The ongoing management of an entire facility, function, or department at a
customer site, usually including responsibility for hiring, training, and management of staff, as well as the
provision of equipment and supplies necessary to perform the contracted function by an outside vendor.
Assigned staff are usually permanent employees of the service provider, though temporaries may also be
used in a routine or supplemental way. Responsibility for the product or service rests completely with the
supplier, so these are (ostensibly) not temporary- or leased-employee arrangements. (See also: Employee
Leasing, Sole Employer.)
The provision of temporary workers to handle a particular facility, department or
function for an organization. Although first-line supervision of these workers is sometimes managed
through the temporary employer, ultimate supervision and management responsibility for the product
or service of the department, or the outsourced function, is retained by the customer. Typically, these
are considered to be “temporary help” arrangements, even though they may be for an indefinite period.
Facilities staffing is often sold as a way to maintain high productivity in high-turnover, high-burnout
positions such as telephone work, data-entry operations, or repetitive assembly work.
A generic term sometimes used to convey the use of various nontraditional work approaches,
such as contingent employment arrangements, planned staffing strategies or flexible work arrangements.
In general business terms, factoring has an alternative meaning and refers to a transaction in which invoices
or accounts receivable are sold for immediate payment generally to improve cash flow. The receivables are
pledged as collateral and the business may draw cash against the eligible accounts receivable at any time.
Also known as business receivable financing, it is not a loan, so there is no need to make payments or create
debt to the business. The rates charged to staffing firms for factoring range from 1% to 5%, depending on
client mix. This is very common with smaller staffing firms, where managing cash flow is a critical concern.
The abbreviated term for the Beijing Foreign Enterprise Human Resources Service Company
Limited, a state-owned enterprise founded in 1979 as the first company to provide professional HR services
to foreign enterprises’ representative offices in China. Such foreign businesses cannot hire employees
directly and, by law, have to use the services of dispatch companies such as Fesco which provides workers on
a temporary basis. Given Fesco’s first mover advantage and its dominance in the Chinese market, the term
is now commonly used as a general description for all Chinese dispatch firms in the same way as genericized
trademarks Hoover and Sellotape have come to be common terms for vacuum cleaners and sticky tape.
So, employers in China may use “a Fesco” to source labor which may not necessarily be part of the original
Fesco. There are now multiple competing Fesco’s in each city, some subsidiaries or affiliates of companies
in another part of the country, some partially state-owned and some 100 per cent privately-owned.
Staffing of work that involves processing and/or analyzing business or financial information related to the finance, accounting, business intelligence, procurement or human resource functions. Common job titles include accountant, auditor, financial analyst, business analyst,
loan agent, claims adjuster, procurement specialist and human resource specialist. Roughly corresponds to the U.S. BLS’s Business and Financial Operations Occupations group and to the ISCO’s Business and Administration Professionals group.
Uniform, fixed candidate staffing agency bill rates are pre-determined for each job title.
Generally in conjunction with job title, description and geography.
From an employment perspective, a contract that will terminate at a future date when a specific 'term' expires – e.g. the completion of a project or task, the occurrence or non-occurrence of a specific event (covering for an employee who is on sick or maternity leave, for example). The contract may be an employment contract with an employee or a service contract with a contractor on the basis of a statement of work. Fixed-Term Employees have employment rights and, in Europe, have the right to be treated no less favorably than a comparable full-time employee working for the same employer.
An employee who is employed on a Fixed-Term Contract. The employee will have the same rights as other employees, and in Europe has the right to be treated no less favorably than a comparable full-time employee working for the same employer.
A generic term used to convey the use of various nontraditional work approaches, such
as contingent employment arrangements, planned staffing strategies or flexible work arrangements. Also
commonly referred to as Flex Work in continental Europe.
A portmanteau of flexibility and security is a European term used to denote a welfare state
model combined with a pro-active labor market policy. The term was first coined by the social democratic
prime minister of Denmark, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, in the 1990s and refers to the combination of both
labor market flexibility as well as security for workers. The European Commission considers flexicurity as
an integrated strategy to be implemented across four policy components: 1) flexible and reliable contractual
arrangements, 2) comprehensive lifelong learning strategies, 3) effective active labor market policies and 4)
modern social security systems providing adequate income support during transitions. In a 2003 report
by the Lisbon Employment Taskforce, “Jobs, jobs, jobs — creating more employment in Europe,” temporary
work was highlighted as an important component of the flexicurity model.
Work schedules that permit flexible starting and quitting times, usually within
limits set by management.
A pool of workers most commonly used in the healthcare sector for supplemental staffing of clinical nursing positions (sometimes referred to as a nurse bank). The ultimate objective is to provide a database of available personnel without having to go through a third party. The float pool provides consistency in supplemental staffing by utilizing experienced nurses and assuring a more highly prepared nursing team is available with consistency of orientation toward the organization, its policies and departments, thereby fostering shared cultural values. Float Pool workers are offered a variety of work by being given opportunities to work across different departments.
An independently owned local unit of a staffing supplier that acts as a franchisor. A franchise
agreement usually includes an authorization to sell staffing services in a particular place. As typically
executed among staffing suppliers, in a franchise relationship, as opposed to a licensee relationship,
the temporary employees are usually employed and paid by the franchisee, not the franchisor. Staffing
companies with franchises typically include in their revenue only the fee they earn from franchisees, not the
total system sales of their franchise network. (See also: Licensee.)
A term that originated in the last century to describe (especially) journalists not tied to particular publishers, but independently made their living by contributing to multiple publications. By the late 1990s, this term spread to be applied to independent contractors working in the graphic arts and other related fields. At this time, the term can be used to refer to almost any independent professional worker who performs jobs transiently and is unaffiliated with a particular employer organization, though sometimes they may be affiliated with one or more agency organizations. Freelancers are typically classified as independent contractors.
A cloud-based workforce management platform. The FMS helps businesses initiate, manage, complete, track and analyze engagements with individual independent workers, who may be sourced by the provider or the business itself. To fall within the FMS category, a solution provider must provide a complete, end-to-end technology system that allows users in an organization to search for and find a particular worker and activate, complete, and pay for the work engagement within the system. Staffing Industry Analysts views FMS as a sub-category of Online Staffing Platforms as it enables specific hirers and specific (typically contingent) workers to enter into, complete and
transact work arrangements.
Historically this refers to the provision of both temporary help and permanent placement by
a single staffing agency. Today, as staffing services provide an ever-broader array of human resource
consulting and strategic staffing options, full-service also has a much broader connotation, implying a
complete set
of staffing solutions that may also include executive search, career consulting, PEO arrangements (in North
America), vendor management, on-premise responsibilities, contract employee management, and HR
consulting.
A measure of workforce size in which the total hours worked are divided
by the contractual hours in a full-time job (2,080 hours in the United States), regardless of the number of
individuals employed in a certain entity (company, region, sector etc.).
In the United States, the FLSA is a federal labor law of general
and nationwide application, including Overtime, Minimum Wages, Child Labor Protections, and the Equal
Pay Act.
