Statistics from the United States Bureau of Labor statistics indicate that 6.5 million hires were made in May 2020. All sorts of businesses have been growing and recovering slowly since the drop off earlier in the 2020 year, and creative industries and art departments are certainly amongst those positions on the rebound. While this is certainly welcome news, the hiring process is nothing to look forward to for the majority of companies. Taking on new staff can be one of the most expensive time-suckers on the agenda, not to mention the possibility of hiring someone who doesn’t quite fit the role and having to start all over.

Enter staffing agencies. Organizations that focus all their energy on finding skilled labor understand the wider job market and have a ready pool of enthusiastic and talented workers ready to fill any role a company might need. To find creatives for an art department or marketing project, using a creative staffing agency that has not only focused on finding the best talent but has also specialized in the industry you need will net your company the best possible new hire.

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all for hiring. What your company needs depends on what you offer and how your current employees are structured. Creative staffing agencies are still the fastest and most versatile method of hiring because we’ve not only found talent but we also have an extensive history of successfully placing them with suitable businesses. That means we’ve seen it all before; in lulls or periods of huge growth, we’ll know the best strategy and exactly what type of creative you need because we’ve done it already.

There are many reasons to use a staffing agency, chief among them being reduced cost. Many companies surprisingly don’t even measure how much they’re spending on hiring and onboarding people. That number can be significantly reduced if you eliminate the need for long interview processes and in-house hiring managers. With some of icreatives’ unique staffing methods, you could possibly even reduce the amount of time needed to train and onboard new staff.

If you’re still on the fence, keep reading for a more thorough explanation of what staffing agencies are, the numerous benefits they can offer, and how you might be able to use that to staff your creative projects.

What is a Creative Staffing Agency?

Agencies that have zeroed in on positions that are common to art departments, marketing projects, and IT departments are referred to as creative staffing agencies. These agencies work to present qualified, talent-ready creatives in a range of creative and design disciplines. Whether it’s for contract, full-, or part-time work, a creative staffing agency will have a built-up pool of video editors, content writers, designers, and many more.

At icreatives, we even offer our creatives free ongoing education so they can build up their various skillsets. Hiring people the old way, by posting advertisements and waiting, creates a pile of resumes to sort through and possibly thousands of credentials to verify. A creative staffing agency has already done the vetting work for you, and here at icreatives, we guarantee our creatives 100%.

5 Benefits of Using a Staffing Agency

If you ask most CEOs or other decision-makers, saving money is the number one motivator for just about everything. That’s what business is, after all. There are way more benefits than that to using a creative staffing agency, though. Here are the greatest benefits:

1- Save Money

It still deserves to be said and we’ll leave it right here at the top of the list. Creative staffing agencies eliminate the need for interviews, advertisements to announce new open positions, maintaining job listings on various websites, and verifying what’s on someone’s resume. It’s not that those things aren’t being done, it’s just that the staffing agency takes care of all of it. The interview process can still be as long as you want it to be, but the staffing agency has already vetted the talent which means you can concentrate on finding out if they’re a good fit for your company culture.

That also means you can let your existing creatives concentrate on money-making projects instead of drafting new job announcements. There will no longer be a need to waste valuable time – that the company pays for – on the hiring process.

2- Make Faster Staff Adjustments

Since staffing agencies already have the talent on-hand, companies can add creatives to their rosters when the need arises. Old-fashioned hiring methods take weeks to find the right talent, but staffing agencies have already covered that part. Of course, that means you’ll save money. But it also means your company can be more flexible and faster to respond to new events. In this age of social media, being able to respond to new events quickly can turn what would otherwise be a non-story into publicity for the company.

Imagine there’s a story in the news that a customer has found a new use for your product, has a problem in one of your stores, or wants to share a success story. If you can have creatives on-hand ASAP, they can respond to such a situation in a way that reaches customers in a friendly, human way.

If you have a project like a charity outreach or a new marketing campaign and you want to get it out quickly, using a staffing agency will get the talent in the building (or in the Slack chat, at least) faster than any other method.

3- Use Our Expertise

This is a huge benefit for companies whose central business isn’t in the creative industry. Rather than have a team of business professionals who have never so much as opened up Photoshop making decisions about selecting the most talented creative workers, farming it out to a creative staffing agency lets your business take advantage of our expertise.

More importantly, we know how to find creatives who have the communication skills to understand your ideas and explain their own. So our unparalleled knowledge of creatives doesn’t stop once the talent is placed in a role. Rather, it will continue the entire time our creatives are working for you.

4- Test Out New Jobs

Let’s say your HR team is working to identify some duties that aren’t already covered by your existing employees and your company is ready to see if a new position assigned these duties is the right solution. Great news: rather than wasting weeks and loads of money on advertising the new job and vetting candidates, you can get creative talent from icreatives to test out how the role works and whether it’s necessary.

Creative staffing agencies have creative talent that understands they’ll be used to fill temporary positions when it’s in the best interest of the company. Trying out a new position with talent from an agency is how you can make sure you have a skilled employee helping you create the new position and get tasks done that weren’t done before. And if it does work out, you can keep that same talent on a permanent or full-time basis without having to make any transition at all.

5- Enjoy Hiring Answerability

Every now and then somebody just doesn’t quite fit the job and you don’t find out until after they’ve been hired. If you hire them without using a staffing agency, there’s not really anyone who has to take responsibility besides maybe a hiring manager. Staffing agencies live on their reputation, which is why we take such care to get the best talent and get them in the right jobs.

