The Fourth Call to the Staffing Agency

A client called the same staffing agency for the same warehouse role four separate times in one year. Not because the business was growing — because nobody could hold onto the person in that seat for more than a few months at a stretch.

Each placement came with roughly the same agency markup, plus the ramp-up time, plus the small mistakes that come with someone new still learning where things are. He’d always talked about turnover as an annoyance — something you deal with and move past. When we actually added up the fees, the lost productivity, and the redone work across all four rounds, the number stopped him mid-sentence.

He hadn’t been ignoring the problem. He just hadn’t ever tallied it — which is easy to do when it shows up as four separate, unrelated headaches instead of one big number.

If you added up everything one revolving-door role has actually cost you this year — fees, ramp-up, redone work — would that number surprise you?