By Allan Maurer
RALEIGH, NC—John Wycoff worked in both the human resources services field and in IT staffing and saw that employers dealing with multiple recruiters became frustrated. “There are a lot of hassles dealing with multiple agencies,” Wycoff says. He started Talpro to reduce the difficulties and increase the efficiency of using multiple staffing vendors.
Talpro is not a staffing agency itself, but instead offers an alternative to outsourced contingent recruiting. Instead of dealing with several agencies and the headaches that brings, such as different accounting and invoicing and tracking procedures, writing multiple monthly checks and so on, Talpro lets an employer do it all through its service.
Wycoff says it works this way:
An employer posts a job on the Talpro Web portal that includes the job description, pay range any special instructions and a placement fee, but only has to do it once rather than on multiple forms.
Then agencies registered with Talpro see the posted job and ask permission to source and screen candidates. Wycoff says Talpro intentionally works with a restricted number of larger agencies so that clients will not be inundated with requests. Employers can bring their current staffing vendors into the Talpro system.
The employer then chooses the agencies with which to work. Employer approved recruiters submit candidates matching job requirements, providing resumes, test results, licenses, certifications, and any industry requirements into a single system available at the Talpro portal.
“An employer can see all the candidates in one source and move them into different buckets—ones under consideration, ones to interview, ones to discard,” notes Wycoff.
When the employer hires a candidate, Talpro invoices for the placement fee and pays the talent agency.
From its Raleigh office, Wycoff says, 5-employee Talpro services companies nationally. It handles permanent placements, contract placements, and contract-to-hire placements.
In addition to cutting down repetitive form-filling and the accounting and back office time spent dealing with multiple vendors, Talpro provides employers with customized reports and metrics to help them evaluate staffing agency performance.
Wycoff says a Chicago client that provides fulfillment services, delivering confidential HR related materials such as benefit packages, 401K statements, and enrollment forms goes through a heavy ramp-up of workload and needs to bring in additional workforce to deal with high volume.
Because the client needs to bring in about 30 temporary workers at that time every year, it works with several different staffing agencies, each with its own process and bill rates.
This year the client used Talpro and filled all 30 spots in two weeks, saving an average of $5.50 an hour per worker. “The client was ecstatic not just about saving money, but about how quick and painless the process was,” says Wycoff.
Free to employers, Talpro takes 25 percent of the agency’s placement fee. Wycoff says it’s not out of line with fees paid to an agency sales arm. “Once they realize we’ll provide business they would not otherwise have time to pursue, they’re all over it,” Wycoff says.
Talpro is a sponsor of the upcoming TechJournal South Deck Party, Thursday, Oct. 23 in Raleigh, a premier networking event (www.techjournalsouth.com/deckparty) and Wycoff will be present to answer any additional questions about the firm’s service.
On the Web: www.Talpro.com
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