How Freight Brokers Can Hire using Near-Shore Staffing

The job market is tighter than ever right now, and the freight brokerage industry has been growing at a pace that can be hard to keep up with.  So how can freight brokers grow when it’s so hard to find good talent to join their team?  In this blog, I’m going to explain the near-shore staffing model, and how the top freight broker companies are using it to diversify their team and talent.

What is Near Shore Staffing?

I’m sure you’re all familiar with staffing companies and even with outsourcing jobs to overseas companies.  The near shore approach takes the benefits of these concepts and tweaks them to reduce the downsides.  At Freight 360, we’re trusted partners of Lean Solutions Group, a near shore staffing company, and we personally use their services to help us out since we live busy lives working in brokerage while still producing quality content for all of you.  Lean maintains multiple offices in Columbia, South America with well over 1,000 freight professionals assisting hundreds of companies.  The near shore staffing model enables freight brokerage companies to source quality team members from outside of their geographical area, but still keeping them in their same time zone or pretty close.  The traditional outsourcing model tends to use talent from countries that are halfway around the globe, which can cause some potential issues given the time zone differences.  Literally speaking, when it’s day time here in the US, it’s night time for them.  That’s where near shore is different.  When it’s day time in the US, it’s daytime in Columbia as well.  The other big difference from traditional staffing companies is the timeframe and scale that is offered to you with a company like Lean.  You’re not getting temp workers that are just there for a week or a month.  These are team members that become an extension of your organization for the long term, and as you grow, so can your team from Lean.  They’re constantly hiring talent and offering a great career for the folks in their home country, so you don’t have to worry about the labor shortage that we’re dealing with here in the States.  The team at Lean hires and trains all of their folks so they’re ready to be vetted and interviewed by you based on your specific needs.  Once you decide you want to hire a specific person, you can integrate them into your brokerage like any other new hire, and the best part is, they’ve already been vetted by Lean and they have a solid foundation of training in the transportation industry.

What Roles Can You Fill?

Lean has four main divisions that they use to offer personnel to handle the needs of your freight brokerage.  

Lean Staffing provides the right talent with the right culture at the right price (their words not mine), and they benefit a lot of brokerages by filling positions in dispatch, track and trace, and the various back office tasks such as accounting and admin.  Being able to hand these tasks off to someone else enables a quality sales rep or freight broker to focus their time on what they do best, selling and growing the business.

Lean Tech helps brokerages build out their IT and software developer departments or completely manage those for you with their dedicated staff.  We personally used Lean to help build out our website and manage it for us, and they’ve done a great job.

Lean Marketing assists brokerages with everything from marketing design and digital marketing to photo, video, and social media production.  Marketing is a huge part of your company’s brand and image and this is exactly why we use Lean Marketing to help us out with content and social media.

Lean Sales allows you to grow your sales team with quality talent that can help you scale your business.  There’s no required way that you have to use their sales talent, so you can mesh them right into your existing systems and practices.  Whether it’s lead generation, business development, account management, or anything else on the sales side, this division has been a game changer for hundreds of large brokerage companies out there.

The Advantage

Cost is an obvious advantage of using the near shore model, but it’s not the only one.  The cost of living difference allows you to get quality talent at the right price, while providing an opportunity to the folks at Lean to make a great living and provide for their family.  With inflation at an all time high in the US and the labor market drying up, it’s hard to get and retain quality talent in your local area at a reasonable price.  Using the near shore model doesn’t restrict you to the talent pool in your immediate area.  With multiple offices in Columbia and more opening up in the future, Lean has tapped into the wealth of talent that we don’t have easy access to ourselves.  Lastly, since Lean supports hundreds of companies and is growing, they have the ability to scale with you as your company grows and your need for different talent grows.  Your hiring cycle speeds up, your costs go down, and you’ve got access to talent that you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Make sure to check out all of the solutions that Lean has to offer your freight brokerage or agency by visiting them online at www.leangroup.com.

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