Aquent is, first and foremost, a staffing company. If you are unfamiliar with that phrase, allow me to explain that a staffing company is what the lay-person might call a "temp agency." A temp agency will tend to call itself a "staffing company" when the people it employs object to thinking of themselves as "temps." This objection arises when the folks in question possess some sort of professional credential or when their skills are difficult to develop and in high demand.
Staffing companies are different from recruitment firms, in the main, as the former generally provide their clients with employees for a set period of time, whether they are working on the loading dock or re-designing a website, while the latter help companies find and hire permanent employees. As it turns out, many staffing companies offer recruitment services, though recruitment firms do not generally have staffing arms.
Staffing firms exist because hiring workers on a temporary basis can be challenging, especially when the workers in question are highly or uniquely skilled. First of all, these people may be difficult to find in the first place. Secondly, even when you do find them, they may be more interested in permanent work than contract work. Finally, if contract work is cool with them, they may already have gigs lined up and thus be unavailable when the manager needs them most (when you need temporary workers, usually it's not just for a set period of time, but for a specific period of time).
Staffing companies, at their best, provide a valuable service by maintaining a pool of talented professionals who are not only interested in working on a temporary, contract, or project basis, but are available to do so right now. The time that the staffing company invests in developing this pool is time that hiring managers save when they engage the staffing agency.
That's the way that staffing, and recruiting more broadly, has operated for decades, mediating between companies that have particular hiring needs and workers that have particular abilities and interests. Then along comes the web, which, as everyone knows, is great at "disintermediation." If you are not familiar with that term, it means "eliminating intermediaries," or, in more prosaic terms, "cutting out the middle man." Since the staffing industry operates squarely in the middle of this middle-manly space, it might not be unreasonable to assume that the web's unstoppable ascension represents this industry's inevitable decline.
Indeed it might. One could easily envision an online community of graphic designers, for example, who need to pass some sort of evaluation in order to become members. The people could list their skills, experience, and availability, and hiring managers could search for suitable folks and contact them directly. In fact, something like this may already exist.
So, is Aquent a dinosaur doomed to extinction or, even more embarrassing, obsolescence? I take some hope from this essay on the myth of disintermediation penned by the father of re-engineering, Michael Hammer. He points out that what really matters is the value added or offered by intermediaries. Very few brick and mortar bookstores, for example, can compete with the selection, customer service, and ease of purchase of Amazon.com. They are being disintermediated.
Along these lines, staffing still does have some value to add. Searching online communities for potential employees would still take time, and it will still make sense in many situations to outsource this time commitment. In addition, there are some ineffables in the hiring process, like "corporate culture" and "fit," that no algorithm has yet mastered. Spending time on-site with a client, and meeting people in person, may still be the best way of making fruitful matches.
To the extent that staffing remains a people business, requiring human insight and human sensitivity to personal and public nuance, it will remain relevant and valuable.
To the extent that it becomes mindless, reactive, and roboticized, it's a goner.
Image Courtesy of tarotastic.
Thanks for the reminder of "why we exist." I'll be sharing this with the rest of my staff. As margins get smaller, we have to show our value as a staffing partner in every contact we make with our clients.
If you posted an ad on craigslist, does the position really exist in all instances? ...or are you sometimes posting an ad in order to recruit talent so you have a pool of candidates ready when a client has a need?