Placement agencies are companies that specialize in placing providers in new jobs with new families. They typically act as a middleman between families and providers taking care of the recruitment process for the families. They also typically provide additional services like background checks and resume writing or updating. Some placement agencies may focus on specific providers’ experience levels or certain subsets of the population based on family income, tailoring their services to meet the needs of those families and providers. Placement agencies often charge a fee for their services which is paid by the family.
Industries that use placement agencies include healthcare, IT, finance and accounting, hospitality, engineering and construction, education, sales and marketing, retail, media, and entertainment.
Why don’t placement agencies employ their providers?
Because it’s a placement agency, and for all of the same reasons that contract agencies don’t do it.
What can a doula or NCS expect from the agency regarding client engagement and tasks (outside of payment collection) at a placement agency?
A placement agency handles all of the initial engagement with potential clients.
- Reviews the leads as they come in
- Reaches out to the potential client about once per week until an intake call is set up. (this could literally be months of contact depending on the family) This does not always move forward to a consult call, but the agency continues to work until told otherwise.
- Spends 30 minutes to 1 hour gathering information and discussing services and prices.
- Continues to follow up with the client for days, weeks and sometimes even months until the client makes a decision. This does not always move forward to a signed contract, but the agency continues to work until told otherwise.
- Handles the contract signing.
- Sends the client invoice for the initial search.
- Posts the job. This often leads to reaching out directly to providers who may not be responsive or posting jobs in other locations and going through the hiring process to find coverage.
- Sends bios to the clients with available providers.
- Facilitates Meet & Greets with available providers and clients. Depending on individual availability this process can take days or several weeks and does not alway end with the client moving forward and requires consistently checking in with clients, but also providers to make sure they are still available.
- Sends client invoice for placement fee which sometimes takes days to be paid.
- Hands the contract off to the provider to move forward
- Sometimes checks in throughout the contract
- Sometimes provides support to clients and providers regarding contract and pay negotiations
- Some will offer a new search within certain parameters if a contract does not work out, but not all will.
