As you look at your revenues so far this year, are you satisfied? If you are looking for more growth, the answer may lie within your contract staffing services — or lack thereof.
Contract staffing in the United States continues to grow at a rapid pace. The temporary help services category continues to grow, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can tap into this trend by either adding contract staffing or expanding your current contract staffing services.
Adding contracting to your service offerings is a great way to create another revenue stream and provide an alternative staffing option to your clients. With the help of a full-service contract staffing back-office, you can add contracting with no ramp-up time or financial investment.
If you are already offering contract staffing, there are a number of ways that you can expand that service to increase profits. Some firms pass up the opportunity to take additional contracting business because doing so may require additional in-house staff or a larger line of credit. However, you can expand your business without these additional costs and hassles by outsourcing some or all of your contractors to a contract staffing back-office service provider. This would allow you to:
A full-service back-office provider would handle all the employment tasks, including payroll funding and processing, tax withholdings and filings, unemployment, workers’ compensation, legal contracts, benefits offerings and administration, and background checks, so that you don’t have to dedicate more administrative resources to the contracting side of your business.
The employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) requires employers with 100 or more full-time employees to provide healthcare coverage to those employees. Many employers with between 50 and 99 employees were allowed to defer compliance until 2016. When you outsource the back-office, you don’t have to worry about contractors putting you over the 50-employee threshold because, as the legal employer for those contractors it is the back-office provider that is liable.
When you run your own back-office, expanding into new states takes a lot of additional time and money. You have to research and comply with each state’s employment laws and tax requirements. It can take months just to get set up. There will also be additional work on an ongoing basis. But with a nationwide contract staffing back-office, they will already be set up to place contractors in any state, so there is no ramp up time and no ongoing administrative burden.
If you currently only place contractors who work in an office environment due to the workers’ comp costs and professional liability, a contract staffing back-office that already has the right coverages can allow you to expand. Be sure to ask if they place the specific positions you want to pursue.
Just be sure to select a quality, full-service back-office. They should become the legal employer of your contractors and handle ALL of the legal, financial, and administrative tasks accurately and promptly. You also want to align yourself with a back-office service that has a proven history for delivering quality customer service because, ultimately, the back-office provider is a reflection of you and your recruiting firm.