For more than six months, the number of American workers leaving their jobs has exceeded pre-pandemic highs—and for many employers, it’s become increasingly difficult to fill that void. In September alone, more than 4.4 million workers quit their jobs. This “Great Resignation,” as it’s been coined, has created a conundrum: When turnover is so high, how do companies keep business moving as usual?
After all, it takes time, money, and energy to hire, train, and retain full-time employees. But filling individual positions isn’t the only option for businesses looking to do great work. Especially in an era of business needs that ebb and flow with economic shifts, hiring an agency to take on creative services can be beneficial for a number of reasons:
Resources are immediately available. Anyone who has spent time in a hiring manager’s shoes knows hiring can be a full-time job in and of itself. Between writing and posting a job description, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and training, you can easily spend weeks working on a single position. But with an agency, you hit the ground running—after a couple of kickoff meetings, you have a whole team of creatives, strategists, and managers at your disposal.
You benefit from a wealth of expertise, knowledge, and disciplines. Looking for an employee who can “do it all” at a high level is like looking for a unicorn. Agencies are already set up to meet high expectations for all disciplines—with valuable knowledge and experience garnered from dozens of past clients and projects. And if you do need an expert in just one single discipline, an agency can quickly fill that need, too. Think of an agency as an extension of your own team—ready to offset resources by taking on projects large or small at any time.
There’s no onboarding or training delay. Agency employees are constantly working with new clients on new projects in new roles—so they’re not only fully trained professionals, they’re experts in the art of efficient onboarding. In the eight months it typically takes you to train a new full-time employee to reach full productivity, your agency counterpart will already have completed several projects.
It’s cheaper than hiring internally. Think about all of the overhead costs associated with hiring an internal team—the money spent on recruiting and hiring, employee benefits, equipment and materials, management time, and training adds up. According to a Deloitte survey, 62 percent of companies report 10 to 25 percent savings when they outsource—and the remaining 38 percent of companies reported savings as high as 40 percent.
You can easily scale projects as needs evolve. When you hire a single employee, you buy (give or take) 40 hours of time per week. But projects wax and wane—one week, you might not be able to fill that employee’s schedule, and the next, you might find yourself in need of another employee altogether. When you hire an agency, scaling up or down to meet business needs becomes simple—simply buy the hours you need, and waste no funds on hours you don’t.
Rather than competing against companies hiring for thousands of open positions (many of them remote, creating even more fierce competition), reconsider your hiring approach. Working with an agency may be exactly the right move to keep your business running smoothly and effectively.
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