Growing Your Business — Adding Staff While Minimizing Risk 

For many technology-driven companies, increasing profitability remains a challenge, despite improvement in the local economy. Fierce competition in many industries is forcing businesses to closely monitor the bottom line. Positioning your company for growth in this cost-conscious environment can be difficult, with success often depending on having talented staff in place to take advantage of fast-moving business opportunities. Unfortunately, finding the best qualified technical staff has only become more complicated — and expensive — in recent years

The Challenge in Making a Good Hiring Decision

Gauging a candidate’s ‘fit’ for a particular position based solely on a resume and interviews is an onerous task. Resumes and interviews provide snapshots of a candidate, which may or may not accurately depict personality and technical proficiency. To further complicate matters, experts estimate that 25-50% of resumes contain misrepresentations — or outright lies — relating to a candidate’s responsibilities, accomplishments, education or dates of employment. 

The direct and intangible costs of making a poor hiring decision are considerable and may include: training costs; productivity losses; administrative costs to terminate an employee; team/project disruption; morale problems due to employee turnover; and unemployment insurance (UI) rate increases. These factors, along with negligent hiring accusations, workplace violence, and possible litigation underscore the importance of making good hiring decisions and avoiding hiring mistakes.

A Better Way to Hire 

Contract-to-direct has become a very popular means of hiring permanent staff while minimizing the risk of a hiring mistake. Contract-to-direct allows an employer to “try before you buy”, observing a candidate in an on-the-job setting prior to making a decision to offer permanent employment. This provides some comfort for the employer that it is hiring the right individual and reducing the likelihood of future turnover. 

With contract-to-direct — also known as ‘contract-to-hire’ or ‘temp-to-perm’ — an individual works as a contractor for six months and then is eligible to become a direct employee at no cost. During the contract period, the individual is an employee of the agency which recruited him/her, and all employment expenses (including payroll taxes, workers compensation insurance, unemployment insurance, etc.) are paid by the agency. If during the contract period it is determined that the individual is not suitable for permanent employment, the contract simply ends with no administrative issues or negative impacts on the company’s UI rate. 

Triad Engineering Corp has specialized for over 36 years in helping clients fill their technical staffing needs on a contract and contract-to-direct basis. Triad is locally owned and operated, focusing solely on the engineering and engineering support staffing needs of its clients throughout  New England. Please contact us at 800-649-1514 or visit our web site www.triad-eng.com for more information.