How Staffing Firms Help with the Sharing Economy
Posted November 30th, 2016
It’s no secret that the sharing economy is growing rapidly. Many people are working as independent contractors because they like the autonomy and flexibility it gives them. At the same time, companies are struggling to find people with the needed skills. As the unemployment rate drops, it is becoming more difficult for companies to find the right people.
Companies Using Independent Contractors
As a result, many companies are using these independent contractors – the American Staffing Association says that staffing companies employed more than three million temporary and contract workers in 2015, almost six percent more than the previous year.
However, there are still many companies avoiding the use of independent contractors because the firms are concerned about compliance issues – trouble they could get into by not complying with legal guidelines defining the status of these workers. These guidelines set out the criteria by which a person is considered an employee or an independent contractor. The problem is that the regulations governing this issue are often vague and contradictory.
How Staffing Firms Help
As a result, staffing firms are stepping into the breach. The rise of independent contractors is creating new opportunities for recruiting firms in managing these types of workers. Staffing agencies have more experience dealing with independent contractors and are using the knowledge of compliance issues to help companies navigate the compliance terrain. The recruiting firms help to prevent companies from wrongly classifying workers.
When working with a company, the staffing agency will look at what kind of job the company is hiring for and how long the job will take, and then the agency will make a recommendation to the company as to whether an independent contractor would make sense for the particular project. If the agency determines that an independent contractor can do the job, the staffing firm would draw up a contract. This way the company is shielded from wrongly classifying the worker since the agency is taking on the responsibility for the employment contract.
If the nature of the job changes so that the worker’s role becomes more that of an employee, the staffing firm will then renegotiate the contract.
The arrangement also works well for the independent contractor, who is able to use the staffing firm to connect him to jobs and to market his or her skills to employers.
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