7 Misconceptions About Working With Staffing Firms
By Melissa Ripp
Marketing Coordinator, Drake & Company Staffing Specialists
At Drake & Company, applicants come to us through several channels. Sometimes we’ve worked to place them in a temporary or full-time position before. Other times, they come to us as a referral from someone we’ve placed. However, the majority of the applicants registering with us are new to the staffing industry. Whenever we speak with a new applicant, we are reminded of the many misconceptions there are regarding the staffing industry—and we thought we’d take the time to dispel them here with regard to Drake & Company:
If I register with a staffing agency, I’ll be there for about four hours between filling out paperwork, interviewing, and taking a bunch of tests.
That won’t happen at Drake & Company. We e-mail you our paperwork ahead of time, so you can fill it out at your convenience before you meet with us. Once you’re here, we ask you to take a moment to fill out reference forms (we need signed permission to contact each of your references) and we ask most applicants to take a short typing test. Any applicants who have applied for legal positions are also asked to take a spelling test. The entire process (reference paperwork, testing, and interview) takes an hour and a half at the very most. If you are interviewing for a specific position, a client might ask us to administer additional tests—but this typically doesn’t happen until a candidate is further along in the interview process.
Once I meet with a recruiter, I’m only being considered for the positions that he or she has open.
All of our Placement Consultants (PCs) work together at Drake, which means that once you register, you have six consultants with potential positions for you. It’s commonplace for consultants to recommend applicants they’ve interviewed for positions that other PCs are working on. We like to get to know our applicants, because we’ll all be working with you!
I’ll need to pay a fee to a staffing company when I register. Or, when I get a job, I’ll have to pay a portion of my salary to the staffing company, right?
Drake & Company does not charge a fee to our applicants in any way. Our fees are paid by the client that has asked us to fill the position. Working with us is completely free of charge for a candidate.
Staffing companies only offer temporary work, and I want a full-time position.
It often surprises people to learn that the majority of the positions Drake has open are typically direct hire positions or temp-to-hire positions. However, before you say “no” to checking out temporary positions, you might want to reconsider: According to statistics put together by the American Staffing Association, 88% of staffing employees say that temporary or contract work made them more employable, and 77% said it’s a good way to obtain a permanent job.
Staffing agencies don’t offer benefits.
Many staffing agencies offer benefits to temporary employees—but know that “benefits” may vary depending on what staffing company you choose to work with. After certain eligibility requirements are met at Drake & Company, you may qualify for holiday pay, vacation pay, 401k and profit sharing.
If I register with Drake & Company, that’s the only staffing firm I can register with.
We are aware that other firms to ask their applicants not to register with other companies, but we encourage it. We believe that every applicant has the right to work and apply for other positions and opportunities, and the only way to make that happen is to look at all the possibilities.
I want my job search to be confidential, so I better just stick to searching on my own.
You certainly can job search on your own, but you absolutely don’t have to. We’ve worked with applicants on confidential searches for many years, and we do promise complete confidentiality in all aspects of your job search. If you are searching for positions on your own, Drake & Company can help you with fine-tuning your resume (we have an in-house resume service) and offering practice tests so you can brush up on your skills. We can help in more ways than simply job placement!
Melissa Ripp is the Marketing Coordinator at Drake & Company, a staffing firm based in Madison, Wisconsin. Drake & Company specializes in temporary, temp-to-hire, and direct hire administrative, clerical, and legal placements. For 36 years, Drake has reached beyond skills and qualifications to match candidate personalities with a company’s culture. You can find Melissa on Google+, and you can find Drake & Company on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.