As the staffing industry becomes increasingly competitive, your staffing agency can gain an edge by controlling your administrative costs, particularly your unemployment insurance tax rates. By keeping your costs lower than your competitors, you can offer better client mark-up rates, drawing in more clients and increasing your profit.

Unemployment insurance (UI) costs can count for a large portion of your overall spending. You can effectively control these costs in many ways. In this blog, we’ll teach you about how you can work with clients to implement unemployment practices and policies that help your staffing agency lower UI costs.

Why Your Clients’ Unemployment Policies Don’t Work

By helping your clients put into place strong unemployment policies, you can help your firm and your clients decrease costs and increase profitability. First, you’ll need to carefully track all your UI claims, protests and costs. By tracking this information, you can identify problems with specific clients and begin work to help these clients to change their unemployment practices.

Clients often experience higher UI costs because:

• They have weak or poorly enforced unemployment policies that hurt their chances of winning UI protests. They may not have attendance policies, for instance, or do not keep proper documentation of discipline or separations.
• The client has different policies in place than you have. Employees you place at these companies may be confused about which policies (yours or the client’s) they should follow.
• They have good unemployment policies in place, but have poor unemployment practices that keep them from using the policies correctly.
• The client doesn’t understand why discipline, documentation and policies are important to control UI costs.

Using Unemployment Policies to Lower Your Clients’ Costs

Through your unemployment tracking system, you can identify these problems with your client and develop a focused plan for managing the client’s unemployment costs. You can work with your client to address these issues and put better unemployment policies into place.

If you work with your client, but they are still unable to correct problems, you will need to use your unemployment tracker data to discuss their markup percentage. By showing them how their actions are increasing costs, you can justify a higher markup on those clients.

Tracking, managing and lowering your UI costs gives you a competitive advantage over other staffing agencies. By working closely with your clients to implement better unemployment policies and practices, you can improve your profitability and experience greater success. For more information, please visit us at unemploymenttracker.com.