safety professionals

Important Qualities in a Safety Staff Member

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safety staff member

Safety staffing is a niched industry with unique skills and experience to consider. If you’re an employer thinking of hiring through ResponsAble, here is a peek at the qualities we’re looking for when building our growing database of staff. We recruit year-round so that when the time comes, we’ve got an ongoing stream of talent equipped to handle any job that comes your way.

If you’re looking to apply to the ResponsAble team, here are some requirements for becoming a part of our task force. The following are characteristics that our staff pride themselves on. If it is a good fit, you’ll be onboarded and placed through ResponsAble so that you’re prepared for every job that comes your way.

Checklist of RA Safety Staff

  • Interested and available for contingent and project-based hiring.
  • Resourceful and solution-minded, not a roadblock.
  • Ready to hit the ground running after training.
  • Desiring to be in-the-field rather than behind a desk, willing to be available to other workers on the jobsite and support team members in safety needs.
  • Professional demeanor and behavior in the work environment.
  • Organized and prepared for job responsibilities at all times.
  • Leader by example and influence, not authority or position.
  • Experienced in safety work.
  • All staff must have completed:
    • a basic orientation from the Safety Council
    • the TWIC credential
    • a hard skills test based on the position they’ve applied for
    • a behavioral based soft-skills interview

Depending on the job applied for or requested, our staff also are prepared for jobs with these characteristics:

  • Heavy Industrial Labor positions.
  • Able to repeatedly lift and hold heavy weights.
  • Physically and emotionally prepared to work within confined spaces.
  • Understanding nature of the work will often include 10-12 hour shifts 5-7 days a week with exposure to natural elements of temperature and weather.
  • Willing to work night shifts.

The characteristic that sets ResponsAble staff apart is their dedication to represent and work toward safety compliance as a leader and employee. ResponsAble helps you find the right people with the necessary skills to effectively and safely complete the job. Big or small, temporary or permanent. Let’s get the job done. https://responsablestaffing.com/contact-us/

ResponsAble’s Hiring Process

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hiring process

Are you interested in becoming a staffer with ResponsAble? Want to be included in our database of desired workers and experience the consistency that working with our distinct agency can bring? We’re here to tell you where to start!

The RA process from start to finish

Apply

Apply online at ApplyForSafety.com! Each applicant must have a basic orientation from the safety council and TWIC credential to complete the application process. If you’ve got both of those, then go ahead and get started! Qualified applicants will be contacted by a member of the ResponsAble team to schedule an interview at our office.

The Interview

Once at our office each person must take and complete a hard skills test based on the type of position applied for (safety technician, CSA/FW, labor).  If you don’t pass the test the first time, then we’ll offer another date after 30 days where the applicant can come back to re-take the test.

Once the test is complete, we then do a face-to-face interview with each candidate to assess their soft skills using behavioral based questions (tell me about a time you had to stop a job, what was it for and how was it handled; tell me about a time you had to work with someone you didn’t particularly like, how did you encounter this and how did you handle it).

We also track types of work environment each candidate is experienced in (refinery, chemical, construction, nuclear, offshore, etc.) as well as specific facilities/companies they have experience with, along with any certification or education they may have.

Through our assessment of their hard skills and soft skills, we’re able to appropriately qualify a candidate’s true safety knowledge and capability outside of just “safety certifications”. This allows us to match the right candidate to the right job and customer every time.

Paperwork

Once a candidate is qualified and considered eligible for hire, we have the qualified candidate complete all new hire paperwork and begin the onboarding process.

The Database

ResponsAble maintains and manages an ever-growing database of qualified and experienced staff. Once an applicant’s paperwork is completed, they become a part of this incredible group. While we may not have an opportunity on their day of hire that best fits a staff member’s capability, the database ensures that when an opportunity we can place them quickly (we have a lot of opportunities where we’re the last to know and first to show).

We frequently contact eligible candidates within our database whom are not working. We look for opportunities to engage with them and maintain communication and interest/availability status. This is such an important part of our culture that we track/measure how many qualified candidates we engage with as a KPI.

Getting to Work

Once on opportunity is presented to an employee, they then go through the final steps of our onboarding process and job-specific training required by our client. After this step, it’s time to get started on your first job!

Ready to start the hiring process with ResponsAble? We love to talk with applicants and determine their best fit. You can start your application online at ApplyForSafety.com and get the process started!

Is Outsourcing the Best Bang for Your Buck? The ROI Of Outsourcing

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ROI Of Outsourcing

We talk a lot about outsourcing your staffing around here. But is outsourcing really the best use of your resources? At first glance, outsourcing services are costly. However, outsourcing is actually used by companies to improve efficiency while REDUCING costs. 

