Streamlined solutions

Staffline is one of the UK’s largest providers of recruitment and outsourced human resource services to industry.

The business, which was founded in 1986, is split into five operating divisions: a traditional industrial branch infrastructure, with 17 branches located principally within the triangle of Leeds, Liverpool and Northampton; Bought Out Labour Technology (BOLT), a new service as part of the industrial business, involving fully insourced production workers; an OnSite division, the largest Staffline branch, involving installing Staffline employees on customers’ premises to manage their recruitment functions and, in some instances, other HR functions; OnSite Partnership, a division specialising in recruitment process outsourcing, talent pool management and response handling; and Teschsearch, Staffline’s smallest but growing arm, specialising in temporary and permanent engineering, IT, HR and fast-moving consumer goods placements.

With a large database of temporary workers, Staffline provides more than 10,000 fully vetted temporary production workers to nearly 600 clients each week, primarily focused on the food production, manufacturing, warehouse and logistics, engineering and e-retailing industries.

Core clients include Sainsbury’s and banana giant Fyffes, along with several other well-known names in the fresh produce world. Two new contracts have recently been secured, one with a leading fruit importer-packer and another with a key UK vegetable producer.

Managing director Andy Hogarth explains: “With our OnSite Partnership division, if a firm requires a certain number of people to do a certain job - let’s say, a food processing plant that needs 100 people with a certain skills set - we will organise an advertising campaign, then do a shortlist of candidates, organise the interviews and select them.

“One of the fruit firms we have just started working with used to use five traditional gangmaster suppliers, but realised it needed the back-up of a larger organisation that could also advise on legality, health and safety, and other issues.

“We have actually saved the company a lot of money - £200,000 a year out of its costs, partly by aggregating spend and putting a manager on site. We are organising a lot of their internal processes for them.

“Usually, we spend time studying how a firm operates, then establish a joint management team and come up with a plan to boost efficiencies. We do not get paid until the system works, so that makes us highly incentivised. We have aligned our objectives with our clients, and are pooling our resources and expertise into their businesses.”

Graham Carr, regional director in charge of Staffline’s industrial branch network, tells FPJ: “Typical flexible resource supply means that the dynamics of what the recruitment firm provides and what their clients want is diametrically opposed - the recruitment firm wants to put in as many staff as possible, and the customer wants to put in as few as possible.

“But because we work on a delivery, performance, risk and reward model, our needs are aligned with those of our clients. Our aim is to deliver value for money for them and improve their processes - it is not just about cutting costs. Over the last five years, we have worked with our clients to reduce their operating costs, mainly by making them more efficient, and ensuring they get more for what they spend.”

Hogarth cites the example of a ready-meal supplier, which has managed to increase its output by 54 per cent thanks to Staffline processes. “With small changes, they have already recovered their overheads and paid for their labour, reducing their input costs,” he says. “With our clients being squeezed at the moment financially and not receiving any more money for their products from their customers, it is really important that we make them more efficient.”

Consultancies are the catalyst for change, explains Hogarth, but Staffline takes it one step further. “Consultancies go into a business, suggest change and walk away, whereas Staffline comes in to suggest change and then gives it momentum. Our job is to create more business.

“Traditionally, we recruited people and managed them for our clients, but we have given that process another edge to ensure our clients get more for each pound they spend.

“Two types of clients are necessary for us - open-minded ones, and also those who have a problem but cannot come up with a solution to it,” Hogarth adds.

Once on site within a company, Staffline will aim to recruit the right people with the right competencies, and will look at resource scheduling, maximising efficiencies and incorporating different shift patterns. “We try to implement changes that will make it better for both the client and staff. It is a whole end-to-end streamlining process,” says Carr. “We are indirectly helping the employees by creating a resource schedule that promotes a good work-life balance, and which will therefore reduce absenteeism - at the end of the day, a happy workforce is a productive one.”

Hogarth adds: “The food industry relies on eastern European labour, and as many of them are now heading back to their own countries, it is important that we make our clients’ companies the ones they want to stay in the UK and work for. If it is a nice place to work, you will stay there - you will not stay at a company where you are bullied and abused.

“Dealing with a company like Staffline is good for our clients, as they know we have to abide by the letter and spirit of the law. All the major supermarkets and their suppliers know what we have to do and, as we are a plc, dealing with us means a certainty of outcome is vital.”

Staffline has a gangmaster’s licence and sits on an advisory committee for the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA). Hogarth is also on the executive committee of the Association of Labour Providers.