safety professionals

What is the Benefit of Working with ResponsAble?

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working with responsable

If you’re considering solutions for staffing your sites and jobs, you may be thinking to yourself – why would I hire ResponsAble? It’s a valid question. We’d love to tell you some of the perks and benefits of being our partner, as well as some secrets behind our process.

We’re driven by value. ResponsAble is a sincere company. We truly want to be valuable to our customers. We know that what we do isn’t needed by everyone, but we’re the best option for those who do. We want you to know that we’re here to create value for those who have a need for safety personnel.

We take what we do very seriously. We’re in this business because we believe safety matters. It’s the livelihood of real people. We also know the only way to develop a valuable business relationship is to do good work. We want to provide the best match for every job. As an additional service, we also want to be a resource for our clients in whatever their safety needs may be. We’ve built a team that takes both seriously.

We can accommodate your needs. We work with a variety of customers in different work environments. This allows us to keep our employees consistently working and allows them to bring more experience to your jobsite. As they work, they gain more and more exposure and opportunity to grow their safety tool belt.  You can discuss specific needs you have and we’ll supply the perfect person for the job.

We do both temp and direct hiring. Whatever your safety staffing need, we are equipped to handle it. Keep all of your business under one partnership. If you don’t have the internal personnel to cover your safety needs, we can supply ongoing support or on a project-to-project basis.

We keep it simple for you. We assign a ResponsAble Project Manager to every project. Their job is to assist you with the staffing needs, support you in managing safety compliance, and help recruit, vet and staff as your needs change! That’s right, we do all of this for you so that you can focus on your project.

ResponsAble helps you find the right people with the necessary skills to effectively and safely complete the job. Big or small, temporary or permanent. ResponsAble has the ability to truly customize our approach. We have the ability to staff experienced Safety Professionals and Managers, Confined Space/Hole Watch Attendants, and Industrial Laborers. Get in touch and let’s talk about how ResponsAble may be a benefit to you. 

Safety Staff are Essential | A COVID-19 Update

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essential safety staff

As the medical community and civic leaders urge only essential personnel to work, you should ask, who are essential employees? 

Safety professionals are high on the list.

Industrial companies and their suppliers are essential businesses and have remained in operation since the outbreak of the Coronavirus.  Due to the stay-at-home order issued by the Governor, most currently scheduled turnarounds have been pushed out to later this year. The disruption of the Coronavirus has brought new and unexpected needs to the businesses we serve.  Being up for the challenge, ResponsAble has been a source of essential staffing for our clients:

It’s important that we keep our distance from people, but not from safety.  An unintended, costly violation can make the current challenging situation worse, threaten the safety of your workers, and negatively affect the reputation that you’ve worked so hard to build. Here are three ways ResponsAble helps you hire qualified, capable staff: 

  1. We’re a part of your industry so we understand the regulations that you’re responsible for maintaining.
  2. We handle all the details (hiring, training, payroll, support and liability) so you can stay busy ramping up for your next project. 
  3. On-demand safety staff. We know you need experienced safety professionals (and backups) that are just a call away when you need a position filled.

We take safety seriously.

Over the past several weeks, we have worked to meet the needs of a changing safety climate and needs. Here are some positions we’ve seen an increased need to recruit and supply:

essential safety staff

Health Screening Personnel

We’ve gained experience in supplying Health Screening Personnel over the past month, and now have the capability to supply Health Screening Technicians to your job sites.  Here’s how this position can help:

The Health Screening Technician may be responsible for assisting the Client with policies and procedures that promote a safe and healthy working environment.  May be capable of performing assignments of limited scope and complexity following the direction of an assigned Client supervisor. Health Screening Technicians can promote safety and health by performing temperature screening for personnel, completing CDC questionnaires based on CDC guidelines, and directing personnel for any advanced medical attention.  Health Screening Techs are also knowledgeable of CDC guidelines for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and other applicable standards.

Industrial Laborers

We also have a database of Industrial Laborers available for your specific projects.  Industrial Laborers help prepare and maintain a site by cleaning, loading, unloading, and transferring of materials to where they may be needed on a work site. These workers have a valid Basic Orientation Plus and TWIC. Each laborer is screened to ensure a strong work ethic, strong mind and strong body.

essential safety staff

Permanent Positions

ResponsAble can source Direct Hire and Temp-To-Hire employees for our clients.

With our Direct Hire service, ResponsAble Safety Staffing agrees to recruitment services, through the provision of resumes for candidate evaluation, in support of our Client’s stated intent to locate, identify and potentially hire candidates as full-time employees. Contact us for more information, including pricing.

Our ResponsAble Temp-To-Hire services include contract employees whom are assigned to a ResponsAble Client with the negotiated intention of “temp-to-hire”. The temporary employee must work for a Client as a Contract Employee from ResponsAble Safety Staffing for a total of amount of consecutive verified hours before becoming eligible for hire by Client.  It is at our Client’s discretion to determine if and/or when they may choose to convert the Contract Employee once eligible for conversion. It is also at the Contract Employee’s discretion to negotiate the terms of their offer for hire by Client and acceptance or refusal of hire offer by Client.  Contact us for more information, including pricing.

We specialize in all the work and details that you don’t have time for when you need additional safety staff. Give us a call today for a free needs assessment to find solutions for safety measures such as health screenings of your workers before entering a jobsite, or simply recruiting qualified safety personnel. Let us know how we can help at (225) 753-1909 or John@rasafetystaffing.com.

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.