Challenges in the Security Industry and How to Overcome Them
Security guard industry challenges
The security industry is a growing market, and research suggests the market size of security services in the United States has increased exponentially since 2014, reaching nearly 52 billion U.S. dollars in 2022.
Within the outsourced contract security industry, there were roughly 830,000 security guards working. But despite the reported growth in the security industry, there’s still a host of challenges present, especially for business owners.
Even though business sizes vary in such a complex market, security professionals experience many of the same obstacles and pain points industry-wide. Most notably, common challenges that professionals in the security industry experience include:
- Attracting and retaining top talent
- Staying profitable by cutting costs
- Remaining compliant with regulations and compliance
- Providing quality service delivery on every contract
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Overcoming challenges in security
1. Hiring and onboarding solutions
Industry leaders in today’s market are confronted with a number of challenges in security, especially when it comes to recruiting talented employees. That’s in part because current labor trends allow people looking for work to have the privilege of being able to choose from a long list of job openings.
The sheer number of opportunities almost encourages applicants to shift from one employer to the next, in search of better benefits. As an employer, it’s important to advertise flexible schedules, minimal education requirements, opportunities for advancement, and other incentives.
A best-in-class applicant tracking system makes it easy to improve your hiring process. It can be used to:
- Post job openings to a host of different boards
- Manage those openings by directing applications to your own dedicated web portal
- Filter applications, schedule interviews and perform background checks with ease
2. Staying profitable by cutting costs
Cost saving techniques are important in growing industries, primarily because growth in the industry can cause increased competition for top contracts. So, how can you stand apart from competitors’ bids without dipping into your own profit margins?
Look for ways to increase efficiencies. By reducing the amount of time and expenses spent on historically manual, labor-intensive tasks, you can improve service delivery for your potential customers. This might look like:
- Using time and attendance tools to eliminate fraudulent timekeeping activities, ensuring your clients are only billed for accurate timekeeping records
- Using guard monitoring tools to demonstrate what services were being performed, who performed them and when those individuals were onsite
- Using scheduling features to reduce overtime, while factoring in compliance needs and specific trainings required by the contract’s SLAs solutions to help reduce unnecessary business expenses
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3. Remaining compliant with regulations and requirements
Especially within the security industry, where turnover rate is high, staying compliant with governmental regulations and requirements can be tough for employers, who are responsible for providing worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance and meeting tax requirements.
To remain compliant, you must ensure your business stays up to date on various requirements. Stay on track when it comes to filing deadlines and ensure that your company always meets the demands required by state governmental agencies, which can fluctuate in different parts of the country.
A comprehensive workforce management software gives you the security tools you need to monitor, track and report on compliance within your business. This helps you avoid costly penalties and fines.
4. Providing quality service delivery on every contract
One of the more widely discussed challenges in security involves providing quality – and provable – service for every contract. That means being able to track your security team, what services they’re performing on their routes and if they are meeting customer requirements.
This extends to being able to report on these activities to your contracts as well. The security industry is notorious for lowest bids often winning the customer contract. Having a guard monitoring tool helps provide proof to your customers about why your contract is worth the spend.
Use software tools to manage this step for you. With mobile proof of service software, guards can be encouraged to upload images and videos at each checkpoint, creating a digital paper trail during each shift. This ensures that all of the work is being done up to standard by quickly reviewing each of the submissions. This also helps reduce incident response time, as issues can be identified and resolved more quickly.
With these kinds of tools, employees are able to perform their work with more clarity and less confusion, while recording tasks, submitting issues and sending messages through apps that can be accessed from their mobile device. All of the information that’s collected gets translated into comprehensive reports that – over time – helps improve the quality of your security services.
Learning more about challenges in security
Identifying challenges in security is the first step in solving those obstacles. Using an inclusive approach, we’ve created a software suite that’s packed with readily available solutions for security contractors. Continue learning more about the issues within your industry by reviewing this helpful guide that elaborates on top challenges for security professionals.
