Staffing Is Where a Lot of Companies Lose Profitability: Here's What to Do to Save Money
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This article was sponsored by Tradesmen International, a manufacturing- and construction-focused staffing service for proven trades, from apprentice- through journey-level.
“Our business is about putting Americans to work,” says Ed Rojeck, director of marketing for Tradesmen International. “We average between 10,000 and 13,000 skilled workers mobilized on a monthly basis. Even in a year such as 2020, we hit nearly 19 million man-hours servicing our manufacturing and construction clients.”
Founded in 1992, Tradesmen International is a safety-minded staffing company specializing in providing manufacturing, construction, and heavy industrial tradespeople. It’s a two-way street: the employee-centric company treats its workers like family knowing that, in turn, they’ll be able to retain the best of the best and ultimately be better able to offer clients tenured, vetted workers who will deliver optimal results. This is particularly critical at a time when finding reliable, skilled trade personnel is a daunting task.
John Learn, national sales manager for industrial accounts, agrees: “We want to keep Americans working and, concurrently, enable clients to minimize the challenges and cost of finding qualified workers.”
“We help businesses optimize their work-to-worker ratio, which is huge for any company,” explains Rojeck. “Overstaffing and understaffing is where a lot of companies lose profitability, and we help them achieve and sustain an exceptional workforce productivity level.”
Need a Trade Professional? Tradesmen International Can Help:
- “We offer the ability for clients to place orders via an app, via our website, or by personalized phone call. We'll always have that personalized, consultative service,” says Rojeck, explaining that automation meets today’s requirements and it enables clients to place an order at odd hours and still get results.
- “We have local service teams in nearly 200 markets nationally and a travel-dedicated workforce,” says Learn, speaking of the company’s national footprint.
- “We are a very employee-centric business,” says Rojeck. “While our employee safety clearly takes precedence over everything, we place our trade colleagues’ employment satisfaction as an overall priority for our business. While that may be scary for some people to hear, that philosophy actually results in a heightened quality product we can consistently deliver to our plant manager, HR staff, and site supervisor clients.”
Thomas Insights (TI): What do you think is the biggest challenge facing industry today, and how is your company working to overcome it?
Ed Rojeck (ER): For every industry that requires some type of trade professional, there is a severe shortage of bona fide trained, job-ready workers. The way we're able to overcome that challenge is by continuously investing in our recruiting technology and by constantly evolving our recruiting process. Also, we employ more than 200 full-time recruiters — based in local markets nationally — who, at the click of a switch, can act as a single recruiting engine focused on filling client trade requests in any market in North America.
We also have a National Recruiting Center that is staffed with trade specialists and trade-specific teams. This centralized recruiting powerhouse supports our local market personnel on an “as needed” basis while helping to ensure a strong order fill-rate percentage for local, regional, and national client orders, from one to hundreds of employees.
In addition to attracting, stringently vetting, and onboarding top candidates, our recruiting team also focuses on employee retention. All this results in a massive database of proven skilled workers — in all trades, at all skill levels — which enables us to mitigate labor shortage challenges for our clients. Our clients don't have that level of recruiting manpower, which is why they commonly look at us as an extension of their internal recruiting resources.
We're confident that the people we place on client projects, in plants or on construction job sites, are what our clients are looking for and cannot find. We have them because we've been doing this for almost 30 years.
John Learn (JL): We're a full-time employer. We not only source great talent, but they're W2 employees for Tradesmen. A lot of other service organizations within these industries don't necessarily have them as employees. They 1099 their workers, just filling in holes. We provide people careers, keeping a paycheck coming in for them by keeping them productively working from project to project. They have the ability to get benefits and a 401(k). There are just so many more things we do for our field employees that other staffing services overlook. That's a key component to getting and keeping the best trade professionals.
TI: What sets Tradesmen International apart from the competition?
ER: We maintain 100% focus on trade personnel within the manufacturing, construction, and industrial arenas. We employ machine operators, electricians, pipefitters, welders, boilermakers, and other trades specialists. Unlike others in our space, we don’t dilute our focus by getting into clerical, accounting, and other areas.
It's a concentration which has enabled us to find precisely who we're looking for from a craft candidate standpoint to place on one of our client’s plant floors or job sites. It's ultimately resulted in a higher-level employee that typically exceeds our clients’ reliability, safety, productivity, and craftsmanship expectations.
TI: How do you help clients be more productive while saving them money?
