TrueBlue Review
TrueBlue Review Summary
Score 8 out of 10
Currency
LatAm and Remote Hires
Monthly fees
20%
Payment options
SWIFT/ACH
TrueBlue (NYSE: TBI) is a leading provider of specialized workforce solutions, helping clients achieve business growth and improve productivity.
Key Takeaways
- TrueBlue is the parent company of several brands of staffing solution service providers.
- Its subsidiaries specialize in blue-collar temporary staffing, RPO, MSP, consulting, and recruiting services.
- TrueBlue’s companies work in over 600 locations across the US and staff hundreds of thousands of positions annually.
- Instead of providing fee structures online, TrueBlue asks customers to meet and discuss their needs so it can provide them with tailored quotes.
TrueBlue Group Company Overview
TrueBlue is an American staffing solutions company headquartered in Tacoma, Washington. It was founded in 1989 but only renamed TrueBlue in 2008. Growing from a single office in Washington state, TrueBlue now has offices in over 600 cities across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. In 2023, it worked with over 67,000 clients and put more than 464,000 people into temporary and long-term positions. TrueBlue offers multiple services to fulfill its clients’ hiring needs. These include individual temporary workers, large temporary workforces, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), managed service provision (MSP), total workforce solutions, and consulting services.
If this sounds like a lot, it is, but TrueBlue manages these different solutions through different brands, which essentially work as completely separate arms of its company. PeopleReady is its brand for on-demand temporary staffing, largely for industry, construction, and other blue-collar jobs. Staff Management SMX is its brand for on-site, large-group industrial staffing, providing teams of 50-5000 workers to its clients. PeopleScout, a more white-collar brand, fills the needs of clients across all industries through RPO and MSP solutions. It also owns Centerline, a brand that fills truck driving jobs, though we won’t focus on this company.
This wide range of services all falls under one blanket: TrueBlue, the parent company, provides extensive talent pools and solutions to match its customers’ specific needs. In this review, we’ll look at the details of its services to see just how well TrueBlue achieves this goal. This should help you decide if this is the best staffing agency for your organization to partner with.
How TrueBlue Works
TrueBlue is the parent company of several brands, each one designed to meet a particular need. These subsidiaries offer different services that are targeted at specific industries. They generally provide temporary staffing solutions but also temp-to-hire and recruiting for permanent positions. Instead of performing an overview of TrueBlue itself, this review will take a different approach, focusing on the key features and pros and cons of each subsidiary.
PeopleReady
PeopleReady is an industrial staffing agency focused on providing temporary workers to clients in blue-collar industries. It works across the country in all 50 states and provides W-2 workers for clients, whether they need one or 100 people to do the job. The key features of this TrueBlue brand include:
Key Features
- Jobstack ordering system: PeopleReady allows clients to use its web and mobile application, Jobstack for Business, to order temporary workers easily, even for the next business day. Employers can make simple staffing orders giving the details of the jobs they need doing, their locations, and the wages they can offer. They can also hire for multiple locations at once through the same account. Workers apply to the Jobstack for Work system and, once vetted and onboarded, become available for temporary jobs.
- Multiple staffing solutions: Through this brand, clients can gain access to temporary (daily), short-term, long-term, seasonal, temp-to-hire, and on-premises services. This gives clients a lot of flexibility in their hiring and the ability to stick longer-term when they find workers that they like.
- Compliance: All workers are technically employed as W-2 employees of PeopleReady and are leased out to clients as temporary workers. This allows PeopleReady to maintain compliance with tax and labor laws while clients only need to focus on worksite safety and management.
- Industry focus: This brand focuses largely on blue-collar workers in the following industries: skilled trades, construction, energy and industrial, transportation, manufacturing, logistics, retail, disaster restoration, hospitality, marine, and waste and recycling.
- Resources: The PeopleReady site provides current and potential clients with free resources to help them with their hiring and HR functions. It offers an entire resource library full of articles on topics ranging from the current state of hiring to industry-specific recruitment and staff management advice.
