Whether your business manages a mature contingent workforce management program or you work with a managed services partner that implements a program on your behalf, you have likely given some thought about how you will measure the success of your staffing agency partnerships.
Of course, cost savings, access to talented workers and building a flexible workforce that contributes to business agility are typically the primary goals of a contingent workforce. As a result, cost quality, efficiency and risk are the top metrics to measure program performance.
But what about the performance of your staffing agencies? Understanding staffing agency performance will help your business achieve those overall goals, so it’s critical that you can evaluate them properly.
Understanding exactly what you should be measuring and which factors drive a successful program will help your business to better evaluate the performance of the staffing agencies you use and analyze how they are helping your company achieve its overall business goals.
With that in mind, in this blog we take a look at some of the most important metrics that will give your organization visibility into how staffing agencies are performing.
Critical to your contingent workforce engagement efforts, fill rate is the ratio of contingent job orders received by suppliers against the number of job orders filled each month. This is a leading indicator of how well your staffing agencies are meeting your organization’s workforce requirements.
Low fill rates indicate that staffing agencies aren’t performing as expected, or that there are rate card issues or other problems within your contingent workforce program. High fill rates, on the other hand, are a fantastic sign that your vendors are helping to meet your company’s unique workforce needs.
How fast your staffing agencies are able to bring in new workers once they have made contact with potential candidates is one of the most critical factors in determining how effective your vendors are at helping your talent acquisition efforts.
If you aren’t able to bring in top talent quickly, then it’s incredibly likely that you’ll lose out on the best candidates to your competitors. Time to hire, similar to the time-to-fill metric (which we will discuss shortly), calculates how fast your organization is able to hire contingent workers once you have made contact with them.
Time to hire helps give your business visibility into how quickly the program is delivering value. This will give you a better idea of how fast staffing agencies are working to fill your needs, and highlight any issues that need resolving so that you can build better (and faster) processes with your suppliers.
A high-quality contingent workforce program should measure both supplier satisfaction and candidate satisfaction.
Supplier satisfaction: Supplier satisfaction surveys can help our business identify issues with the processes and relationships you have with your staffing agencies. When you know these issues exist, you can work on fixing them so that you can work more effectively with your current (and future) staffing agencies and improve your talent acquisition initiatives.
Candidate satisfaction: Contingent workers have an ever-growing number of businesses that they can work for. Your business needs to position itself as an “employer of choice” if it is to better achieve its workforce requirements. Candidate satisfaction surveys can help you receive feedback from previous contingent workers, allowing you to improve the experience for others as you move forward.
Turnover within a contingent workforce program is expected, after all you are only hiring these workers for a certain amount of time. But when it comes to the contingent workforce, the turnover metric refers to contingent workers leaving before their contract is up with your organization.
This is an important metric when it comes to evaluating the performance of your staffing agencies. High turnover could suggest that your staffing agencies are placing the wrong candidates within your business.
Unlike time to hire which calculates the speed of hiring a contingent worker once contact has been made, time to fill looks at the number of calendar days it takes a staffing agency to fill a position from the moment the vacancy is opened to the moment the vendor places a candidate in the role.
A slow time to fill could suggest that your staffing agency is struggling to place candidates into your business. With this knowledge, you can work with your staffing agencies to ensure they have all the information they need to better place contingent candidates within your organization.
Supplier rate cards can be made to include information such as the supply of qualified candidates, filled roles and response rate. Including this information on your supplier rate cards can help you gain visibility into whether the staffing agencies you work with are adhering to rate cards, and how much they are paying workers.
Rate cards can help your organization to determine your strongest performing staffing agencies, which need to be worked with to improve their performance and which need to be removed from your contingent workforce supply chain altogether.
Are you interested in learning more about how you can improve your contingent workforce management program? Request a free assessment with Contrax today.
