Benefits of Strategic Staffing, Part 2: Meeting Strategic Objectives

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“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

—Lewis Carroll

Strategic planning is in full swing for 2012. What are your company’s goals for the next year? Whether you’re looking to expand business lines, tap into new markets or simply maintain profitability during these uncertain times, a proactive, strategic staffing plan is critical to achieving your corporate objectives.

Strategic staffing enables you to use temporary, contract and direct placement workers as a permanent solution to meet workforce challenges. By planning your upcoming talent needs, you and your staffing partner can develop a comprehensive staffing strategy that creates true competitive advantage for your organization and delivers real bottom-line results.

This ability to meet strategic objectives is one of the benefits of strategic staffing. In a recent post, I discussed ways our clients realized another benefit of strategic staffing services – to increase organizational flexibility. Today, I would like to take a look at how our staffing services allow our clients to meet strategic objectives by fulfilling the needs of four different business endeavors:

  • Test new ideas. If you want to offer a new product or service, or test a new concept, then you know how much extra work it takes. However, in today’s tough economic environment, you may hesitate to hire more people – and rightfully so. Before you staff up to implement new ideas, try leveraging temporary/contingent workers throughout the testing process.  Snelling can provide temporaries to either be directly involved with the test or to fill in for your permanent staff members who are involved.
  • Manage the unknown. Even under the best economic circumstances, every strategic plan is subject to some uncertainty. In today’s marketplace, it can be difficult to predict what will happen a month from now – let alone a year from now. Thankfully, you can use contingent/temporary staffing to effectively manage this ambiguity. When the road ahead is unclear, flexible staffing is key. Bring in the labor and expertise when only your business needs it; this keeps your expenses down and avoids the problems caused by overstaffing.
  • Access expertise on a short-term basis. The scope of the contingent workforce has grown dramatically to include engineers, IT specialists, accountants, and other professionals. Use their talent strategically to educate your employees and teach them new skills.  Leveraging these workers will shorten learning curves without the cost of a permanent hire, and once your training (or project) is finished, so are your additional expenses.
  • Complete special projects. Initiatives like financial audits and systems upgrades can bring long-term financial benefits to your company; however, they can also bring down short-term productivity levels. Keep daily operations running smoothly, get projects completed on schedule and ensure productivity levels stay at optimum levels by bringing in temporary staff. Contingent workers can either help directly with special projects, or provide support to the employees working on them.

Strategic Staffing Success Starts with a Great Staffing Partner

As you head into 2012 planning, take the time to discuss your business goals and the ways our workforce solutions can help you reach them. Do this, and you’ll be well on your way to developing a stronger relationship that maximizes the value of your staffing investment – and yields better results for your business.

Where is your company headed in 2012? Partner with Snelling Staffing Services and we’ll help you get there.