A detailed guide about choosing a staffing agency and how you will manage the employment. This guide is ideal for those who are looking for an agency and need help.
What are the best agencies to find work? It is certainly one of the most popular questions among those who are looking for employment. Nowadays finding a valid agency is very important also because the choice is very wide and not all of them are right for us.
In fact, there are agencies more rooted in the territory, or agencies specialized in certain sectors and more lacking in others, or agencies that carry out only intermediate for professionals, etc .; that's why it's not true that one is worth the other.
Work, or rather finding work, is today one of the greatest needs for people, whether they are young people at the first job or workers made redundant and therefore looking for a new job.
On the opposite side, many companies need new collaborators and therefore they must need a suitable IT staffing agencies that can fulfill their needs. The problem is to bring together supply and demand. Those looking for a new job are turning more and more often to temporary agencies, places created precisely to meet the demand and supply of work.
How do you approach these agencies, how can they be used best and which are the main ones?
Let's discuss all these things in detail.
What Employment Agencies Do?
Employment agencies are realities that deal with job brokerage. In practice, a company looking for staff turns to these agencies to have temporary or permanent staff. The employment agency - also defined in jargon app - takes care of making the selections and proposing the most suitable candidates for the company.
Once the profile has been chosen, then the employment agency will contract it. We become, therefore, to all intents and purposes employees of the agency (which will deal with the contract, the payroll, the CU, etc.) but we are "loaned" to the company which in this case assumes the name of the user.
It is an increasingly present reality in the job market and above all a method of contracting that companies prefer for various reasons, first of all, that of being able to try the candidate without any constraint even for very short assignments, sometimes even for only a few days. However, they are an excellent system for candidates to enter the world of work.
What Are Temporary Agencies For?
Temporary agencies, also called employment agencies, are agencies that collect job offers from companies looking for staff and job requests from individuals.
The term " interim " means that the type of work required by companies is provisional (from the Latin "interim"). In some cases, temporary work can also be transformed into definitive, depending on the needs of the company in question and the skills that the worker has demonstrated.
Differences between temporary agencies and employment centers The temporary agencies differ from the employment centers in some main aspects such as:
- Temporary agencies are private
- A person who is looking for a job can register with several temporary agencies, while as regards the employment center, they can only register at the employment center of their municipality of residence.
Temporary agencies to find work
How Temporary Agencies Work?
For Job Seekers
The agency, called the "administrator", creates a database that is as vast and updated as possible of people who go to their offices in search of work.
In fact, the person looking for work must go to the temporary agency's headquarters where he will have to fill in forms with his personal data, training, previous professional experiences, interests and must specify, following professional training and personal aptitudes, which types of professional sectors you are interested in.
It is advisable to bring along a copy of the curriculum vitae which can be attached to the forms in addition to an identity document. After filling in the various forms, there is sometimes an interview with the agency's staff to evaluate personal attitudes and motivations. In some cases, registration may also take place via the temporary agency website.
For Those Who Offer Work
Companies that are looking for new collaborators can contact temporary agencies specifying the characteristics of the worker requested and other data: professional training, age, expected working hours, accurate description of the task to be performed, a period of work.
In general, companies turn to temporary agencies to meet periods of increased work or to replace staff who, for example, are sick or on maternity leave, for this reason, they are usually temporary jobs for a certain period of time.
But it is important to emphasize that once the contact between the company and the worker has been established, the opportunity to work for other subsequent periods or even to transform the employment relationship from precarious to definitive may re-occur.
Meeting of Job Demand and Offer
Once the agency has collected the requests of private individuals looking for work in its archive and job offers from companies, it will compare the requests and offers to look for the profiles of workers best suited to the job requested.
At this point, potential workers will be contacted and informed of the new profile that is required by the company. If there is interest, an appointment will be made between the company and the worker, where a representative of the temporary agency will also be present.
What Characteristics Must the Employment Agency Have?
The first advice you can give is to check the accreditation of the job agencies you intend to contact. In fact, all APLs are legally obliged to undertake an accreditation process that will lead them to the exercise of the activity.
Accreditation means having the professional, ethical, and economic skills to support this type of profession: a guarantee for all candidates who rely on it for job search.
A perhaps a little more empirical method for evaluating the agency for the right job may be to check online the opinions that other workers have given about the agency or on one of its branches.
Who can be a better judge, in fact, than someone who found himself personally verifying the agency's skills? On the net there are many opinion forums, just read the comments to make a personal first impression.
