Agencies

Launch a Slivers-of-Time marketplace for your area and clients who want endless fiddly short-notice, short-length bookings can become a smooth revenue stream, rather than a source of stress. Candidates who never know when they'll want to work can be steered towards self registration in a channel that allows the good ones to then deliver annuity income for you with marginal upkeep. Agencies have a crucial role to play in these new marketplaces, but it's adding value rather than acting as day-to-day booking clerks.

A branch launching a Slivers-of-Time market for the surrounding area should progressively start to see a boost on these fronts:

1. Annuity income
2. Growing the sector
3. Competitive differentiation
4. Attracting web-generation candidates
5. Master-vend opportunities
6. A new take on industry issues

• Register interest

1) Annuity income

It takes some work to put a Seller into this market, and you should probably put in a few calls during their first few weeks. But there should come a point where the individual "gets it" and starts managing their own bookings. But your markup is on every assignment; depending on what rate you tell the market to charge a specific Buyer. We take your relationships with Sellers very seriously. The system includes anti-poaching protection to stop competitors trying to re-register your Sellers.

The initial work of putting someone new into the market can be minimised. Sellers can register all their own details, branch staff simply vet them before allowing entry to the market.

It may be worth setting up a couple of internet connected PCs in reception? Then, when a potential candidate walks in decide where to route them. They want conventional temp, contract or perm work? Use existing processes. They have fiddly bits of availability around other things? Send them home to register themselves on your Slivers market, or direct them to a PC in the foyer and offer to vet them as soon as they've done so.

2) Growing the sector

Temping through recruitment agencies is a hefty £20-24bn industry. But, when last measured, it makes up only 17.5% of irregular work in the UK. Every branch is fighting rivals for share within that slice.

A Slivers-of-Time market allows you to step outside that and grow the overall agency market in your area. 25% of irregular work is casual/seasonal/ad hoc, much of it the types of bookings you probably don't serve very well at the moment. Your new service could grow your business with sustainable "land grab" into new territory, not margin-paring battles for business against competitors.

• Register interest

3) Competitive differentiation

Fed up of cold calling to try and push your unique selling point to sceptical prospects? Commit to launching a Slivers-of-Time channel then shift to educating the local market about a government funded, well researched, only now viable, resource available through you. It could leave your rivals commoditised as mere order takers.

• Register interest

4) Attracting web generation candidates

The generation now coming into the workforce have grown up with the web. They travel on easyjet, buy their books at Amazon and sell their stuff on eBay.

These are desirable candidates, yet your current processes probably expect those people, when they need to do odd bits of work, to accept time-consuming traditional recruitment practices. That's not how this generation works. They want to see the market as a whole and interact instantly on their own terms. Offer them Slivers-of-Time before the competition and be their obvious first port of call when they want other interactions with the labour market.

Take a mid-sized town with, perhaps, 25 branches of temp agencies. The first one to offer a Slivers-of-Time channel can immediately start outreach to sources of candidates that aren't currently appealing to the others: such as local colleges where students have ever changing availability.

• Register interest

5) Master-vend opportunities

Your new marketplace allows you to tap into other agencies also offering Slivers-of-Time. Your Sellers can be supplied to their Buyers. Or vice versa. It exposes you to new buying power and allows you to offer your employers a deep pool of workers. When it comes to the rest of the market, you have three options:

• Go it alone. No partnering with anyone.
• Partner with selected other agencies and agree a margin-split with each. Your system will do all the admin for the payroll/invoicing.
• Auto-accept partnering. You'll allow transactions through any other agency that will agree to your terms.

You can move between these options at any time. It provides enormous flexibility as you cope with the new landscape of Client/Agency relationships.

• Register interest

6) A new take on industry issues

You'll know the forces shaping recruitment at the moment: clients want more for less, big employers are shifting to in-house agencies, PSL's tend to favour larger agencies. Your new channel provides new responses to those persistent issues. Some of these dynamics could start to work in your favour.

TREND	CURRENT DYNAMIC	SoT DYNAMIC
Client leveraging their own buying power	Corporates set up in-house agency	SoT sellers have multiple buyers - external agency is essential
Client SLA's	Agency functions as bookings clerks	Agency moves up value chain to enforce quality in the workforce
Client need to cut costs	Agencies forced to compete on margin	Competition is job-by-job and primarily on seller rate
Clients want workflow reduction	Restricted PSL closes agency opportunity	Multi-agency inter-system billing opens the market to all local branches

• Register interest
• Agency FAQs