The Phantom Menace

February 29th, 1996 Posted in Cubicle Blues

A bit of context: I work at a staffing company called Staff Co. Those temps you sometimes see in your office, making $6 an hour to help sort your mail? We’re one of the companies that send those people over.

Now, really big companies need more than one or two temps; sometimes they’ll need 800 customer service reps, or 400 staff for a business conference, or whatever. Because it’s such a large order, they’ll request proposals from all the staffing companies, read through them, and pick the staffing company that gives them the most value for the best price. My job is to tell these companies why Staff Co. is the best. And since naturally we’re not, it’s a bit of a challenge.

At any rate, Staff Co. has a process with which we recruit people. This includes finding the people, interviewing them, assessing their skills, checking their references, and so on. It’s a set-in-stone process, and it goes into all our proposals as a way to impress the company about how thorough we are. In reality, it’s the same damn process every staffing company has — it’s not like one staffing company’s not gonna check references when every other staffing company does