Yes, our consultants provide professional work or expert advice in their particular fields of science and/or business.

A staffing company finds workers who will become an employee of the client via one of three methods.

(1) Temporary Placement, where a staffing firm recruits and places workers for seasonal positions or to cover absences of the client’s employees.

(2) Temporary-to-Permanent Placement, where the worker will become an employee of the client after some trial or probationary period.

(3) Direct (or Permanent) Placement, where the staffing firm recruits an individual who immediately becomes an employee of the client. Our employees stay our employees. There is no plan, expectation, or desire to transition them to become an employee of the client. In a traditional sense, staffing firms place workers for light industrial, office/clerical, or general labor categories and use a business model based on having a high quantity of workers. Conversely, we bring on very highly specialized individuals, focusing on quality rather than quantity.

No. Our clients typically have an individual in mind when they contact us. This might be an industry expert, former employee, or retiree.

Although a PEO does assume a significant portion of employer responsibilities, it does so for all (or a significant majority) of the client’s workforce. Conversely, Gentry provides individual consultants to our clients.

No, an MSP is a company that takes responsibility for managing an organization’s entire contingent workforce program. This includes supplier selection, direct sourcing, and consolidated billing. Basically, any company providing any form of contingent work must go through the MSP.

Gentry simply provides highly skilled consultants. While we do work with some clients’ MSPs, we find that they are better suited for handling staffing companies. MSPs grade suppliers by how many candidates a supplier provides and how quickly they can fill seats. In our situations, it’s not about speed or quantity. It’s about providing the one expert you need.

Yes, if we are not already on your MSP’s list of approved suppliers, we can work with you to add our name to their list and be added to the system you already have in place.

No, all team members of Gentry Professional Services are W2 employees of our company. If a client were to use independent contractors instead of Gentry, there can be confusion over whether that worker should be considered the client’s employee and eligible for their benefits.

We make it clear that the worker is our employee. We pay for workers compensation. We withhold their taxes. We pay their benefits.

Misclassification is when an employer classifies the employment status of a worker as an independent contractor instead of as an employee. Usually client companies might do this to avoid paying payroll taxes, workers compensation, or providing benefits. That problem does not exist when using Gentry. All our workers are our W2 employees. We pay all employer liabilites, such as benefits, taxes, workers comp, etc.

No. In an employee leasing relationship, the worker is controlled and supervised by the client. In our arrangements, the worker is considered the authority and is either working independently, consulting on a project, or training client employees. They take an active leadership or management role for the client, implementing changes and leading the organization.

The term contingent worker is an umbrella term that can include anyone who provides work for a business but is not on that businesses payroll. Since the term is broad, it can include everything from an assistant from a staffing agency to the workers of a subcontracted company providing an outsourced product or service.

In short, while Gentry team members would be considered contingent workers, the term also includes services unrelated to what we provide.

All Gentry team members, either serving as consultants to clients or our own management staff, are W2 employees of Gentry Professional Services.

Yes, for everyone. We use Sterling for background checks and Quest Diagnostics for drug screens. We have done this since day one.

We work with both. While each union has its own leadership and makes its own independent decisions, we have provided team members who were retired union members. With the union’s blessing, those retirees have trained younger workers with very successful results.

Yes, this can be considered gig work. While some refer to gig work as transactions mediated online, we consider it to be any short-term, project-based work performed by someone who is not a direct employee of the client.

Yes, we provide:

(1) Paid time off

(2) Sick time

(3) 401(k) with company match

(4) Medical insurance

(5) Company-paid dental insurance

(6) Company-paid vision insurance

(7) Company-paid life insurance

(8) Additional Optional life insurance

(9) Optional accident insurance

(10) Optional cancer insurance

Staff Augmentation means services that supplement a client’s internal staff. In this context, there is no project-based Statement of Work. The individual is providing additional temporary help with seasonal or short-term surges of work. The worker is typically either an independent contractor or an employee of the staffing firm, and under the direct control of the client. In the case of independent contractors, care must be taken to avoid misclassification. In either case, staff augmentation is generally considered to be a joint employment or co-employment arrangement.

At Gentry, we do prefer to set things up as a project-based statement of work. However, if your company uses only a staff augmentation model, we do work with that as well. We have clients who handle staff augmentation through their HR departments, and others who handle SOWs through their supply chain procurement. We can accommodate whatever form of contractual arrangement your company prefers.

Co-employment (also known as joint employment) is the relationship between two or more organizations that exert some level of control over the same worker or group of workers. Co-employers often share some degree of responsibility and liability for shared employees.

Contact our office to set up a 15-30 minute virtual meeting where we spend time understanding what your challenges are and to see if there’s a potential fit between your needs and what we do best. We won’t be trying to “sell” you anything. If there’s a potential fit and you want to explore it further, we will address it beyond the initial discovery call. If there’s not a fit between your needs and our capabilities, we can hopefully refer you to another company who can better serve you.

We don’t list names because we have non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with our clients. Our first customers were in the aerospace and defense industry, where this was a common practice particularly for government contracts. As our client base expanded, we found commercial companies also wanted NDAs. This makes sense because when clients come to us, they are asking for help in a critical part of their organization. Clients do not wish to reveal a competitive disadvantage or that they were unprepared for changes in the workforce.

That being said, we can say that four of the top 50 US defense contractors are clients, along with other Fortune 100 companies.

We work with your Human Resources, Supply Chain Managers, and/or Procurement Specialists to establish the appropriate service agreement that solves your problem and fits within your corporate policies. We accommodate whatever form of contractual agreement your company prefers to become your vendor, supplier, subcontractor, or partner.

A waiting period would only apply if your company’s retirement package has a Defined Benefit (DB) plan, also referred to as a traditional pension. The IRS states there must be a “bona fide termination” before DB distributions are made. Bona fide termination is not defined or codified in law. If a company rehires a retiree “too soon”, an argument can be made that there was no bona fide termination. The company can be found in violation of the DB plan rules regarding pre-tax status, and the company could be liable for additional taxes.

As a precaution, employers guess at an appropriate period to wait before retirees can return. This is why the waiting period differs from one company to the next and can range from 30 days to 12 months.

If the employer does not have a DB plan and instead has a Defined Contribution (DC) plan, such as a 401(k), the rule does not apply. Some companies had a DB plan in the past and no longer have one, however the waiting period policy they implemented may still be on the books.

Some employers and retirees have sought to overcome this hurdle by having these former employees return as an independent contractor. The problem then becomes one of misclassification, where an argument can be made that the individual is no different than a regular employee. While legally, this approach addresses the DB concerns, it now introduces a dispute on who should be responsible for income taxes, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, etc. The root of this concern is that the government must get the taxes its due, and the employee must get the rights and benefits due to them.

With Gentry’s approach, the individual formally retires, and we hire them as our W-2 employee. We pay all taxes and benefits, so we fulfill the rights due to the government and employees. To further distance the retiree from the previous employer, our arrangements are business to business (B2B) contracts to provide a labor category with a particular skill set. No individuals are named. We can assign anyone who meets the qualifications of that labor category, and our employees can and have worked for other clients, not only their previous employer.

For all intents and purposes, the retiree has left their previous job and gone to work for a different company, so a waiting period is not applicable.