ER: Tradesmen International’s business evolved out of an electrical contracting business, which gave us first-hand knowledge of the challenges to keep productivity at high levels. Also, we’ve been doing this for nearly three decades and know the constantly fluctuating workload businesses face is the result of factors out of their control, such as material delays, inclement weather, and modified customer contracts.
We’ve developed a workforce strategy that puts the control back into our clients’ hands. It enables many to efficiently and effectively combat workload ebbs and flow and to maintain exceptional workforce productivity levels.
The strategy’s called CORE+Flex, where we enable companies to run a leaner, full-time workforce consisting only of the workers they’re able to keep productive throughout the year. As workload increases beyond what this smaller, core workforce can handle, we are there to provide the skilled people they need, on a just-in-time basis.
As workload diminishes and their own people can handle the work, they send our people back. Essentially, our trades are flexed in and flexed out based on workload, keeping the “work-to-skilled-worker” levels balanced.
JL: We're a strategic partner. We actually get involved in planning projects with our clients. When we have a partnership like that, it makes it easier for them to adjust for those peaks and valleys and to have only what they need only when they need it.
There is a right-sizing to a lot of employers as they go through this process of running lean and mean. Some folks do that holistically, and they get it, and we're partners. Some folks, over time — because of unemployment, because of injuries, because of other things — get themselves into a place where they really have to seek out partnership because they just can't, frankly, afford to bring people in. They know the true cost of not only hiring and training but the associated costs of keeping people working, giving them good benefits, and having an attractive pay-plan for them.
We've actually got a lot of things we can do for our clients as we get to understand their business cycles. Once they get to know us, they understand the quality of craftsmen we've got and how we can save them money with the CORE+Flex.
TI: Can you tell me a little about your traveling workforce — how does it benefit the client and your employees?
JL: So much of the work we do these days is all around the country. I'm located in Phoenix, but you can see a lot of companies that work in Phoenix are bidding contracts around the country, or they're affiliated with companies that are, and they support each other as subcontractors. Because we have that nationwide footprint, there is a significant amount of work that we're a really good match for.
Additionally — and we've seen quite a bit of success with this — we have a traveling workforce that's available as well. So if there is a shutdown in the middle of Montana, we have the ability to bring in a significant workforce on short notice because we already have a bench of fantastic craftsmen that we've been working with. And, because of the way our recruiters can put the math together to get the right amount of people out there to go through any of the protocols.
We're really there to support the client and make it super easy for them to get back to work.
ER: A big competitive advantage we offer our clients is the ability to source skilled trades outside of the company’s normal geographic recruiting reach. Whereas other staffing firms are essentially pulling from the same labor pool, not only do we have local trades, but we’re able to bring in top, hard-to-find talent from surrounding areas cost-effectively. We widen the net, enabling us to have greater fill-rate percentages of qualified people.
Overall, we’re able to provide skilled individuals in every city, in all 50 states and in Canada. Our focus is North America, but we're able to do elsewhere.
To jump onto what John said related to mobilizing crews in remote locations, one good example is a refinery turnaround in Bismarck, North Dakota. We mobilized around 200 pipe welders and fitters to a remote area where there were limited hotels. We managed the transportation, housing, and other essentials to get the best talent to make the journey. We always do what it takes to get the people where they need to be and to make sure they’re taken care of locally.
TI: How do you measure success at your company?
ER: That’s a twofold answer. One measure is based on client loyalty levels, which only exists if we hit high order fill-rate percentages with trade professionals who are reliable, who show up ready to work emphasizing safety, productivity, and craftsmanship. It’s also the result of getting to know our clients and their specific business so that we can serve them in a way that makes sense to them and their business. This takes true partnership; one we continuously strive for.
The second measure is related to our trade employee retention. We’re proud of our highly tenured workforce whose safety is always placed first. Then, it’s giving them the respect they deserve as America’s best, keeping them productively earning a paycheck to meet their personal obligations and desires. And, of course, ensuring they’re serviced to their 100% satisfaction, whether it’s related to payroll, understanding benefits, meeting their work choice requirements, or the location of work.
Only after we hit high levels of approval among both of these groups do we consider ourselves successful. And frankly, we’re never satisfied and are always upping the standard in how we serve both our clients and our trade employees. Doing so has kept us the leader in the trade staffing arena among manufacturers, construction businesses, heavy industrial firms, and even within the shipbuilding sector.
Image Credit: Image courtesy of Tradesmen International
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