As the skills gap puts pressure on businesses in various industries, those businesses turn to staffing firms to fill open positions. There's just one problem; staffing firms are facing the same challenges as the businesses they're supporting. Record low unemployment rates, weak workforce participation rates and changing skills demands make finding the right temporary employee more difficult than ever. 

Finding Solutions to Unemployment 

A well-developed job posting is the first step toward attracting the right talent to fill open positions. With a yawning skills gap, and a plummeting unemployment rate, quality job postings are more important than ever. If you're still repurposing the same job postings you used a decade ago, you're probably missing great candidates. 

The United States ended 2018 with some of the lowest unemployment rates seen in decades. This great news for the economy brings challenges for businesses trying to fill open positions or expand their workforce. Coupled with the low employment rate, the skills gap has also made hiring all the more difficult for employers. Tackling these challenges starts with exploring new strategies to help your business stay competitive in the 2019 hiring market.

When you select a training and education program for your staff, you're looking for more than ways to upskill employees. You're looking for a training partner who can help you realize a positive return on investment for your efforts.

Employers challenged by the skills gap are turning to staffing firms to find qualified employes. Yet staffing companies are not immune to the skills gap. Just like employers, staffing companies are struggling to recruit and retain skilled talent.  To continue serving their clients, staffing companies need to go beyond placement and start upskilling and training employees for high-demand roles. This strategy will allow staffing companies to do more than overcome the skills gap, it will allow them to thrive in a whole new way.

Penn Foster is thrilled to be participating in this year's American Staffing Association Staffing World Conference next week (October 16-18) at the Gaylord National Convention Center in National Harbor, MD. As the largest staffing and recruiting conference in the US, Staffing World welcomes over one thousand attendees annually. As we near this year's event, we are looking forward to having the opportunity to meet with so many leaders and discuss the key trends and challenges in the staffing, recruiting, and workforce solutions industry. 

As technology continues to evolve at an incredibly fast rate, the role of staffing firms has changed with it. The average worker is finding it more and more difficult to stay current with the necessary skills to succeed in a labor market that's requiring more of them each and every day, and the result is a growing skills gap. As that gap widens, the role of staffing firms has become more important than ever. No longer are staffing firms able to simply play matchmaker between an employer and a prospective hire; in order to remain competitive, they must be able to cultivate highly qualified candidates and successfully find homes for them with the right organizations at the right time.

If you spent five minutes in the exposition hall at the ASA's 2017 Staffing World Expo & Conference last month, you would very quickly get a sense of what products are being purchased by staffing firms.   

Kicking off tomorrow in Chicago, the American Staffing Association's 2017 Staffing World conference will draw over 2,000 leaders in staffing, recruiting, and workforce solutions to the McCormick Place Convention Center. With nearly 50 sessions led by industry experts and business leaders, including workshops, roundtables, and sector-specific forums, Staffing World seeks to disrupt the thinking of the staffing industry with new strategies and cutting-edge best practices to take back to your organization.