- Pros
Large talent pool
PeopleReady has access to over one million workers which means clients can always find people to fill their needs.
Automation
Using the mobile or web app, Jobstack, clients can quickly make orders and have them filled almost instantly through the system’s automated matching function.
Flexibility
Clients can order workers for hourly, daily, weekly, or longer periods. They can also follow a temp-to-hire arrangement if they find staff that they want to bring on board long-term.
- Cons
Prices not posted
PeopleReady chooses not to disclose its prices online, perhaps because of the great variability in its fees or because they’re very high and don’t leave much for workers.
Worker variability
The system matches jobs to worker skills, location, and availability. However, clients have to take what they get and can’t screen workers on their own.
Staff Management SMX
Staff Management SMX is another TrueBlue brand, this time focusing on a variety of services to help clients source and manage workers. It provides onsite staffing, outsourced recruitment, MSP services, and flexible staffing solutions for clients in the light industrial and professional services spaces.
Key Features
- Stafftrack system: Staff Management SMX uses its Stafftrack platform to manage workforces and fill temporary positions. Clients can use the web or mobile apps to check scheduling, attendance, compliance, and more.
- Direct sourcing: This provider claims to be able to fill positions in between three and five days on average. It searches its large talent pool to find candidates that are the best fit for clients’ opening positions, contacts them quickly to check their availability, and puts you in contact with them for interviews.
- RPO: Staff Management SMX can also take over your entire recruitment function. After an in-depth consultation to assess your needs, it does everything from creating job ads to interviewing and selecting candidates so you get workers without having to do the work.
- MSP: Managed service provision lets Staff Management SMX manage a client’s entire contingent/temporary staff team from multiple sources. It centralizes billing, attendance, scheduling, and onboarding into a single system to help manage large teams.
- Agent of Record: This provider can help you hire and manage independent contractors across the US. It handles payroll and compliance for 1099 workers, protecting your company from the risk of worker misclassification.
- Onsite staffing: The provider can set up HR staff at your premises as a base to manage temporary and project-based teams. This means you don’t need to burden your own HR department with these tasks.
- Industry focus: This brand focuses on automotive, manufacturing, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, airline and cargo, call and contact center, consumer goods, retail, e-commerce, clerical and administrative, energy and solar, and facility management staffing.
- Pros
Automation
The Stafftrack system is a convenient and user-friendly workforce management tool that can be used by both admins and workers.
Multiple solutions
Clients can choose from simple temporary staffing to recruitment, RPO, and even onsite solutions. This lets them choose only as few or as many services as they need.
Benefits
The provider gives health insurance to all its workers when they’re hired so it complies with the Affordable Care Act.
- Cons
Prices not posted
Staff Management SMX doesn’t post its fee structure publicly, making it hard to compare it to other competitors.
PeopleScout
PeopleScout is another TrueBlue brand that provides clients with both recruitment and contingent workforce solutions of all sorts. This brand is aimed at employers in services and professional industries.
Key Features
- Affinix platform: PeopleScout’s digital platform, Affinix, is an effective workforce management tool that helps clients take care of their full-time, part-time, and temporary workers in a single place. The platform combines a large, searchable database with powerful analytics tools and numerous management features to create what is essentially a human resources information system or HRIS.
- RPO: PeopleScout also offers RPO services that let clients outsource to them some or all of their recruitment functions. The provider can source talent and pass it on to the client for interviewing or carry the process all the way to selection, contracting, and onboarding. It also provides recruiters on demand for clients that have sporadic hiring needs.
- MSP: This provider also offers MSP solutions to help larger companies organize all of their vendors into a centralized system. This service can help you unify your payroll, invoicing, and requisition functions for all of your temporary, temp-to-hire, and permanent staff, as well as 1099 contractors you also have working for you.
