During turbulent times marked by talent shortages and economic uncertainty, leveraging contingent workers has become an important part of many companies’ agile hiring strategies. Not only can this be beneficial to a company’s bottom line, but contingent workers can also bring fresh ideas and different perspectives to a role. They can usually be hired with little additional training, and bring expertise that may not be available on the traditional job market.
That said, recruiting and managing a contingent workforce can be challenging, especially if you’ve only ever worked with permanent employees. In this article, we’ll share three tips to help you build your contingent workforce in a way that benefits both them and your business.
1. Adapt your offering to attract and retain the right workers
Contingent workers are not full-time employees, and they often have different expectations from their working relationships. If you want to attract top contingent talent, you may need to adapt your offering to make sure it’s aligned with their needs and preferences. Naturally, this means offering competitive compensation. It also means meeting workers’ expectations in terms of flexibility and autonomy, which may be different from what you’re used to with your permanent employees.
However, it’s also important to consider the various perks that are often not extended to non-permanent workers, which could help you to attract top contingent talent. For example, you might consider offering health and wellness perks or opportunities for career or skills development to your on-demand workforce as well as your permanent employees.
Of course, getting the right contingent workers on board is only half the battle. And while we often think of contingent relationships as temporary, many talented freelancers or contractors end up collaborating with their clients on a long-term basis. On the client side, this tends to be more cost-effective than continuously sourcing and onboarding new workers.
To encourage contingent workers to stay with your organisation for the long term, it’s important to provide a sense of community. Contingent workers often don’t feel the same degree of connection to an organisation as their permanent counterparts, so it’s important to keep channels of communication open and do everything you can to make sure they feel valued and included in the company culture.
2. Find the management solution that works best for you
There are a number of different solutions to choose from when it comes to building and maintaining a pool of contingent talent. Your choice will depend on the exact needs of your organisation. Here are a few of the options that are available:
Managing your contingent talent in-house
Many companies choose to take a hands-on approach to contingent workforce management by building an in-house team to source, hire, onboard and manage non-permanent workers. This is most common in smaller organisations that only need a small number of contingent workers. However, it may also be a viable option for large organisations whose needs are extensive enough to justify building a whole internal team.
The main advantage of this approach is that an in-house team automatically has a more in-depth understanding of the company’s culture than an external agency, giving them an advantage when it comes to identifying the most suitable candidates for a role.
Whether or not this approach is suitable for your company will depend upon the size of your contingent workforce and whether you have the resources to effectively manage them, ensure quality of hire, keep an eye on ROI and manage the associated legislative and statutory risks.
Working with a recruitment agency
If you would like to maintain a high level of control over your contingent staffing but don’t have the resources to manage the entire recruitment process in-house, you may want to consider working with a recruitment agency.
Many agencies offer contractor management outsourcing services and can relieve your internal team of the administrative burden that comes with hiring and managing contingent workers. This allows you to transfer some of the risk, cost and paperwork involved in hiring employees over to a third party, enabling you to more easily adapt to evolving market conditions.
The direct contact an agency has with your organisation means that they’re able to develop a thorough understanding of your internal culture. Naturally, recruiters are also highly skilled in sourcing and attracting candidates — giving you a better chance of landing top independent talent.
Engaging a managed service provider (MSP)
A managed service provider (MSP) is an organisation that bridges the gap between a company and a recruitment agency. Companies engage MSPs to manage their contingent workers for the entirety of their lifecycle, from sourcing through onboarding and training right through to off-boarding. The specialised expertise that MSPs provide makes them an invaluable link in the recruitment chain. This solution is more popular in large businesses that have more extensive contingent workforce needs.
Because MSPs liaise closely with both the agency and the end client, they understand their clients’ company policies, values and preferences, and can convey these accurately to the agency that is recruiting candidates on their behalf.
So, what’s the advantage of working with an MSP instead of working with the agency directly? According to Sam Jackson, Director of Global Supplier Relations at Magnit Global, it’s the absence of vested interest in any particular agency:
“MSPs that value a vendor-neutral approach (such as Magnit) are dedicated to engaging the most reliable, trustworthy, and cost-effective agencies for their client programs, with performance measured on the capability of the supply chain. This removes the potential commercial conflict that inevitably arises when providers seek to be part of the supply chain and assume responsibility for managing it.”
In addition, MSPs hold specialised knowledge of various government policies and regulations and help companies to keep their contingent workforces running in compliance with these. For global organisations hiring across several jurisdictions, an MSP’s specialised knowledge of local employment law can be particularly valuable.
“This approach can produce top-quality talent at competitive rates, reduces compliance risk and drives diversity, equity and inclusion for clients. In addition, an effective neutral vendor brings contributes to service improvement through market intelligence, ideas and innovation. Once all three parties – the hiring organisation, the neutral vendor and its supply chain – are interoperating to this extent, the true value of agency resource can be realised“
Investing in contingent recruitment process outsourcing (RPO)
Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is another way of managing contingent talent. Typically, an RPO solution involves a representative from a recruitment agency working onsite with a client on a long-term basis. They’re embedded in the client company and work exclusively for one client.
The advantage of the RPO model is that the recruiter is fully immersed in the company’s culture. Instead of simply receiving briefs about open contingent roles over the phone, they can meet with hiring managers and teams in person. This means RPO recruiters are often better equipped to gauge which candidates would be the best fit, both for specific roles and for the company as a whole.
3. Make use of technology to increase efficiency
These days, most companies have made efforts to automate and simplify parts of their recruitment strategies — and contingent recruitment is no different.
One of the most important pieces of technology for managing your contingent workforce is a vendor management system, or VMS. This is a cloud-based software platform that companies can use to source, hire and manage independent contractors and other non-permanent workers. It’s a vital piece of software that gives you visibility over the status of your entire workforce and helps you to increase efficiency.
For example, you can use your VMS to uncover valuable insights into the hiring trends within your organisation, such as which departments are successfully making the most hires, and where you need to step up your efforts. A VMS can also be a crucial tool in helping you to stay compliant, by ensuring that each one of your non-permanent employees is classified correctly.
In addition to your VMS, you may also want to consider including your contingent workers in the software systems you already use for your permanent employees, such as your human resources information system (HRIS), employee intranet or other platforms for internal communications. Adding your contingent workers to these systems not only helps them to feel more involved with the organisation — increasing retention — but also helps your permanent employees to understand who they are.
When you’re building out your contingent talent strategy, it’s important to think about how the various tools you use will work together. You may use several different apps or software systems to manage your contingent workforce, and switching between them can be time-consuming and even confusing for your hiring team. To avoid this, you should always seek out solutions that integrate neatly with your existing tech stack to ensure everything works seamlessly together.
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Looking to add contingent workers to your recruitment strategy?
Building out an agile hiring strategy that leverages contingent workers gives you access to a larger pool of talented professionals and can help your organisation to remain competitive even when times are tough.
At Career Moves, we source the full spectrum of contingent workers from short-term temps to contracts. Our contingent talent team have great relationships with a number of MSPs and works with an extensive portfolio of clients including the big tech giants and big players in global media, broadcast and professional services.
