It’s an honor to be a contributor to Staffing Talk, a fantastic webzine/blog that documents the various challenges, triumphs, idiosyncrasies, and contributions of our unique industry, the staffing industry!

Our first post ran yesterday – check it out!

As anyone in the staffing industry will tell you, we are nothing without our clients and associates. Both are important, integral. Without either one, we wouldn’t be in business. Like a giant, ever-changing jigsaw puzzle, it’s our job to match them up with each other, to make perfect fit after perfect fit, all the while trying to keep them both happy and content (or at least happy enough to keep using our agency to solve the puzzles).

Now, as everyone knows, that’s an impossible game. Someone is bound to become unhappy at some point along the way. As staffers, however, it’s our job to make sure it’s not the client. I’ll go ahead and say it: while we deeply appreciate everyone involved in allowing us to do what we do, in a zero-sum game, one client is far more important to our business than one associate. Fair or not, that’s just the way it is. It comes down to simple numbers – there are fewer clients out there and they are tougher to get, so upsetting and losing the business of one of our clients can affect everyone, including our associates, in a negative way.

CAVEAT – Please recognize that we are very appreciative and cognizant of the fact that associates are vitally important and valuable, to us and to any other business! Every one of us are ‘associates’ too! This is just a ‘zero-sum’ comparison between one client and one associate, for academic sake…

So, we bend over backwards, jump through hoops, toe the line, and do just about everything imaginable to make sure every one of our clients feel that they are our ONLY client. And, believe it or not, some clients, by the demands they put on agencies these days, seem to really think that’s the case! But, despite this, would one of them, really, want to BE an agency’s only client? While on a sales call to a major prospect we actually got into this topic of conversation, and it was eye-opening. There are two agencies currently doing business with this prospect. One of them is on their way out, and the HR recruiter was frank enough to tell us one of the reasons why:

Read the rest here!