“In a study of 30 firms, outsourcing resulted on average in a 9% reduction in costs and a 15% increase in capacity and quality,” according to Wheelen and Hunger (2010). How do each of these things play out?

Let’s break it down practically.

It’s Monday and you’ve just landed a new contract.

You’ve got 8 staff on-hand that can work on the job, but you need about 15 more trained safety staff before the job starts next week.

On Tuesday you call ResponsAble and tell them the scope of expertise you need for your job.

Next week, your staff show up on time for the job.

That’s it.

When the job is over, the staff that worked on your project return back to ResponsAble and you don’t have to incur the cost or risk of termination or management.

Outsourcing means that you can grow your business and operate successfully without compromising quality or safety.

In this scenario (and many others) outsourcing was valuable to the contractor because he could still bid on that project knowing that he didn’t have the staff on hand to complete the job.

He didn’t have to hire staff pre-emptively prior to landing the job, thus costing him additional months of staff time and liability without a job on the table. He also didn’t have to panic after receiving a job that he didn’t have staff for.

Had this contractor not had access to a staffing company, things would have played out differently.

Upon winning the bid on the contract, he would have to scramble to find staff that were qualified within such a short time period. This would be very time consuming for himself and others on his team. Not to mention potentially impossible to recruit the caliber of employee he was looking for on such short notice. He may have had to take on the risk of hiring staff that don’t have as much experience or training in the type of work required for the job- thus compromising quality, efficiency and safety.

However, with the help of a staffing agency this contractor was able to have peace of mind while growing the success of his company by bidding on bigger and better jobs with confidence.

This contractor also has more time to spend focusing on his business and getting the next job, because he wasn’t spending his time managing his current staff, mitigating risk and focusing attention internally.

By working with a staffing agency a company actually SAVES on hours of time on overhead, liability of ill-equipped staff, risk of low-quality work, and cost of onboarding, training and termination.

Interested in learning more about how outsourcing your staffing could actually reduce cost for your company? Contact us to talk about specific opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness on your next job!

One Good Way to Help Your Safety Staff Stay Focused On Safety

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staff focused on safety

Maintaining a safe work environment requires vigilance.  There are always competing priorities that force tough business decisions where we must guard against anything that might distract us from our safety culture and focus.

A common challenge for business managers in all disciplines is identifying what you should delegate and what you should not.  A few simple tests for when to delegate include:

  • • Are you spending energy and time on things that are not your core competency?
  • • Do you have options for delegation that can produce the desired results?
  • • Are there activities currently required of higher priority in your core competency?

I find a real estate valuation principle helpful in delegation decisions; “Highest and Best Use.”  Just like a real estate investor wants to use property for the property’s highest and best use to receive the best value, so should we seek to use our work time for it’s highest and best use.

Ask yourself, “What should I be doing that produces the most value to my business?”

The biggest obstacle to staying focused on your highest and best use of time is usually a perceived lack of people to whom you can delegate all the things that just need to be done.  There’s a lot to do and somebody has to do it.

I recognized this problem in the safety arena and decided I could offer solutions that would make a big improvement by helping safety managers stay focused on safety.

My company started as a safety consulting firm and after many years of seeing how much time both we and our clients spent on finding, recruiting, hiring, managing and transitioning all the various safety roles in the industrial and heavy commercial work place, I saw the light.  ResponsAble Safety Staffing was born with a new mission.

We help safety leaders stay focused on safety by providing experienced professional safety resources focused only on safety staffing.

Think for a moment about the activities involved to find, recruit, hire, manage and transition between jobs for all your safety related roles.  While critical to your success, those activities are not related to safety.

Staffing all of your safety roles takes a tremendous amount of time which distracts you from your highest and best use, safety.

Some people haven’t stopped to take inventory of the activities that go into staffing safety roles through a typical business cycle so I’ll summarize to make the point.

A typical project will include these fundamental steps and the associated time to get a safety team in place.

Developing and Publishing a good Position Description

Effective recruiting for any position requires a good job description to facilitate clear communication and expectations from initial recruiting contact and on to performance management should a candidate be hired.  A Position Description or Job Description also supports the development of a Job Post

Creating an effective Job Post

A Job Post is distinct from a Job Description in that the Job Post is usually shorter, focuses on the highlights and includes some favorable descriptions of the employer and work environment.  An effective Job Posting will draw far more qualified and desirable candidates than a long, dry job description or poorly worded job post.

Posting Jobs

A Job Post isn’t likely to be effective if you don’t post it in the right places, in the right formats and promoted the right way.  Various job boards have differing applications and it can take some time to learn the ins and outs.

