The biggest problem is too many misguided Chiefs and not enough hard working Indians. Manpower is a company all about middle management. There are middle managers to manage your trips to restroom. The issue is that mediocre people are promoted to management. They don't do anything really well or really bad. They are strictly mediocre, just enough to pass. They are cheerleaders to every incompetent new process and systems that the corporate office rolls out. They don't ask questions, make suggestions or have any new ideas. They go along to get along. Manpower rewards this behavior with promotions. Therefore you have a large group of middle managers that lack knowledge, skills, experience and vision of a successful staffing agency. They are however insecure, incompetent and egotistical. Middle management completely kills the mission before it gets off the ground. Instead of devising strategies on how to gain more market share in the industry they are creating processes and hierarchies. Process get in the way of sales revenues. Egos get in the way of efficiency. They create completely unrealistic expectations regarding time lines and getting things done. They have a complete lack of respect for personnel in general but most especially for admin staff.
Another big issue is disorganized operations departments and systems. Too much time and energy is wasted on inefficient processes that are not necessary. Definitely too much time, energy, investment going to build a systems internally THAT DO NOT WORK. This creates lots of extra manual paperwork to work around and patch places where the systems fail to do the job they are supposed to do. Recruiters and sales people spend most of their time trying to fix the system to get the information in correctly so that middle managers can pull a report than on making sales calls and filling job order. While we are playing with our system other staffing agencies are filling job orders.
