Recruitment agency

Community resourcing quote The recruitment industry traditionally has a small number of leaders and a lot of followers. Leaders are willing to commit to new offerings ahead of the curve. For them, the best innovations offer lasting advantage; not just a momentary edge until the followers catch on. Slivers-of-Time marketplaces reward local innovators in this way.

Where to start?

Any area has its "low hanging fruit" for this new way of working. Think of the employers with constantly fluctuating workforce needs, currently relying on overtime, compromising their service around employee availability or muddling through understaffed. On the supply side, look towards colleges, parents networks, carer support groups or channels to the newly retired. All contain people who need to work odd hours around other things in their life. Whoever signs up this first wave of market participants locally will own those relationships. It's then much harder for slower moving rivals to build a base of users.

The profit potential of a Slivers-of-Time marketplace comes from a new approach to fiddly, short-notice, short-length assignments. Instead of being a loss leader done as a favour for clients, they can become a profit source. The table below illustrates the business case for 3 hour bookings on a 20% mark up. It assumes a total of 20 minutes of branch staff time to receive a booking, look up candidates, call potential candidates and inform the client. Internal costs are assumed to be £30 an hour. These costs do not exist in a Slivers-of-Time marketplace. Agency value from SoT

Man at desk Getting a local market off the ground takes dedicated commitment. But it can reap immediate rewards by repositioning your branch against competitors. Our launch section offers planning tools for getting a service off the ground and running the market as it gets established. We'd also like to offer the broad lessons learned so far about steps towards a successful launch for branches.

1) Get the right team member on the case

Calling potential clients with an easily understood recruitment agency offering is one skill. Working with the local labour market to start a new way of hiring is another. We've found success or failure can often come down to the personality of the person doing the outreach. Is it someone local business leaders will listen to? Does their personal vision for the new channel shine through? Can they pull together clusters of employers with a need for Slivers-of-Time workers who don't individually have the buying power to make the service worth your while?

launch guide recruitment agency Call it the Gung-ho Factor. It's not standard short-term selling, more about a personal commitment to something new that is engaging and informative. Someone with these qualities, and time to spend on the project, can galvanise the opportunity.

2) Establish the branding

A seamless component of your main website? New extension to your main brand? Funky stand-alone product targeting a different niche? You call your market whatever you want and that is how it announces itself. Within certain constraints, it displays in your colours and has your wording at key user intersections. Our training materials will show you how to instantly match colours of existing websites or shape complementary new colour schemes.

launch guide recruitment agency

The decision will probably come down to your current customer targeting. Upscale professionals wooed with high personal contact? Your new automated marketplace is probably best as a stand-alone. But, if you're a high volume player it could simply be a platform beneath the website.

We've helped brainstorm names for brand extensions. Obvious starting point words include: fast, personalised, snippets, flexibility, precision and control.

3) Prepare the outreach plan

Put aside the existing sales target list for now. Who are your new prospects? They include:

On the buyer side:

Buyer targets list
Potential targets	Broad proposition
Caterers	Book workers for mealtime rushes
Contact Centres	Match inbound call handling capacity with need hour-by-hour
Distribution companies	Book extra staff when goods need unloading
Promotion/leafleting etc.	Buy local people for the exact needs of each contract
Market research providers	Train a pool of Slivers-of-Time sellers in your questionnaires, then buy their time as the project progresses
Healthcare/Hospitals	Ward orderlies, porters, cleaners: all can be booked with new efficiencies
Retailers	Supermarkets typically have a staff shortage from 16.00-18.00 on weekdays.
Hotels	Hosting an event? Wedding booked? This is how to get your extra staff.
Pick'n'pack	Suddenly popular product coming through the warehouse? This is how you cope.
Leisure sector (eg cinemas)	Blockbuster on your hands? Sudden rush? Staff up for the evening, don't loose sales.

On the seller side:

Sources of sellers
Source:	Notes:
Lone parents	A lone parent on Jobseeker's Allowance can earn £20 per week without loosing their benefits. Your local Jobcentre manager may help promote your service with posters and leaflets.
Newly retired	Tricky to track down the best route in any given area. But a good starting point is http://www.thebigproject.co.uk/links_seniors.htm.
Part employed	Get to know your local Housing Associations. (http://www.housing.org.uk/links/region.asp is one place to start the search.) They often have both a budget for work to be done and access to pools of residents who have time on their hands.
Incapacity Benefit claimants	There are 2.7m people off work and claiming Incapacity Benefit in the UK. 1m of them are able and want to work around the unpredictability in their life. Since Oct. 2004, IB claimants have been allowed to work 16 hours a week for 6 months without loosing their primary benefit. The leading organisation for getting IB claimants ready for work is: http://www.shaw-trust.org.uk/
Carers	1 in 8 adults in the UK act as carer to another dependant adult. That's a commitment they have to work around. It might be worth going along to your local group. Find it at: http://www.carersuk.org/Information/ Findinghelp/LocalOrganisations

Another source of targets is the Slivers-of-Time "gateway" site at www.sliversoftime.com. This allows anyone around the country who is interested in buying or selling this way to register their interest. It is a resource for branches launching a new market, providing they accept the conditions of the site they can approach potential buyers and sellers around the branch and invite them to take part.

4) Personalise the marketing materials

Our documents section contains multiple materials for spreading the word. You may want to tweak them to attach your branding to the new service before distributing them.

Starting a market