Agencies with staffing issues might soon have the option of temporarily renting employees from another agency.

That’s the idea behind a new staffing platform called Shipyard, developed by independent agency Anchor Worldwide and its Co-Founder and Head of Digital David Gross. The platform comes as the ad industry suffers layoffs and job cuts due to a shaky economy, spending slowdowns and moves by clients toward in-housing and project work that make planning and staffing tougher for shops.

To use Shipyard, an agency lists the project's parameters and then “anyone who is a resource manager and up can opt into to working on it,” Gross said. “They submit a proposal and then the proposal's approved.”

Once there is an agreement between the two agencies on the platform, Gross said it's up to them to take the conversation offline and agree on terms. Agencies offering up staff for hire will likely agree on a billing rate that works for them in exchange for their employees’ services.

The service is still in beta and there is no fee to use it at this time. 

The idea for the platform came a year ago when Gross was thinking about a more efficient way to collaborate and share resources among the agency’s offices, which are in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Bogotá, Colombia. Currently, the agency has 195 employees and clients including BMW, Spotify and Starbucks.

Gross said it became “challenging” to hire staff for a period of time during the pandemic as the demand for work increased.

“Especially with smaller agencies, there's never a resource equilibrium,” said Gross. “So you either need people or you need work. And that is a big impact on your business because when you have unallocated resources, they're not generating income.”

For participating agencies, Shipyard presents “a revenue stream on the utilization side.” He said that for shops only occupied 75% of the time, this could give them the ability to generate revenue during the other 25%, keeping employees busy with interesting new projects.

“As more and more assignments become project-based, agencies have had to become more agile, flexible and adaptive,” said Greg Paull, principal, and co-founder of consultancy R3. “Already, freelance costs are the second largest expense for most holding groups, after salaries and their role is only going to be more and more important.”

Employment in advertising, public relations and related services fell by 1,000 jobs in February, the fourth drop in the past six months.

While agency staffers can sign up for profiles on Shipyard, they currently can't respond directly to a post looking for help. Instead they can flag their agency's resource or project managers to alert them about a potential opportunity listed on Shipyard. 

“We wanted to create some sort of structure on who can make decisions about either offering talent out there or offering projects,” said Gross. He said, however, that the process could evolve in time and that Shipyard could eventually become a social platform.

This type of platform is more crucial for smaller agencies that tend to work together from time to time, and niche agencies that may not have the full capability to pitch for a piece of business, according to Gross.

“The idea is we'll have more confidence to pitch projects where 90% of it is within our wheelhouse, but there's still that extra 10%,” of insurance, he said.

Gross views Shipyard as a “segmentation” of the current freelance hiring market. Other popular sites have included Fiverr, We Are Rosie and Upwork, the last of which recently started allowing full-time hires for non-contract work. Tongal is another platform that allows anyone to pitch for open projects for clients like Lego, Nickelodeon, and PayPal.

Currently, the Shipyard platform is only available for the agency’s own network and a few agencies that are “close friends,” said Gross. The plan is to have the platform available to all agencies in two months.