Interviewing Candidates

Interviewing involves many steps in itself but I have lumped them all in an attempt to stay brief.  Contacting, screening and personal interviews are all required to navigate an interview of any one candidate for a job.  When you need more than one or two employees for a job, interviewing can become very time consuming and difficult to manage.

Testing Prospects

A good hiring process should include testing and evaluation to assure only qualified candidates make it onto a job site.  At ResponsAble we test all candidates and require acceptable passing criteria before they can progress in the hiring process.  The testing and confirming of credentials gets even more complicated and time consuming if you are hiring for diverse roles on a project.

Hiring Employees

Our clients incur a high cost every time they hire an employee.  Beyond the steps outlined above, the additional overhead cost associated with insurance, administrative processing requirements, and other benefits can total 50% of the employee’s salary.

Transitioning Employees

For project employees who may not stay for full career employment, you typically have costs and time to transition them out of a given role.  Sort of like unwinding the process costs to hire the employee to start.

The fundamental steps to hire employees to support a project of any size just takes a lot of time.  I can feel the man hours piling up even written in abbreviated form as I’ve done here.

So if you are a Safety Director or Safety Manager and want to keep your safety staff focused on Safety, ask yourself, “Are the recruiting and hiring steps for project safety staff the highest and best use of my or the team’s time?”

There are competent resources available to carry the burden of building a project safety team.  I have built my entire business upon carrying these burdens for our clients.  Consider delegating the staffing process for your industrial or heavy commercial project to people who specialize in doing just that.

If you think there might be a way to place more focus on Safety rather than the administration of recruiting and hiring, I’m happy to talk to you about how we can help.

The Economic and Ethical Roles Played by Safety Professionals

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Safety Professionals

From the top of an organization down, we can all agree that we want our companies to run as efficiently as possible AND be the safest environment it can be for all employees, right? This goal is easy when you hire the right people- safety staff hired by us! Safety professionals play economic and ethical roles and we’ve done the research to make this case.

The economic role of safety professionals.


We know that corporate management has goals that they want to accomplish in productivity and revenue, but here’s the thing: safety professionals share the same goals.

We’ve seen success when management promotes safety solutions that achieve goals such as efficiency. How do we measure success? Perhaps this definition resonates with you: “Success is clearly dependent on the quality and wellbeing of  your workforce” – NCS

We want to present a business case for you to invest in your organization’s safety because the long-term benefits far outweigh the “costs”. This kind of investment is an investment into your greatest assets- your people.


Tangible & Intangible Benefits of Safety Investment

The benefits for investing in the safety of your organization are both tangible and intangible. David Galt from ASSE provides examples of each:

  • Tangible benefits: increased revenues, decreased costs, cash glow, faster time to market, employee productivity, operational efficiency, increased capacity, decreased employee absenteeism and turnover, higher quality, increased market share, and improved customer retention.
  • Intangible benefits: technical expertise, company reputation, employee morale, innovation, compliance risk, and political support or influence.

ASSE argues that managers will determine the contribution of safety programs according to the impact on the following priorities:

1.     Control costs.

2.     Comply with regulations, government mandates, judicial interpretations or directives.

3.     Support business initiatives (strategies for growth, new technologies, competitive advantage).

4.     Enhance the organization’s image and reputation (public relations, reporting, disclosure).

5.     Everything else such as investor demands, employee considerations, insurance…

We put our investments in what we value. If we value the tangible and intangible benefits mentioned above, we will invest in safety professionals without thinking of it as a “cost”.

The ethical roles of safety professionals.


OSH professional organizations have developed codes of ethical behavior for members, which can be defined as the making of sound choices that reflect the professional view of prudent conduct, including factors such as honesty, integrity, and accuracy.

The success of OHS is determined by what does NOT occur- injuries and damages, etc. rather that what DOES occur. Unfortunately, these successes are often unnoticed because the failures attract more attention than the successes. While laws and regulations regarding safety inform us of what safety professionals should NOT do, ethics instruct us in what we SHOULD do. It’s about doing the right thing, not just avoiding the wrong thing.
Unsafe conditions and accidents are symptoms of problems in the organizational management system. In this philosophy, senior management ultimately is responsible for building an ethical system that effectively can analyze and control workplace hazards…

We do believe ethics start from the top of the organization and filters down, but we hire and train our safety professionals that have such strong ethics that they can provide positive influence on a job site.

EHS continues:

…safety professionals must promote a more ethical approach to managing their own profession. This strategy requires moral courage, conviction and professional unity, including a bottom-up approach at their worksites and through professional organizations, and understanding the need to look out for workers and the public…


If you would like to continue this conversation, we would love to further discuss the different roles that safety professionals play. Our safety professionals are high quality, experienced employees that can add value to your organization. Click here to read more and give us a call at 225-753-1909!