Hello -<p>I'm an experienced embedded systems developer, 62, and I have been approached by a staffing agency for a gig in nearby city.<p>I have interviewed with the team lead. It went really well. I'd like to take the gig, but I'm choking on the idea of working with a staffing agency.<p>I have had my own business since 1996, and I've been contracting with individual clients ever since. It's a been a good business.<p>I see working with a staffing agency (I'd be corp-to-corp) with them as introducing a third party into the relationship, and that they would be basically rent-seeking off of the relationship over the longer haul.<p>I think this gig could be 5 years or so of good, interesting work at a reasonable rate.<p>At the same time, I want to be objective as I can be in my thinking about this. I'm having trouble seeing any benefit from having them in the loop for the long term.<p>Are their any good arguments for working with a staffing agency on a gig that would last more than a year?<p>As you likely know, the staffing agency makes it contractually difficult, if not outright impossible, to cut them out and for me to work directly with the client on a corp-to-corp basis.<p>I would be willing to put up with the staffing agency for six months or a year. What I find hard to swallow is working with them in the loop for a longer period.<p>Thanks for any advice you can offer.
Staffing agencies are favored by businesses because they help offload much of the hiring/HR/legal and allow the business to focus on it's main concerns. From a contractor standpoint, as long as the pay meets your requirements, why not? You <i>could</i> hypothetically be making more without them, but there are a lot of assumptions in that hypothesis, and if you could get the contract yourself you would already have it.
First, the contracting company will ask you to sign a clause saying that you don’t seek contract with their clients. Here, you can add a conditional: it is valid for 6 months after the contract. You can quit and do c2c directly after 6 months. You can even knock it down to 3 months.<p>The other option is to jack up the rate that you think you are worth, and forget about how much staffing company makes off of you. Definitely for sure, they will make 20 percent.<p>Or don’t sign this contract and find the contact at the vendor management, try to present yourself. This is difficult unless you know insiders.
think of it like this: the margin the staffing agency is charging is the cost-of-discovery for both the supplier (you) and the client (end employer). Seems like this is a great fit - in a market with imperfect information, what are the chances of you two both being able to find each other? The end client has saved on advertising costs, you have saved on having to look at those adverts. Unless the margin is egregious - and you get the rate you're happy with - I don't see any problem