Tips on Working with Contract-Staffing Firms

When was the last time you had more than a five-minute conversation with your contract staffing firm? If you are tired of being sent contract engineers/designers/drafters who don´t know how to effectively perform their engineering function, it’s time to give your favorite — or least favorite — contract staffing firm a call and have a real conversation with them.

Before you pick up the phone or shoot off an email, check out the following tips for working well with a contract-staffing firm:

Treat the firm as a valued business partner. You value your relationship with your accountant; you value the advice your lawyer gives you, why not value the help of your contract staffing firm? The contract-staffing firm is going to be working as an extension of your company, so explain your business to them. Spend at least as much time talking about your company to a contract staffing firm as you would a prospective full-time job candidate. If you pick a good contract-staffing firm and treat its staffers as professionals, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the contractors sent to your company.

Don’t wait until the day before you need someone to call the contract-staffing firm. If you call the contract staffing firm at 4:30 p.m. on Friday to get a contractor at your office at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, that doesn’t leave much time for the firm to track down a contractor, much less the right contractor for the job. If all the other companies that use your contract staffing firm call a few days in advance of their assignment and you wait until the day before or the day that you need someone, chances are that a highly qualified contractor will not be available. Don’t make the contract staffing firm’s job harder than it has to be.

Provide the contract-staffing firm with a description of how a superior performer in your engineering discipline will be identified. Are you aware that one of the most common hiring mistakes managers make is failing to define Superior Performance for an open position? The answers to the following questions can help to define the Superior Performance in terms of specific, measurable, action, result, and time objectives. Your contract staffing firm should be available to assist you define these performance-based objectives, just call them.
Position title:
Position description – the responsibilities the individual will be performing:
Skills required to successfully meet the expectations of the position:
Superior Performance Profile of the position: define the specific objectives of the individual in measurable terms, define actions expected, the results expected, and time frames over which these objectives are to be accomplished
Why would an individual want to work for your company?

Offer the contract staffing firm feedback. Tell the firm if one of their contractors needs more training. Let them know what you did and didn’t like about the person they sent to you. Constructive feedback will ensure they send you the right person every time. And definitely let the firm know if you want to work with one of their contractors again.

Have realistic expectations. Don’t expect a contractor to come in and do the same quality of work as the staffer they are filling in for – unless you have an effective quality system that documents how that work is done so that the transition is transparent to your customer. If you don’t have that quality process, make sure you use a contract-staffing firm that does have that capability so that you can measure the effectiveness of the contractor.