Bodyshop

Bodyshop is a way of hiring (or providing) workforce capacity when the client pays for a person on an hourly or daily basis. It is a purchase of people’s capacities like a service.

Where is body shopping used in practise?

The most frequent use of body shopping is in technical and IT professions - programmers, testers and so on. The client pays to the bodyshop company a pre-agreed amount per unit of time - man-hour or man-day and hires the workers for a certain pre-arranged amount of time. Very often the bodyshop is used for projects.

How does it work?

The company hiring the workforce capacities does not care about the hired workers’ workload in terms of managing their work. On the other hand, they can take care of their professional development and qualification. If the hired people themselves take care about it, they are called freelancers who make the bodyshop company hire them - sell their capacities to the end customers. In other words, they don’t want to develop their own business, and that’s what the agency does for them.

It is typical for body shopping that the customers themselves (and not the bodyshop company), manage the hired workers’ workload. The customer doesn’t care about the professional development of the hired people - from their point of view, they “only” hire (usually for a limited period of time) workers with a required qualification.

Therefore, it is a big advantage for the customers to be able to hire people’s work capacity for a price that can be pre-estimated and, at the same time, they are not legally bound to those workers - they buy them as a service.