body shop

Definition

A staffing agency that provides temporary workers with minimal screening or quality control, treating employees as interchangeable units rather than individuals. The Walmart of human resources, if you will.

Example Usage

We contracted with a body shop to fill twenty developer positions, and exactly zero of them lasted more than three months.

Origin

1970s technology consulting industry, originally describing contract programming firms

Fun Fact

The term has particularly negative connotations in the Indian IT industry, where 'body shopping' describes practices that border on labor exploitation.

Source: IT staffing industry slang

Related Terms

Beginner

versatile

The resume buzzword that means you're willing to do literally anything because you're desperate to seem valuable. Describes someone who can competently juggle multiple tasks, though 'competently' is doing some heavy lifting here. The corporate equivalent of a Swiss Army knife, except you're the knife and your employer keeps finding new things to cut.

👥 Human Resources

Intermediate

talent density

The concentration of high performers within an organization, measuring how many stars versus slackers occupy your office chairs. Netflix famously champions high talent density, believing one brilliant engineer beats three mediocre ones.

👥 Human Resources

Intermediate

furlough

A temporary unpaid leave where employees remain technically employed but don't work or get paid, preserving benefits while saving the company money. It's the corporate equivalent of 'it's not you, it's the economy'—but actually, it's definitely the company's budget.

👥 Human Resources

Advanced

salary compression

When there's little difference between the pay of new hires and experienced employees, or between different job levels. The phenomenon that makes loyal employees realize they should have job-hopped years ago.

👥 Human Resources

Advanced

ghost employee

A person on payroll who doesn't actually exist or no longer works for the company, but continues collecting paychecks through fraud or administrative incompetence. The organizational equivalent of believing in paranormal activity, except the money really does disappear.

👥 Human Resources

Beginner

evaluation

The corporate ritual where your boss assigns numerical values to your humanity, typically determining whether you get a raise or just 'valuable feedback.' It's an assessment that pretends to be objective while being influenced by office politics, recent memory bias, and how well you schmooze. In math, it's simply solving for X; in life, it's solving for your mortgage payment.

👥 Human Resources

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