The flexibility and cost-effectiveness of contingent workers make them ideal for completing projects or addressing seasonal demands – but only if there are enough quality candidates available to complete your objectives on time. Under current market conditions, maintaining such a talent pipeline often proves difficult, though it’s not impossible if you know how to wield the full power of your contingent workforce. Through our project-based staffing experience, we’ve identified the following strategies as essential if you want to maximize the ROI of your contingent workforce management program.
Build Transparency with Staffing Partners
The quality of the contingent workers you receive depends on how well your staffing partners understand your business and requisitions. Though the right partners will be eager to learn about your goals, culture, and requirements, you’ll achieve better results by guiding their intelligence gathering. At its best, your staffing partnerships should feel like an extension of your business – acting on your behalf to source, screen, and submit people who will help realize your goals.
That’s why transparency is so important. Though the right partner can eventually learn your internal rubric for top candidates, it takes a longer trial and error process. Your contingent workforce can scale faster when you provide staffing partners with enough details to narrow down the field of candidates faster.
Additionally, greater transparency enables your staffing partners to respond to changing needs. When there is a regular dialogue between your organization and staffing partners, you can update them about last-minute changes to skill requirements and experience. That way, your partner can shift their screening parameters in real-time and keep a steady flow of top talent into your workforce.
More than just accelerating your hiring timelines, transparent communication reduces costs with your partners. Your positions are filled faster (reducing vacancy-related expenses) and you limit the potential for expensive bad hires.
Define Performance Metrics
Which of your staffing partners are delivering top results? And how can you bottle that lightning, instead of hoping it’ll strike twice? By setting effective performance metrics. At the heart of every successful contingent workforce management program are specific KPIs that show which staffing firms are achieving above and beyond your expectations:
- Time to Submit – In the current market, there is no time to waste. Your staffing partner needs to have the efficient processes in place to move quality candidates through the recruiting process. When they do, there are fewer opportunities for competitors to poach candidates away.
- Supply of Qualified Candidates – It’s important to identify your top performers and their original source. If a specific staffing vendor is leveraging processes that are sourcing exceptional people, you want to allocate more of your business to their recruiters. And if there are any best-practices they can impart to your business, impart then whenever possible.
- Filled Roles – Though quality is more important than quantity, you also want to evaluate your staffing partners on their ability to fill positions. If they’re consistently supplying you with top candidates, that shows they understand your business goals and the criteria by which you judge top candidates.
Make Compliance a Priority
You’re well aware of how much of a threat regulatory non-compliance is to your organization. Though you’ve drilled the importance of remaining compliant into your in-house team, your staffing partners need to equally prioritize it. Healthcare, financial services, and other organizations run the risk of expensive fines if their employees or their actions are not compliant with state and federal laws. Your staffing partner is the first line of defense for maintaining your compliance.
For the healthcare industry, staffing partners ensure that the contingent workers funneled into your program are properly screened and credentialed. For financial services organizations, the right staffing partner will be vigilant in screening for candidates who are experienced with PCI-DSS, SOX, and other regulations. In either case, they need to grasp the gravity of compliance to the ongoing success of your organization.
Streamline Decision Making
Though you want your staffing partners to move fast, all their efforts depend upon the urgency of your internal approval process. If you have a lengthy review process or require a variety of internal stakeholders to approve each applicant, then you’ll experience higher candidate falloff rates. Top candidates are here one day, gone the next. When your organization is the bottle neck, then you’re misusing your own time and recruiting budget.
One of the main attributes of effective contingent workforce management is having a single source of approval. When one person is trusted and empowered to call the shots, then you’ll acquire and retain more contingent workers. Additionally, organizations that streamline their application process, removing any steps that won’t improve the caliber of candidates, experience better results in the long run.
Want to achieve better results with your contingent workforce management? Learn how a project-based staffing partner like w3r Consulting can drive results!
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