ONLINE SKILL EXCHANGE SAVES JOBS, SHARES TALENT

A new social enterprise initiative to level out employment peaks and troughs, helping to reduce the need for redundancy has been launched.

“Unemployment in any form is damaging and wasteful,” said John Taylor, chief executive of ACAS (the Arbitration and Conciliation Service). “The impact on employees and the economy has long term implications and the cycle of recruitment and redundancy is a practice that we should be trying to change.”

StaffShare, the new online skill exchange, addresses damaging and expensive skills wastage by offering an ingenious online ‘skill exchange’ – literally an internet marketplace for employers to share employee skills and costs. Using smarter marketing and relational databases, StaffShare helps achieve ‘on-line introductions’ between employers wanting valuable skills with those employers trying to cut costs by finding temporary or even permanent new roles for their under-utilised employees. StaffShare uses a low cost, simple and flexible employee secondment process – passing talent not used in one company to be better applied in another – and both employers effectively share the salary.

John Taylor continued: “StaffShare is a new and different social enterprise and provides a serious and interesting alternative to workplace management. We are totally supportive of this new venture."

As in all recessions, spending cuts and efficiency drives always seem to involve increased unemployment through redundancy and recruitment freezes. StaffShare can reduce the impact of these ‘troughs’ by providing an alternative – based on cost-sharing – where the new employer contributes perhaps around 50% of the salary costs of any seconded employee – but crucially that employee remains under the same contract of employment throughout the secondment period. Periods can range from perhaps a few months to a year or longer.

StaffShare will also help mitigate the effects of the ‘peaks’ when the economy is performing better. Growing businesses cannot find suitably skilled people quickly enough, while shrinking or changing corporations have under-utilised employees trapped inside contracts. This ‘skills gap’ is an imbalance in the economy which the market mechanism does not handle either efficiently or fairly.

Phil Flaxton, a founding director of StaffShare, explained that StaffShare was purposely priced as low as possible to give charities and SMEs access to skills they could not otherwise afford. Membership is from £100 per year and employee CVs can be bought at just £20 each. He said: “Secondment through StaffShare is also a great way to enhance and broaden tired careers. Offering staff periodic secondments does widen their horizons and experience, and can reinvigorate and refocus their careers and motivation.”

StaffShare will enable registered employer ‘members’ to offer contracted staff at lower than market rates for fixed terms to other organisations via the website. The ‘skill’ employer benefits by cutting overheads and operational costs related to existing contracted staff; the ‘share’ employer gains selected and valuable skills at substantially lower costs than market rates, and the seconded employee gains from a new and potentially stimulating and valuable experience.

About Us:

StaffShare wishes to encourage local and national press, trade journals and feature writers to use their media voice and channels to educate, inform and spread the aims and principles of the ‘exchange of skills’ to save skills, add flexibility in the workforce and maintain job roles and employment.

The founders and indeed all at StaffShare will be delighted to help you wherever we can - through relevant comment, press releases and interviews with ourselves or our growing supporters from within public and private sectors across the UK.

In the first instance please feel free to access any part of this web site and contact our PR Consultant should you require assistance or further information.

StaffShare is a social enterprise. The organisation's board has committed to donate a minimum of 10 per cent of its cleared annual profits to selected UK and EU charities to encourage education, apprenticeships, training and skill development.

Further information about StaffShare can be found on its website

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