Recruitment giant Randstad has introduced a salary offsetting service to enable small businesses to reduce their costs without having to cut headcount.

The new service, initially being offered from branches in Birmingham, Bristol, Ilford, Leeds, Manchester and Solihull, will eventually be rolled out nationally.

Under Randstad’s offsetting option, employees undergo the normal redundancy consultation process, but would be offered the offsetting alternative as a way of maintaining their position with their employer, with Randstad attempting find a suitable secondment for the employee with another local business for an agreed period of time, which could be from one week to 10 months.  

The employer pays the salaries, national insurance and other contractual benefits of their offset employees, while Randstad pays the employer the hourly rate of the secondment job, enabling them to save up to 89% in salary costs over the offsetting period.  

Patrick Maloney, director of Staffing Solutions at Randstad, says: “Without our offsetting service, many businesses would be forced to make redundancies of skilled employees, which is costly and time consuming, and would leave them with the challenge of having to find and pay for the recruitment and training of new talent when the upturn comes.”