Changing Recruitment Supplier

Six things, in this order. Changing supplier is next week's problem; tonight is about the shift.

1. 1Get the real number from your current supplier, in writing, now. Not “we are working on it” — how many people are confirmed, by name, and what time they are due.
2. 2Decide what you can run with. Identify the minimum crew that keeps the critical line moving and what you are prepared to stand down, before someone has to decide it at 6am.
3. 3Call a second supplier tonight, not tomorrow morning. Lead time on a same-day booking is measured in hours and the useful hours are the evening ones.
4. 4Ask your own team before you ask the market. Overtime from people already inducted and on site is faster, safer and usually cheaper than an emergency agency booking.
5. 5Confirm transport and start times for anything you do book. A confirmed worker who cannot get there at 5am is not cover.
6. 6Write down what happened while it is fresh — what was booked, what was promised, what arrived. If this becomes a supplier conversation, contemporaneous notes are worth more than recollection.

If you want us in the mix for tomorrow, the sales enquiry form below reaches our team directly rather than a general inbox — including in the evening, when the branches are shut. Tell us the site, the shift and the number, and somebody will come back to you.

“Bookings are covered” and “people will arrive” are different statements, and the gap between them is where most supplier failure lives. A booking that has been allocated but never accepted by a worker is not cover, and a supplier who does not separate the two cannot tell you which you have.

Ask three specific questions:

1. 1How many of tomorrow's shifts have been accepted by a named worker, as opposed to allocated to one?
2. 2How many of those workers have worked this site before?
3. 3What was the difference between booked and attended on this site, for each of the last four weeks?

The last question is the one that matters. A supplier who cannot produce booked against attended by week, by site, is not measuring the thing they are being paid to deliver. That is not an aggressive question and it should not produce a defensive answer — it is the basic record of the service.

If the answers are vague, ask for them in writing with a deadline. A supplier who will not put their own delivery figures in an email is telling you something useful.

If you are using three agencies and still have gaps, changing one of them may not help. Multi-agency supply is often introduced to create competition and ends up creating ambiguity instead.

The diagnostic is whether anybody owns the total. Three things tend to be true when nobody does:

• Each supplier fills its own allocation, so nobody is accountable for the shortfall between the three, and each can point at the others.
• The same workers are registered with all three, so you are competing with yourself for a pool you already had.
• Each supplier books separately, so nobody sees the whole picture and no one can tell you why Thursday nights keep failing.

Before replacing a supplier, check whether the booking process is the problem: how requirements are communicated, how late changes are handled, how far ahead bookings are confirmed. A single well-run supplier with a clear process usually outperforms three suppliers with an unclear one — but only if the process is fixed as part of the change.

Ask every candidate supplier for the same seven things, and compare the answers rather than the presentations.

1. 1Booked against attended, by week, for a comparable site. Not a headline percentage — the actual weekly figures, and the definition behind them.
2. 2How they distinguish an allocated shift from an accepted one, and which of the two their fill rate counts.
3. 3Compliance evidence: licence number and the name it is held in, right-to-work process, insurance cover, and how qualification expiry is tracked.
4. 4What their induction throughput per day is, which is what actually determines how fast they can take over.
5. 5How many workers they have who have already worked sites like yours, and how they will approach yours specifically.
6. 6What you will be able to see yourself — bookings, live attendance, timesheets — and whether you need to ask them for it.
7. 7A reference from a client who changed supplier to them, not a client who has always used them. The transition is what you are buying.

Accept answers all seven, and it is fair to hold us to that. Booked against attended comes from the records that run the shifts rather than from a report assembled for the meeting. The difference between an allocated shift and an accepted one is built into how we book, so we can tell you which you have. Our licence number and the name it is held in are on the compliance page. And clients see bookings, live attendance and timesheets themselves rather than asking us to send them.

We work across the Midlands from branches in Leicester, Coventry and Tamworth, which matters more than it sounds when a supplier is being replaced. Taking a site over quickly depends on having people who already live near it and have already worked that shift pattern — not on how fast an agency can recruit strangers.

This is the part that determines whether the change works, and it is usually the part nobody plans.

The workers on your site are not the property of the outgoing agency. They are individuals who will decide, within a day or two of hearing about the change, whether to register with the incoming supplier, go to a different site, or stay with the agency they know. The good ones decide fastest, because they have options.

So identify the people you want to keep before anything is announced, and make sure the incoming supplier's first action is to register them — quickly, on site if possible, with continuity of pay rate and shift pattern. Uncertainty about either is what sends a reliable worker elsewhere. Say plainly that you want them to stay; it is remarkable how rarely anyone does.

Where an onsite managed service is being replaced rather than a supply arrangement, TUPE may apply to the agency's own on-site staff — the coordinators and account team, not the temporary workers. Establish early whether it applies, because the consultation obligations and timescales sit on the critical path of the change rather than alongside it. This is a legal question rather than a commercial one, and it is worth taking your own advice on it at the start rather than relying on the view of either agency, incoming or outgoing.

How long a change takes is set by the same thing that governs any large intake: how many people the incoming supplier can get registered, compliant and inducted per day, and how quickly your own site can receive them. Headcount matters less than either. A like-for-like takeover where most of the workers stay and register with the new supplier runs over a small number of weeks. One where the workers do not follow is a recruitment exercise, and it takes as long as recruitment takes.

So ask a candidate supplier for their registration and induction throughput per day rather than for a date. A supplier who offers you a date without first asking about your induction capacity has not worked out what the constraint is.

1. 1Pick the date deliberately. Never the Monday of a peak week, never the week of a go-live, and ideally a period where a bad day is survivable.
2. 2Run parallel for at least one full cycle. The incoming supplier covers part of the requirement while the outgoing one still covers the rest, so a failure is a gap rather than a stoppage.
3. 3Register the workers you want to keep before the switch date, not on it.
4. 4Transfer the information, not just the people: shift patterns, site-specific requirements, qualification records, who works which line, and the arrangements that exist by custom rather than in writing (see what a mobilisation plan contains).
5. 5Agree what “working” looks like in week one — the attendance figure you expect, reviewed daily, with a named person on each side.
6. 6Keep the outgoing supplier informed and paid. A supplier who learns they are being replaced from their own workers has no reason to help you through the last four weeks.

Everything above is what to do once it has already gone wrong. This is what makes the next time survivable, and none of it takes long to set up:

• A second supplier who has actually worked your site. A contingency supplier who has never been through your induction is a phone number, not a plan.
• An agreed minimum crew per line, written down. It turns the six o'clock decision into a lookup rather than a judgement call made by whoever is there.
• A standing overtime understanding with your own team, agreed in advance rather than negotiated during a crisis.
• A booking cutoff you both hold to, and an agreed point at which a shortfall is escalated rather than quietly absorbed.
• Booked against attended, reported weekly as routine. Most supplier failures are visible in that figure two or three weeks before they are visible on the floor.
• One named person on each side with authority to commit, and their mobile number. Not a shared inbox.

The last two are the ones that prevent rather than mitigate. A weekly figure nobody looks at is not a control, and an escalation route that runs through a generic mailbox at nine in the evening is not one either.