Exploring partnerships between staffing agencies and client organizations : A B2B perspective

Sammanfattning: Outsourcing is a method of staffing where a staffing agency takes on the responsibility of conducting the staffing process. This defines a B2B partnership between the staffing agency and the client organization, which is scarcely connected to outcome success in the partnership literature. The study aims to get an understanding regarding the operation of the staffing agency and outsourcing incentives in connection with how a partnershipbetween the two is able to be maintained and developed. This is a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews, conducted with one Swedish staffing agency and three of their clients. It follows the interpretivism research philosophy with an abductive approach.The findings of this research show that companies choose to outsource staffing when they wish to optimize their resource distribution. The Resource BasedView, which was historically linked to outsourcing, is one of the mainincentives' perspectives. Regarding the B2B partnerships in staffing outsourcing, it is concluded that taking the initial transactional partnership into the long-term transformational partnership is done through matching expectations and outcomes. Agency problems are dealt with from a triadicperspective and the service quality dimensions are a main tool to assess satisfaction of outsourcing success.