Wages Are Rising. Your Casual Staffing Costs Don’t Have To.

Very soon, early childhood services will see significant increases in award wages.  For providers already managing tight budgets, the obvious question is: 

We still need casual educators. So how do we manage costs? 

Wage increases are unavoidable, but services have more control than they think over their casual staffing costs.

Higher wages don’t automatically mean casual staffing has to become more expensive. 

In fact, many services are doing the opposite. They’re reducing their reliance on traditional labour hire and building their own trusted casual workforce with Talent Now.

A different approach 

Talent Now’s Casual Connect model works differently. 

For services used to traditional labour hire, this is a different way of thinking about casual staffing costs.

Unlike labour hire agencies that charge according to the educator qualification and shift length, Talent Now offers a simple, fixed booking fee. Whether you need a Certificate III educator, Diploma-qualified educator, or Early Childhood Teacher (ECT), for a short lunch cover or a full-day shift, the booking fee remains exactly the same.

Services employ and pay educators directly, while Talent Now provides the sourcing, screening, compliance, bookings and workforce management technology needed to build and manage a trusted casual workforce. 

Services can add educators to their Favourites and offer shifts directly to them through the platform. The result is a trusted pool of familiar educators who already understand the service, its routines and culture. 

Staffing costs are only part of the equation 

The challenge isn’t just wages.  It’s everything that comes with employing people. 

• Recruitment. 
• Onboarding. 
• Compliance. 
• Worker Register reporting. 
• Payroll. 
• Workforce administration. 

Talent Now helps reduce that burden by combining educator sourcing, workforce management, compliance monitoring, payroll reporting and integrations with Xero and Employment Hero in a single platform. 

Tasks that previously required multiple systems and manual processes can increasingly be completed in just a few clicks. 

A smarter way to manage rising costs 

The goal isn’t to avoid paying educators more. The goal is to ensure more of your staffing budget goes to educators, rather than labour hire margins and administration. 

As wages increase across the sector, many services are finding that direct employment supported by the right technology is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative.