Business support staff, why you need them and how to find them during a recession.

Business support staff (BSS), the staff that cost you but don’t make you money but also; the staff that enable you to make more money!

BSS roles are key to the smooth running of a business, whether that be administration, front of house roles or qualified roles within finance or human resources, these are all BSS roles. Dependant on the size of your organisation you may have one employee covering multiple functions and responsibilities or a whole team looking after each function. No matter how big your organisation having these functions covered in some shape or form will enable you to increase your output and subsequent returns on this.

An additional 120K a year

It may sound crazy employing more staff in roles which aren’t directly making the organisation money during a recession but hear me out and look at it this way. A tradesperson who charges their time out at £75 an hour but is spending their time looking after their organisations administration could pay someone £27000 per annum to look after it on their behalf and make an additional £121,514 (based on a 40 hour working week and including the employers costs.) Prioritise your time on making more money.

Of course, there are other ways of doing this, you don’t have to recruit directly to do this, you could use a Virtual Assistant (VA) company or outsource things such as your payroll and HR requirements to a provider, surely it’s better to have someone in house who understands the organisation inside and out?

A direct employee working solely for you who can pivot and adapt to the eb and flow of your organisation. Someone who’s flexible and understand how things work, that will use common sense to support the organisation.

While the outsources are great when things are running smoothly but at some point there will be a bump in the road, be it a short deadline or something doesn’t quite fit into the parameters you agree with the third party and that’s where things can get costly, both in charges from the third party and potentially missed opportunity.

750 Candidates for two roles!

The unfortunate reality is people get made redundant during a recession, to paraphrase Rishi Sunak, “We can’t protect every job.” This in turn floods the job market with a huge influx of candidates, some of which will apply for any and every role as they simple have no choice. To put that in perspective for you, we have just filled two admin roles, to which we had over seven hundred and fifty odd applicants! We also had over a thousand applicants for sixteen temporary warehouse roles!

Candidates are doing the right thing in applying for every role they can, simple fact of it, it’s a numbers game. But that doesn’t make an employer’s life any easier. Without using an applicant tracking system we worked it out to approximately twenty minutes per applicant to initially screen. That would allow you to screen a hundred and twenty applicants in forty hours, a full-time working week. Remember we had seven hundred and fifty odd applicants to our admin roles? With the correct systems and the right tools to hand, they could be filtered in about twelve hours.

Outsource it

So back to our tradesperson and their organisation, can they really afford to pull someone else in to support the two of them rather than being out making the organisation money? Why would you? Outsource it.

Using a Recruitment Consultant has many benefits and dependent on what you need and when depends which benefits are most relevant. Right now, as we touched, on the talent pool is full, it’s managing it, don’t forget even after the initial screening there’s still a long way to go in the process. With a Consultant, all our tradesperson needs to worry about is maybe five candidates maximum. Yes our trades person is going to pay for the service, but on £27K salary? £3-£3.5K maximum and the whole process will be guaranteed to protect your money in some way shape or form.

They’re back making money

Right, back to our tradesperson one more time. They’ve outsourced the process of recruitment, they’ve agreed to pay a fee of £3.5K, they’ve agreed their investment is guaranteed from the first day of employment for three months, they have clear a day in their diary to interview five candidates, they’re back in an area of the business where they can focus on making money. At the end of year one they have the potential to be £118,014 better off- makes pretty good sense to me.

Still think it’s crazy to hire BSS right now?