It’s a calculated process that’s guaranteed to find the right candidate for any position. The only thing more bothersome than the old-fashioned hiring process is having to restart the whole thing because an unsuitable person was hired. Using a creative staffing agency completely removes that risk.

Those are five of the biggest advantages businesses will gain if they use a staffing agency. Now let’s take a look at some more specific ways you can use a creative staffing agency strategically to help your business.

Staffing Agencies and Passive Job Seekers

One of the most popular ways to use creative staffing agencies is to gain access to passive candidates, which are people who are not actively looking for a new job. Most of the time, potential candidates are passive because they are content at the job they have. However, the idea that everyone has their price has driven some companies to look for talent at other firms.

The advantage of this headhunting tactic is that the talent is already trained and capable of doing the job, and it’s proven because they already are doing that job for another company. Staffing agencies have wide networks of creatives who have already been placed in jobs, which means we have methods of contacting them. Some companies want to use this network to announce jobs and pull talent from other companies, but there are a few reasons why this is unlikely to be the best method.

It’s just not a good look, for one thing. If you’re trying to build up your company’s employment brand, staffing primarily through headhunting from competitors is going to make you seem more cutthroat than is probably necessary.

Outside hiring can also discourage your existing employees. If they don’t see themselves on a career ladder within your own company, they’re more likely to search for better employment with other companies. That’s bad for company culture and retention.

We’re not saying there’s no use trying, but if you don’t know how to target passive job seekers you’re likely to make some missteps and waste your own time. It’s important to find a creative staffing agency that knows how to handle passive job seekers and even more important to have one that knows when your company should target passive job seekers and when you shouldn’t.

Most of the time, it’s wiser to promote from within – including talent from the staffing agency that’s already with your company – and then bring in new talent for the positions existing talent once held. The idea of the career ladder in one company has virtually disappeared in the mind of millennials and Gen-Z, but it’s never too late to bring it back.

Using a Creative Staffing Agency for Insourcing

Another staffing tool that’s gaining momentum is insourcing, which is the process of bringing outsourced roles back in-house. Insourcing is great for gaining additional control over the final product and also allows the parent company to give everyone the same guidelines. Internal communication and security will both be improved as well.

Now, having to reverse the process of outsourcing may seem like a tall order. If your company tries to take on all the interviews, ads, and logistics by itself, there’s a good chance insourcing would be inhibitively convoluted. However, if you use a staffing agency to help, then you don’t need to worry about finding talent that can come in-house to takeover outsourced roles.

Best of all, icreatives even has our own In-House Outsourcing that allows company to have all the benefits of in-house creatives without having the hassle of overseeing them. Everything will be right there in the building, but we’ll handle all the stress.

Should Creatives Use a Staffing Agency?

Not only are staffing agencies highly advantageous for businesses, but they also have plenty of benefits for job seekers. For one thing, it greatly reduces the number of applications you need to fill out. Apply to join a creative staffing agency and you’ll only have to submit once. The agency matches you with jobs based on the information you give us during your application process, if you are accepted, that is.

There are some huge companies, even at the Fortune 500 level, that rely on our prowess to find their creative talent. We’ve built trust with them over the years and that means going through icreatives might not only be the best place to find jobs with these big-name companies, but it might be the only place, too.

Staffing agencies can also be a great place to build on your existing skills. We offer free continuing education to our talent and there’s a wealth of open positions where you can put your talent to good use. You can avoid driving all over town to tons of different interviews by applying through a creative staffing agency and taking advantage of the relationships we’ve already built with companies that have some of the best employment brands in the world.

Hiring Practices and Staffing Agencies

Using a creative staffing agency is also a fantastic way to start gathering information about your hiring process. As the Harvard Business Review has written, companies often make tons of mistakes in their hiring practices and don’t realize it because they haven’t taken the time to measure any of the results. If you eliminate all the noise of drafting ads, finding applicants, and interviewing huge numbers at a time, you’ll have more time to note what’s working and what’s not.

Paying more attention to what employees turned out to be good hires can also help the staffing agency get a better idea of the kind of talent you’re looking for, which will get you better-suited creatives more quickly down the road. Having a solid set of hiring practices that are based on measured and calculated evidence from experience will not only get you better employees, but it can also help protect your company from discrimination in hiring.

Conclusion;

There is a wealth of reasons you should use a staffing agency. Most businesses prioritize the reduced cost, and for good reason. Staffing agencies save companies tons of time that would otherwise need to spent creating job announcements, posting on job boards, fielding applications, contacting applicants, interviewing candidates, and training or onboarding them.

In addition to saving these businesses lots of time and money, using a creative staffing agency also allows companies to make faster staff adjustments, use our expertise in the creative industry, test out new jobs, and have someone to take accountability over hiring practices. The company will be more flexible and able to respond to new events much more quickly because we’ll always have the talent they need ready to work.

Whether you’re insourcing or trying to reach out to passive job seekers, staffing agencies are the best way to strategically structure your staff. It’s a great way to solidify what your company’s hiring practices are explicit to avoid liability issues in the future. Creative staffing agencies are even beneficial for the creatives themselves, who can avoid tons of applications and potentially find jobs at some of the biggest companies that aren’t posting jobs anywhere else.