffing vendors. Buyers are leveraging technology to enable programs that closely manage both processes and pricing, driving the staffing firm’s operational costs up while at the same time squeezing gross margin profitability. To preserve bottom line profits staffing firms responded with a focus on increasing the “productivity” of the recruiting and sales organizations to achieve activity metrics that were simply not possible even five years ago. Operational improvements are a continued necessity to survive in the staffing business, and can briefly give a company a competitive advantage. However, is it enough to outperform the competition long term? The short answer is no. A longer answer can be found by reading an … Read More
