Sponsored by Benefits in a Card
After thirty-four years of sitting across the table from carriers and bringing new products to market, I keep landing on the same uncomfortable truth. The thing that separates a benefit plan that works from one that fails has nothing to do with what makes up the plan itself. The carrier is fine. The coverage is fine. The price is fine. What kills plans — and what makes the rare ones excel — is the journey the employee takes to get to their benefits.
I used to think the answer was a better plan. Richer coverage, sharper pricing, a slicker brochure. We’ve chased all of that for years. And we learned, slowly and expensively, that you can have the best plan in place and still watch your participation sit idle. Meanwhile a “lesser” plan that falls directly on the path the worker is already on lights up. So let me say the part out loud that took me three decades to fully believe: you have to get in their way.
Why the journey is everything in staffing
Every industry has a benefits enrollment problem. Ours is worse — and it’s worse because of the fault lines built into how staffing works.
Our associates are mobile. They’re transient. They get placed fast, they start fast, and a lot of them never set foot in an HR office or sit through a benefits video. There’s no manager nudging them in the hallway, no open-enrollment ritual, no annual cadence that forces a decision. The traditional benefits journey assumes a stable employee with time, attention, and someone available to hold their hand. Our worker has none of these.
So then what? The associate gets a link that sits in a personal email they don’t check. Or a flyer they toss out. Or a “you’re eligible, go enroll” message thrown at them during onboarding. And then they do exactly what every human being does with an optional task that requires effort and offers a delayed reward: nothing. They mean to. They never do. The plan didn’t fail because it was bad. It failed because we left the decision sitting on the side of the road the worker is driving down.
That’s the whole game. Benefits that live on a side road don’t get visited. Benefits that sit in the middle of the road get a decision.
“Getting in their way,” and why it isn’t a bad thing
When I say get in their way, people flinch a little, like I’m talking about being pushy. I’m not. I’m talking about design.
Think about the path an associate already has to take before they even start working for you. They apply, interview, work through a series of onboarding tasks, and set up their bank info — all before they log their first hour of work. That path is required. They will walk every step of it because they can’t get paid if they don’t.
The mistake the industry has made for decades is keeping benefits off the straight path. We treat the election as a separate errand. Of course participation collapses — we built it to.
The fix is to put the benefits decision on the road they’re already traveling. Inside the familiar onboarding path — when they’re already engaged and already paying attention — you make them stop, look at it, and make a choice: yes or no, actively. Not “enroll later if you feel like it.” A deliberate moment where a decision gets made — not an afterthought they’ll get to someday.
That’s what we built SKY to do. The election isn’t a side quest; it’s a checkbox on the path they’re already walking. We get in their way on purpose, at the one moment we know we have their attention. And the difference in participation isn’t small. It’s the difference between a plan that works and a plan that doesn’t.
Now let’s go to the numbers — because this is where it gets real for your P&L
Here’s why I care about this so much, and why you should. Participation isn’t a feel-good HR metric in staffing. It is a direct lever on your gross profit. We built a calculator specifically for staffing economics to prove it, and I want to walk you through the math in plain English so it’s yours to use.
Start with how you make money. You’ve got your bill rate and your pay rate, and what’s left after burden is your gross profit — the recruiter’s spread. Critically, that gross profit accrues per hour worked. Every hour an associate stays on assignment is another hour of margin. Every hour they don’t — because they quit early — is margin you don’t get back.
So the single most valuable thing you can do is to keep associates on assignment longer. Tenure is gross profit. Turnover is gross profit set on fire.
Here’s what our numbers consistently show, and it’s the heart of the whole thesis: an associate who elects even one benefit stays on assignment roughly 45% longer than one who elects nothing. One. Not a rich package. A single election is enough to change their behavior, because the moment they have something they’re paying into, they have a reason to stay.
Let me put dollars on it. Plug in your own figures — these are illustrative working numbers so you can see the mechanism.
- Say your gross profit is $4 per hour per associate (after burden).
- Say a typical associate who elects nothing stays about 11 weeks — roughly 440 hours.
- That’s 440 hours × $4 = $1,760 in gross profit from that associate.
Now take the associate who elects one benefit and stays 45% longer:
- 11 weeks × 1.45 ≈ 16 weeks — roughly 640 hours.
- That’s 640 hours × $4 = $2,560 in gross profit.
The difference is about $800 in additional gross profit per associate — and that comes from the same worker, in the same seat, on the same plan.
Nothing changed except they stayed longer. The only thing that made them stay longer was that they elected something. And the only reason they elected something was that we put the decision in their path instead of off to the side.
Now scale it across a real book of business. Say you’ve got 1,000 associates on assignment.
- If your participation sits where most untouched programs sit — call it 30% — that’s 300 associates electing, at $800 each: $240,000 in additional annual gross profit.
- Now get in their way. Move participation to 50% — which is exactly what putting the election on the mandatory path does — and you’ve got 500 associates × $800: $400,000.
That’s a $160,000 swing on your bottom line, and it didn’t come from a better plan, a bigger sales team, or higher bill rates. It came purely from where you placed the decision in the journey.
And I’m being conservative, because that math only counts the tenure lift. I haven’t even added the replacement cost you avoid. Every associate who quits early forces another recruiting cycle — sourcing hours, onboarding, the gap where the seat sits empty and bills nothing. Call that $1,500 a turn, conservatively. Fewer early quits means fewer turns per seat per year, and that saving stacks right on top of the gross profit you’re already gaining.
What this means for you
For thirty-four years I optimized the wrong end of this equation. I negotiated the plan. I should have been engineering the journey.
The takeaway for every staffing leader is this: stop treating participation as something you hope for and start treating it as something you design. Your associates are not apathetic. They are busy, mobile, and behaving exactly the way the road you built tells them to behave. Build a road that runs the benefits decision straight through the middle of onboarding — where they’re already standing, already paying attention, already required to act — and they will decide. A meaningful share will say yes. And the ones who say yes will stay roughly 45% longer and hand you several hundred more dollars of margin each, multiplied across your entire book.
That’s not a benefits story. That’s a profitability story that happens to run through benefits.
The plan was never the point. The journey is the plan. Get in their way — respectfully, deliberately, at exactly the right moment — and the numbers take care of themselves.
Run your numbers — then get in their way.
