By Monique Crapper
Author: Michelle Peterson
About the Author: Michelle Peterson has led global payroll strategy at one of the top 5 staffing companies in the U.S for over a decade. She understands firsthand the challenges payroll and operations teams face in managing temp talent. As the leader in staffing solutions at Instant, she now advises workforce organizations on time clock efficiency, payroll modernization, employee engagement, and digital pay solutions.
When staffing leaders talk about growth, most of the focus falls on bringing in new candidates and filling more jobs. It revolves around placement metrics, recruitment costs, and fill rates. Meanwhile, there’s a major driver of profitability sitting right under our noses, often overlooked: redeployment.
Redeployment means placing a worker on their next assignment before they leave your agency. It seems obvious, but its impact on your bottom line can be significant.
Why Redeployment Matters
It comes down to simple maths. Every time you recruit, screen, and onboard a worker, you make an investment. If that worker finishes their assignment and leaves your agency, the investment just disappears into thin air. That’s why redeployment is a vital business tactic. When you redeploy them to another job, you maximize the ROI of your recruiting efforts.
How redeployed workers impact business:
- Boost fill rates: Workers are already vetted, onboarded, and proven performers. You have a bench of talent ready to work.
- Reduce turnover costs: fewer people leaving means fewer expensive backfills.
- Increase billable hours: your team spends less time chasing applicants and more time on revenue-generating placement activities.
- Strengthen client trust: clients value consistent, reliable workers returning for future assignments as it cuts on training costs and provides operational continuity.
In short, redeployment improves both efficiency and gross profit.
The Challenge with Redeployment: Why Most Agencies Fail
If redeployment is such an obvious profit driver, why doesn’t every staffing agency excel at it? After speaking with dozens of leaders over the years, I’ve identified three challenges that trip up even well-intentioned agencies:
- Talent hopping: Workers often leave for competitors once their pay hits their account. Often, they take the first offer to prevent gaps in employment.
- Engagement gap: Low engagement during an assignment means workers don’t stick around afterward. Communication is key. In fact, 73% of candidates are more likely to keep working with a staffing firm if their recruiter is prompt in communication.
- Operational oversights: Recruiters lose track of workers’ end dates and miss the window to redeploy them. This is often a systems problem masquerading as a people problem. Without automation and tracking, even your best recruiters will let opportunities slip.
Without strong engagement and retention tools, deployment becomes a manual process, allowing room for error or oversight. Many agencies hope good intentions and periodic check-in calls will be enough to maintain worker loyalty, but in today’s competitive labor market, that is not enough.
Adopting On-Demand Pay to Address Redeployment Issues
Have you considered giving your workers immediate access to their earned pay as opposed to them having to wait until payday? Forward-thinking agencies are using early access to wages as a strategic tool to keep talent on the books. Earned wage access (EWA) providers like Instant are changing the game for staffing agencies.
The mechanism of EWA is straightforward, but the impact is profound:
- Stronger engagement — workers feel more valued and financially secure when they have immediate access to their wages.
- Improved loyalty — instant access to pay is a perk that 86% of workers want, meaning they’re more likely to stay with your agency rather than switch to a competitor.
- Better timecard accuracy — fewer payroll disputes keep assignments running smoothly and reduce friction.
- Increased redeployment — keep talent from switching to a competitor by giving them an additional and meaningful reason to stay. Earned wage access is a sticking point.
Offering on-demand pay is a business tool that not only addresses the challenge of redeployment but also helps tackle higher fill rates, lower turnover, and stronger gross profit—all without raising bill rates or lowering worker pay.
The Bottom Line
Redeployment isn’t just about finding the next job for a worker. It’s about protecting your recruiting investment, keeping workers loyal and engaged, and driving higher profitability for your agency.
Visit our booth #1207 at the 2025 Staffing World on October 6–8 in Orlando, FL, or schedule a call to learn more about how Instant can help your staffing agency get ahead:
- Get in Touch with Michelle Peterson at michelle.peterson@instant.co or
- Fill out the form on instant.co/demo.