If the employment agencies we are evaluating have all these characteristics, then the analysis needs to be more in-depth and take into consideration other types of elements.
Employment Contracts Between Temporary Agency, Company, and Worker
Once the agency has identified the new worker that corresponds to the needs requested by the company, a contract is stipulated between the company and the temporary agency in which the characteristics of the service are specified.
In the same way, a performance contract is stipulated between the temporary agency and the worker, according to which the worker is employed by the agency and not by the company.
In practice, the worker is hired not by the company, but directly by the temporary agency from which he will also be paid, in fact, it is as if the actual employer were the agency and not the company.
The temporary agencies will earn their earnings for the service offered according to the agreement with the company to which the worker was found.
The hires are generally fixed-term and following this contract the worker can then be hired directly by the company and the temporary agency will no longer have any role in this new relationship.
Functions of Temporary Agencies
The main functions of the temporary agencies are, therefore:
- Collecting job offers from companies;
- Collection of job applications from potential workers;
- Personnel selection;
- Administration of hired personnel (employment contracts, paychecks, eventual delivery of tickets for meals, communications between agencies and the employment center);
- Organization and provision of professional training courses.
How to Choose Executive Search Firm Services?
Choosing the agency for the best job for your needs is never a simple operation because many different factors come into play. First of all, it is necessary to evaluate the territory and understand which is the "strongest" agency and with the best offers compared to the area in which it is sought.
In addition to influencing the choice is also the personal relationship that is established with the recruiter, the sector in which you are looking for employment, and much more. Here are all the elements that must be taken into consideration when choosing the agency for the best job.
1. Map the Territory
A mapping of the territory is fundamental for choosing the most suitable employment agency. In fact, agencies are usually highly territorial and tend to treat customers and workers who live in the immediate vicinity.
The first step, therefore, is to check which employment agencies operate in the area of our interest: it will be sufficient to check the addresses of the branches on the company websites. In this way, you will be sure to contact someone who deals with offers of interest.
2. Understand the Sector of Reference
What is the sector in which you want to work? It is a very important question to ask to be able to choose the agency for the right job. In fact, almost naturally, each agency has a specialization sector and therefore has a greater number of offers of that type.
In some apl the specialization is so marked as to push them to create special companies for the management of those offered: it happens with tourism, the healthcare sector, the engineering sector, and so on. Identifying which employment agency operates in our preferred professional sector is a first, important discriminating factor in the final choice.
3. Evaluate how To Register?
Enrollment procedures are also another important element of evaluation. In fact, each one applies different rules. There are those who only ask their candidates to register online and who, on the other hand, allow the delivery of the paper curriculums which then end up in a pile from which it is difficult to leave.
The best employment agencies, on the other hand, are those that provide for the possibility of personally delivering the CV and also having a short interview.
In this way, you have the opportunity to better express your potential and also illustrate other skills that perhaps with a cold curriculum vitae would be difficult to identify.
4. the Methods of Selection
As for the registrations, also for the selections, each employment agency has its own method. Obviously, a lot also depends on the type of figure you are looking for, but the best apls also combine a cognitive interview with a technical one, perhaps performed through tests and interviews with specialists in the subject.
An important opportunity even for the shyest who can be very prepared but maybe not at the interview. Finally, the best apl always gives feedback on the outcome of the interview, both in the positive and negative cases: a simple email is enough to make the candidate feel a person and not a number.
5. Monitor the Labor Market
It is always very important to monitor the job market. Only in this way, in fact, can we understand which job agencies have the largest number of customers and, consequently, also job offers.
Monitoring is also important to understand if that specific company of its interest relies on one apl rather than another: in this way the candidacy will certainly be targeted to the one that takes care of the selections for the company of the heart.
6. Active Employment Policies
One very important service that the apl has been offering in recent years is that of active policies. These are accompanying paths for the unemployed looking for a new job.
Through orientation actions, balance of skills and training, people are helped to return to the world of work. They are free programs and surely choosing an agency for employment that also offers this opportunity is an added bonus.
7. Matter of Feeling
Beyond all these reasoned tips that are aimed at evaluating the best employment agency, there is an imponderable element that must always guide the choice: the feeling that is created with the agency staff.
Those looking for work - be it the first or a new one during an unemployment period - are experiencing a very delicate phase of their existence.
It is therefore necessary that someone who can understand him, with whom empathy develops, be a real support for this adventure full of obstacles which are the search for a job.