- Professional search: PeopleScout offers a service it calls Apex which is essentially a tailored, full-cycle recruitment process aimed at clients with very specific hiring needs. Stopping short of calling itself an executive search service. Apex provides clients with support for everything from research and strategy to assessments, selection support, and contract negotiation to help them fill critical high-level positions.
- Consulting: This provider also offers talent acquisition advisory services to clients that may already have their own recruiters but need to improve their success rates. Its advisors consult on DEI, building the employer brand, recruitment technology, and vacancy marketing. This helps clients upgrade their recruitment processes to lead them to greater talent-sourcing success.
- Industry focus: PeopleScout focuses on white-collar jobs and has particular expertise in the following industries: healthcare, technology, public sector, engineering, industrial, transportation, logistics, life sciences, pharmaceutical, medical, financial services, hospitality, tourism, energy, consumer goods, and retail.
- Pros
HRIS
The Affinix platform acts as a multi-feature HR information system that allows clients to manage their entire workforce in a single place. This platform includes a mobile app for convenient connectivity.
Professional solutions
This provider offers a wide array of services, from recruiting to completely managed services. This means that clients have a lot of choices regarding the services they need and can outsource any or all parts of their workforce management function.
Advisory services
Most staffing agencies want to keep their clients with them, so they don’t offer consulting that can help clients learn to improve their own recruitment processes. PeopleScout, conversely, is happy to let clients leverage their professional advice and build their own capacity.
- Cons
No prices online
As with all of TrueBlue’s brands, PeopleScout doesn’t post its prices online so potential clients have to contact the provider to ask for quotes instead.
Professional not executive search
While PeopleScout offers bespoke recruitment services for professional positions, it doesn’t offer executive searches. While these are essentially the same thing, its branding suggests that this provider lacks the connections and capacity to go after the very top-level candidates that its clients might require.
TrueBlue Customer Reviews
The average scores (as of the time of writing) were:
- TrueBlue Indeed = 3.5/5 (470 reviews)
- TrueBlue Glassdoor = 3.7/5 (726 reviews)
TrueBlue Pricing
TrueBlue is one of many companies that doesn’t publicly present its fees online. Instead, all of its brands ask potential clients to request quotes tailored to their needs. This may be because they’re afraid of scaring clients away with high prices or because their fee structures are highly complex. Either way, this makes it hard to compare them against other service providers.
TrueBlue Unique Selling Point
TrueBlue’s unique selling point is its extensive range of brands and services. Instead of confining itself to only a few services or industries, this company has made a major effort to ensure that it has something for every kind of company out there. Its staffing, recruiting, and management offerings cover everything that these clients can ask for no matter what their HR situation or hiring needs are.
Remote People Score for TrueBlue
8./10
Our expert score for TrueBlue
Our team came to this score by considering the following components in the following weightings:
Talent Acquisition features
25%
RPO features
10%
HR features
10%
EOR features
10%
Platform features
10%
Pricing
20%
User reviews
15%
For each component, TrueBlue received the following score:
Talent Acquisition features
20/25
RPO features
8/10
HR features
8/10
EOR features
7/10
Platform features
7/10
Pricing
12/20
User reviews
12/15
Overall Assessment: TrueBlue
TrueBlue is a parent company with multiple brands representing different arms of its services. This means that it has solutions for businesses of all sizes and covers every type of recruitment and temporary staffing arrangement possible. Without its prices, we can’t compare it directly with its competitors. However, with the exception of international recruitment and employment assistance, this provider offers extensive professional services and can staff organizations large and small quickly and effectively.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does TrueBlue help with international hiring?
No, none of its brands offers international hiring solutions like Employer of Record or contractor management, though Staff Management SMX can act as an Agent of Record for contractor hiring in the US.
Does TrueBlue offer payroll services?
Yes, this company offers payroll services with its Staff Management SMX brand. This provider can take care of payroll through its onsite services as well as its Agent of Record program for contractors.
Does TrueBlue have any certifications?
Yes, this company is certified by the ASA (America Staffing Association) as a responsible and professional staffing organization.
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