"When a leader needs more capacity, they reach for the staffing agency. Not because it is the best option, but because it is the only one they have been left with."
Let me walk you through something that happens in every large enterprise, and that almost nobody stops to question.
You are a VP of marketing, or a senior director of engineering. You have goals for the year. To hit them, there is a set of things you need to do, and those are your jobs to be done. Then you do your capacity planning. You look at your team and ask, which of these can I actually get done with the people I have today? And there is a gap. There are not enough hours in the day. So you have two choices: cut your scope, or increase your capacity.
And here is where the trap springs. Because you are a large enterprise with agreements with a staffing agency, by inertia you assume the only way to increase capacity is to bring in a temporary staff aug person. Why? Because you have worked with that agency for five or ten years, and that is what is available to you. So the option becomes the answer, before you have really asked the question.
Where the trap came from
None of this is because anyone is bad at their job. Twenty years ago, most suppliers of human capital did not use technology at all. It was genuinely hard to get a staff aug worker for 20 weeks and, in parallel, a cutting-edge freelancer who maybe did not even live in your country. There were real barriers. And those barriers got baked into the programs. Inertia is inertia. Things stay the way they are until somebody says we can do better. So 20 years later you are still living inside constraints someone set a decade or two ago, and nobody has revisited them, because people do not have the bandwidth to question everything they do every day.
How you break out
Now run the same scenario, but you stop and do the analysis. You can increase capacity in many ways. AI helps you get more done with the same people. But for the jobs AI does only partly, you still need people, and you are not limited to a staffing agency. You can go to a marketplace for independent contractors. You can use an employer of record for someone you have worked with before. You can go to a managed services or outsourcing provider. Just by doing that analysis, you exponentially increase the number of tools in your toolkit, and your odds of hitting your goals go up.
And the cost game opens up
There is a second prize. Each of those ways to engage talent comes at a different cost, so now you can actually manage cost. The staff aug route tends to be the more expensive one. Other routes let you control it: people who are not in a high-cost location, people engaged for a finite time with no ramp-up and no onboarding. And sometimes you need a specialist who does one thing this month, and you never need it again. You do not run a long interview loop for that. You engage somebody excellent; they deliver, and getting it done is the interview.
So the next time you need more capacity, stop before you reach for the staffing agency by reflex. Ask what the job to be done actually is, and what all the ways to get it done are. Which of your own constraints is quietly deciding the answer for you, and when did you last question it.
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Author
Ernesto Lamaina
GM, Lifted
Ernesto Lamaina is the General Manager of Lifted, an Upwork company dedicated to helping enterprises source, engage, and manage contingent talent across every contract type—independent contractors, staff augmentation, employer of record, and managed services.
