Covid-19 crisis brings digital opportunities for staffing companies

Staffing companies are finding new opportunities in digitalisation of the workforce and providing software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to meet new challenges and demands from customers in times of Covid-19.
Market leaders Quess Corp and TeamLease told ET that they were betting on growing customer requirements like managing staff virtually, conducting interviews online, remote training and remote surveillance. The two companies are among the largest private sector employers in the country. The coronavirus pandemic disrupted the staffing sector as temporary staff were the first to be laid-off by companies to control cost.

Now, TeamLease sees opportunity in providing SaaS-based solutions for workforce management, as a considerable number of employees are working from home, managing director Ashok Reddy said.

“Our belief is that corporates will need a lot of intervention on technology and that's really the opportunity that we see coming out of the crisis,” Reddy said.

Opportunities for virtualisation are also emerging from sectors like FMCG, where traditionally frontline workers go from shop to shop to count inventory and obtain new orders, said Suraj Moraje, the group chief executive at Quess Corp. These jobs could now be handled remotely through call centres, he added.

In fact, there was increasing virtualisation even within call centres, according to Moraje. “We are now able to hire, train and deploy call-centre agents without even seeing them once because there are technologies to do this virtually.”

In the security services business, Moraje said customers were increasingly warming up to the idea of having fewer personnel on site who were then supported by remote agents who monitor operations from a command centre through cameras installed on the premises.

Apart from these, the market leader also found short-term opportunities arising due to the pandemic — like moving equipment, fumigation of premises and management of new safety protocols.

There was a spurt in demand for the company’s IT staffing business in just helping customers move equipment and ensuring that the employees had all the technology as they work from home. In the facilities management department, there was a spurt in demand for fumigation services.

“And that's something we have never done before,” Moraje said.