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TRIAD’s Top Eight Reasons to Use a Contract Engineering Staffing Agency

With increased demand to quickly introduce products to the marketplace, budget constraints, and the need to have access to highly trained engineering and technical personnel, many Massachusetts and New Hampshire firms are partnering with an engineering staffing agency to satisfy their requirement for highly skilled technical professionals to staff critical projects. Utilizing a engineering staffing agency to provide a temporary or “contract” worker can be highly advantageous for your company. Benefits include quickly gaining technical expertise, providing an influx of new ideas, reducing administrative overhead, minimizing employment costs, and, importantly, saving time.

Some of the most important reasons for your company to engage a contractor include:

Financial:  Working with a contractor can help your company save money in several different ways.  As a W-2 employee of the engineering staffing agency, the contractor’s wages, along with the employer portion of federal and state payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, professional liability insurance, and any benefits, are paid by the staffing agency.  The billing rate you pay the staffing agency is generally lower than what your costs for a direct employee – including wages, benefits that range from time off to health insurance to retirement plans, payroll taxes and other associated employment costs – would be. Hiring on a per need basis also saves money as you avoid hiring a new employee who may not have a full workload once the current project is complete. Contractors are hired for a specific job, project or assignment, and cease being an expense as soon as their tasks are complete.

Convenience: If your company is in a crunch and needs to fill an engineering or engineering support position immediately, contract staffing agencies are there to help! They spend considerable time and effort cultivating a network of professionals with a variety of technical skills.

The job of the contract placement firm is to find an available highly skilled candidate to match the technical skills for your company’s project.  As such, your firm doesn’t spend time searching for applicants, coordinating interviews, verifying references, and completing all of the paperwork required of a direct hire. With just a phone call to the agency, you can often have technically qualified candidates within a day or two, saving your company time and avoiding stress in the process.

Professional Hiring Help: As noted, the primary responsibility of an engineering contract placement firm is to find your company the best candidate possible for your specific need. Their job is to make sure you are matched with a contractor who can maximize your likelihood of project success. The recruiters are trained to evaluate resumes and assess a candidate’s skills and specific experience through various interviewing techniques. Contract placement firms can weed out unprofessional workers and those who are not a good match for your company for any variety of reasons (skills-based as well as the more intangible factors that are so critical). Their expertise and the range of candidates in their network can help ensure that you find the best candidate for your requirements, with minimal work on your part.

Reduced Administrative Burden: One of the best benefits of using a contract placement firm is the absence of paperwork.

The contract placement agency takes care of the entire hiring process with its myriad forms, and all of the needed paperwork for state and federal requirements including taxes and work authorization.  Additionally, when the contract ends the staffing firm handles the unemployment paperwork as needed.  This saves both time and money for your company and allows your employees to work on other important tasks.

Trial Run:  As alluded to above, if you find that the contractor has valuable skills and think you may be interested in bringing them on as an employee, you can use this time to fully assess performance and make an informed decision regarding their viability for a direct hire role.  After a designated timeframe, your company has the option to hire the contractor with no fee to the staffing agency. This is a great benefit as an employee who seems appealing during the hiring process may not always be the best overall fit for the company. Having the opportunity for a “trial run” to

evaluate a contractor’s technical skills and how well they work with the company’s other employees is a great benefit for both the contractor and the company.

Needed Expertise: Another benefit of hiring a contract engineer for a specific job is access to critical expertise on an as-needed basis. Through the contract placement agency, your company can acquire someone with a very specific technical skill that may be lacking from your workforce and that may only be needed to satisfy a particular project requirement. This skill may not be useful to the company in the future, but only needed at this point in time.  Using a contractor allows for the project task to be done quickly and cost-effectively without having to invest in a full time employee.

• Fresh Ideas for the Company: Many times creative new ideas can come from outside of your company. Contractors who have had a variety of work experiences at many different companies are often able to bring a new perspective to your company. Contractors can suggest innovative approaches, help implement cost-effective processes and methodologies, and introduce creative problem solving skills for technical projects. Your employees can learn from the contractor, and use these new skills and ideas on future projects. By using technical contractors on a routine basis, your company will benefit from the constant influx of new perspectives.

Engineering contract assignments can be as short as a few weeks or as long as several years. Partnering with an engineering staffing agency can provide you with the technical talent you need for your critical projects, without making a long-term commitment to a direct hire. This can be an important strategy for helping your company manage costs to compete in today’s highly technical competitive business environment.