Before a claim becomes a legal issue, your clients might give you various excuses and make up reasons why they feel they don’t have to pay their invoice(s). Don’t put yourself through this gamut of promises and lies. Make sure you turn your client over to collections before too much time has passed and the likelihood of receiving payment and the percentage of the total due, diminishes.
If a debtor starts to use excuses (some stated below), why should you have to put up with this nonsense? Running a staffing agency is stressful enough, you should be paid for the services you provide. Staffing firms provide complex hiring assistance to their clients which takes a considerable amount of time, money and effort.
The service you provide involves human beings and their time and energy. Think of all that’s involved: your temporary employees, new job candidates and all of your permanent staff. Consider all the personal touch points provided to your client from the Account Manager who visited them in person, to the Administrative Assistant taking their phone calls, your Recruiter advertising and recruiting and your Bookkeeper processing payroll and invoices. It’s more than your money due, it’s upsetting and depressing to your staff when their time and effort isn’t seen as worthy of payment.
If you are being taken advantage of by one of your clients and are not being paid, Adams, Evens & Ross is a great choice to help collect the debt you are owed. AER has become the nation’s largest credit and collections solution for the staffing and recruiting industry and has been in business for more than 20 years.
Watch for these 5 excuses our staffing agencies receive from their clients for not paying:
5. "We are not paying because it was turned over to collections."
We found this humorous because the staffing agency had to turn over the account in order to get paid. After all, the debtor was not paying. Guess the client could see the future and know they would send it to collections?
4. "I'm not paying because your client will not meet with us so we can give him his check."
As a rule of thumb: If you are asked to meet at 11 PM off a dark alley to collect from your debtor, they probably do not wish to hand you a check. We love our clients, and we will do everything to the best of our ability, but will stop short of taking on this type of risk.
3. "We will not pay because it’s technically not the same person because they passed a certification exam between presentation and hiring."
This example was a case encountered through Backdoor Hires. We find this particularly funny because anytime an attorney says, "technically," it is usually legalese for BS. The debtor's argument states that the candidate passed a trade certification. Since they did not have the accreditation during the presentation, it was a different person in the eyes of the contract. This isn’t a reason to not pay for work provided.
2. "We do not have to pay because they were not retained by us, and they only worked for us for three months."
Unfortunately for this debtor, the contract did not specifically define what retain meant. The contract also said that they would pay the candidate's engagement, regardless of job title or arrangement.
1. "The client was retained to hire candidates, and they only sent over two candidates. One was hired, but only because of time constraints that prevented us from seeing more qualified candidates."
Often, we’ve found that an attorney prefers to argue with a non-attorney; the best advice we can give you is to hang up the phone. They are trying to intimidate you with some legal gotcha they have up their sleeve, and the rest of the time they are making up issues and defining them with the intent that their law degree will make them seem credible. Also, if an attorney sends you a letter claiming that the issue is a closed matter, never accept this as such.
Running a staffing agency is expensive and complex and involves hopeful job candidates and hard working Recruiters. Staffing firms deserve to be paid for services provided. If you can relate to any of these scenarios or have a client who is not paying, give us a call or contact Samantha at samantha@aercollections.com today.
AER has been integrated with COATS Staffing Software for multiple years and offers free credit reports on new clients seeking to work with your staffing agency. “From personal experience with AER and Reliance Staffing, a prior sister company of COATS, AER collected debt that I thought was impossible. I highly recommend their services.” -Lynn Connor
