Thaindian News

By Venkatachari Jagannathan
Chennai, Jan 16 (IANS) With staffing services fast turning into big business, major players in the field have started going up in the value chain, offering trained people or even guaranteeing performance so as to get a better billing.Staffing companies provide temporary employees to firms. The service is also called “temping” or “flexi staffing.”

“Staffing is a matured service globally with multiple offerings like managed programmes, in-house management and vendor management,” P.S. Srikumar, vice president for sales and marketing at Talent Pro India HR, told IANS.

In countries like Britain, there are specialised staffing companies operating in niche areas like healthcare, leisure and tourism, and manufacturing. What they offer is a combination of people, productivity and management.

“The niche player offers the advantage of expertise and convenience and the client is willing to pay a higher value for the benefits received. These services border between temping and outsourcing, realising the benefits of both,” Srikumar said.

Speaking about Talent Pro’s attempts in climbing the value chain, he said: “We offer a managed programme - one of the first of its kind in India - to a multinational telecom operator.”

“We mapped the market completely and used a research-based approach to offer a comprehensive proposition. We did a detailed industry research to arrive at the benchmark norms. The scope of work includes regular monthly monitoring of performance against targets,” added Srikumar.

To execute its contract, Talent Pro built an employee dashboard for information, used productivity yardsticks and benchmarking that with the industry norms.

“Since the team is run by a professional as a managed programme, we agreed for performance guarantee. The fee structure here is very different from that of a normal staffing or temping fee. The research-based approach also has been cautiously applied to work out the productivity indices, as loss of productivity will impact us on billing,” Srikumar remarked.

“We have engaged a team from the industry. So it understands the nuances of business and hence can significantly value add. It gives a settling time for the client while his business does not have to wait till his people are in place,” Srikumar said.

According to him, this module works on a build operate-lease-or-transfer method. The team is transferred to the client at an appropriate time for a fee.

The service fee is of various forms - retainer-plus-handling fee, recruitment fee, administration fee, transfer fee and others.

“This is non-conventional and the risks of taking on productivity keep companies away from this module. The success key is to have national recruitment capabilities, time-bound activity and earmarking of exclusive resources,” according to Srikumar.

On the risk side, the liability is unlimited and staffing companies are bound by exclusivity agreements. They cannot offer the service to others.

The country’s largest staffing company, Ma Foi Management Consultants, which is part of the Netherlands-based 12-billion-euro Ranstad Holdings, will soon launch its value-added service called In-house Services for its clients.

“Under this we will take care of the entire flexiemporary staff at our client’s place deputed by us. We will also assure performance guarantee and provide all the business analytical data,” K. Pandiarajan, chairman of Ma Foi Management, told IANS.

According to him, the company deputes around 60,000 people for 980 clients and the plan is to increase it to 100,000 in 2011.

Not all agree with such new models guaranteeing performance.

“They are basically outsourcing deals which staffing companies are not equipped to do,” Manish Sabharwal, chairman of the Bangalore-based TeamLease Services, told IANS.

He said: “TeamLease offers trained personnel to companies which itself would be a great relief to the client companies. Staffing companies are not supposed to provide trained personnel.”

Last year TeamLease acquired a training company, Indian Institute of Job Training, and Sabharwal said the number of centres would be expanded to 400 this year from the current 250.

“We haven’t started value-added services to our staffing activity. Our core focus is on offering labour law compliance services,” said Bharath K.S, chairman and managing director of Aparajitha Group.

(Venkatachari Jagannathan can be contacted at v.jagannathan@ians.in)