Technology always has a huge impact on the way Americans live. The arrival of the automobile was a game-changer for how Americans traveled, and the invention of the computer and the Internet has now changed just about every aspect of the way we send and receive information.

In this regard, information technology has disrupted nearly every facet of our lives, from the way we live to the way we work, making the gig economy a bigger part of our business future. If you run a staffing company, technology can dramatically change how you operate, making your management faster, more precise and more efficient. Here’s how.

It Makes Job Assignments Faster

In the old days, before online digital technology, if you had an assignment for temporary work, you had two choices for notifying available staff. You could either post a notice of the job on some bulletin board or even put an ad out on a newspaper and wait for staff who read it to respond. Alternatively, if you had radio or telephone network, you could announce the job, and wait for staff to respond via radio, or call in. Then you had to pick whomever it was that responded first while informing everyone else the job was no longer available.

Today, any temp staff you have can install software on their phone. You only need to create one notice of the availability of a job, and it goes out to everyone. Whoever is qualified that responds first gets the job and the job availability is automatically removed for everyone else. All of this can happen in seconds, rather than hours, or even days.

It Reduces Briefing Time

Temporary staff comes into a position without knowing anything about where to go and what to do. It’s your job, as the staffing agency to take the needs of a client into account and communicate this to the temp staff. Without digital technology, the only way to do this is either to have staff come in for a briefing and hope their memory is good, or that they are taking good notes, or do the same via a phone call.

With new technology, the briefing for a job is preserved digitally and can be referred to at any time. This means that you don’t have to wait for staff to show up at the office, or call in to discuss the terms of the job. Everything from the location, to the times, to the expected duties are sent directly to their phone, so they can refer to them as and when needed, and there’s no dispute about whether a person was told something, or not, or forgot to write it down.

It Provides Accountability

Without digital technology, once a temp staff worker takes an assignment, you don’t know what kind of job that worker is doing, or even whether that worker showed up for the assignment until you hear from the client about the final results.

With an employee time clock app, you know the exact moment a worker begins the job since the software installed on their phone tracks their “punch in.” You even know whether the worker is punching in at the correct location since GPS tracking is embedded in the software. And finally, if there are any special requests, such as photographing the final results of the work, you can check that photo yourself since all this information is preserved online for both you and the client to verify.