The less obvious true value that agencies bring to the mix is:
a. From a client point of view there is a middle man doing all the hard work of finding and managing contract resource and that also means the risk of the client being seen to be an employee of contractors is mitigated. Hence why no client takes on self-employed status contractors direct as they'd be at risk of having to pay employer taxes and provide employee benefits such as holidays and sick pay.
b. From a contractor point of view the second most important thing an agency does (after the most important thing of finding the contract) is invoice factoring. Weekly or fortnightly and even monthly invoice payments can be a damn site quicker than typical client billing cycles. That also reduces the exposure to risk of non-payment. i.e. the shorter the cycle from invoice to payment the better.
So what's the solution? Ironically the best entity to come up with a working solution to replace agencies is an agency. One that sees the opportunity to disrupt and corner the market by offering something tuned to appeal to both clients and contractors as being a genuinely new better approach to solving what are the perceived problems. Not sure what format it would be, I'm not an agent , but maybe something mostly automated and online to do to contract agencies what PurpleBricks et al are doing to traditional estate agencies.
For a technological based sector such as IT, which most of us on CUK are involved with, though hi to the farmers and construction workers , it's seems ironic (I'll have to check the definition with Alanis Morissette ) that this hasn't already been solved by better use of technology to modernise the whole process.
Where's Dodgy Agent when we need him...
a. From a client point of view there is a middle man doing all the hard work of finding and managing contract resource and that also means the risk of the client being seen to be an employee of contractors is mitigated. Hence why no client takes on self-employed status contractors direct as they'd be at risk of having to pay employer taxes and provide employee benefits such as holidays and sick pay.
b. From a contractor point of view the second most important thing an agency does (after the most important thing of finding the contract) is invoice factoring. Weekly or fortnightly and even monthly invoice payments can be a damn site quicker than typical client billing cycles. That also reduces the exposure to risk of non-payment. i.e. the shorter the cycle from invoice to payment the better.
So what's the solution? Ironically the best entity to come up with a working solution to replace agencies is an agency. One that sees the opportunity to disrupt and corner the market by offering something tuned to appeal to both clients and contractors as being a genuinely new better approach to solving what are the perceived problems. Not sure what format it would be, I'm not an agent , but maybe something mostly automated and online to do to contract agencies what PurpleBricks et al are doing to traditional estate agencies.
For a technological based sector such as IT, which most of us on CUK are involved with, though hi to the farmers and construction workers , it's seems ironic (I'll have to check the definition with Alanis Morissette ) that this hasn't already been solved by better use of technology to modernise the whole process.
Where's Dodgy Agent when we need him...
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