Acquiring the right skills at the right time and for the right cost is one of your fundamental sources of competitive advantage. However, some skills and occupations are in permanent short supply, while others are only needed at the 'right time.' This means a talent strategy that includes an extended workforce of high-quality, skilled, flexible, agile, and resilient contingent workers is essential for your organization to compete effectively.
What is your talent strategy?
Your talent strategy will match the needs of your business strategy with the right human capital resources or the people who can deliver that strategy. This alignment of talent strategy and business strategy is your talent optimization strategy.
Unless you are a start-up or a new internal business unit, you are probably not starting with a blank sheet, and your organization has people already. Your talent optimization process could look like this:
- Understanding your organizational strategy
- Identifying the human capital requirements to deliver it – the people you will need
- Assessing your existing employees and contingent workers – do they have the skills and capabilities?
- Gap analysis – having assessed your existing workforce, what are you missing?
- Talent acquisition – going out to the labor market and sourcing the talent you don't have, and retraining/focusing the talent you do have.
The above process is building your talent organically to meet strategic needs. An alternative approach is to buy your talent by acquiring another organization with all the talent in place and bolting it onto your business or contracting out the services.
Acquisitions can be highly effective and faster than organically building your talent. However, there are risks, such as cultural misalignment. For example, if your talent comprises knowledge workers who are highly mobile, a culture clash that reduces morale could drive your most valuable human capital, your knowledge workers with their portable knowledge assets, to leave, leaving your acquisition a failure.
Contracting out is also a potentially swift solution to access talent. Plus, you are accessing an organization that provides the services you need as part of its core competencies, so you would expect them to be good at it. Careful specification at the outset is essential to avoid contractual scope creep and variations that may lead you to spend more than originally planned or hire the wrong service provider.
Why your talent strategy needs contingent workers
Acquiring the right skills for your organization during your talent optimization process is only going to get tougher. Research by McKinsey highlights that nearly two-thirds of global executives believe that within the next five years, half of their workforce will leave the organization or need retraining. That is a lot of workers to find, especially if all your competitors face that same challenge.
So, actually, your source of competitive advantage is not just your talent. It is how skilled you are at identifying the mix of employed and contingent talent, identifying the right people, and hiring them faster and cost-effectively. Your ability to identify and acquire the right skills underpins whether you respond to market challenges and opportunities faster than your competitors.
The benefits of hiring contingent workers typically include:
- Short-term access to strategic skills
- Capacity management
- Agility and flexibility, the ability to scale up and down
- Reduced employment risk – employees have rights.
The most important benefit is your ability to use contingent workers. If you have a strategy and processes that facilitate rapid talent sourcing and acquisition, and these are more effective than your competitors', then you will compete more effectively. The converse is true: Poor talent acquisition skills will mean you get left behind in the race for the best and most effective talent.
Tools to deliver the contingent worker talent strategy
Having established what mix of employed versus contingent talent you need, human resources departments (HRDs) and procurement functions face several challenges in delivering contingent talent to an organization:
- How do you create job requisitions that identify the talent you need? What experience and skills do you need, and will the workers adapt to your culture well?
- Having created the right specifications, how and where do you locate the needed talent?
- Once you start hiring and managing the contingent talent as part of your talent strategy, how do you know how well these people perform?
- How well are your employment business and staffing agencies or your vendors performing?
The focus of contingent workforce performance management and the various tech platforms used to manage contingent workers is all too often on the costs, not the performance. After all, contingent workers are people, not pieces of machinery.
A tech solution that enables you to understand how well contingent workers are performing and how much they cost is essential. You might be spending under budget, but the project is not achieving its milestones because the cheap labor you've hired lacks the skills and experience to effectively deliver the strategy. You need a system that will tell you if milestones according to statements of work (SOWs) are being achieved and how much it costs.
Analytics tools, potentially aided by artificial intelligence (AI) that can remove your unconscious bias, will highlight trends and themes within your organization, providing you with actionable insights. The reason SOW milestones are falling behind may not just be cost-related.
For example, you might have contract developers used to a T-shirt and jeans workplace being managed by suit-wearing back-office banking operations managers who are purely process-driven and who have no concept of how developers work. Half the team will leave the project in a week, and the other half will stay because they are not good enough to get another contract.
Create effective talent strategies using a vendor management system
A vendor management system, VMS, provides data and analytics tools that make it incredibly easy to track and manage the activities and performance of your contingent workers and vendors. It enables you to track costs, with analytics highlighting the differences between your vendors' performance.
The right VMS will go a step further and give you people insights. You can identify worker churn, those leaving a role because it is not a good fit, consistently missed milestones, or other signs that something is wrong. Perhaps one vendor supplies fewer and more expensive contractors than its peers because they better fit the job requisition, so they meet milestones without churn.
To learn more about a vendor management system, its key features, and what benefits it can bring to your organization, download our free guide. It'll give you all the necessary information to understand how a VMS can aid in contingent workforce planning, forecasting, management, and procurement.
