The most severe labor shortage since the end of WWII has created a candidate-led market in which professionals are leaving their roles in droves in search of greater flexibility, better pay and more autonomy.
And employers have responded out of necessity. Salary increases, generous signing bonuses, and new perks have driven talent and acquisition costs to unprecedented levels.
It seems there’s no getting away from the fact that organizations must be willing to pay more to procure the right talent when they need to.
But there’s more to effective talent acquisition strategies than just throwing money at the problem. For forward-thinking organizations, the current crisis is an opportunity to reassess their relationships with talent and design multi-faceted, futureproof strategies that will keep them competitive until long after the storm has passed.
Making greater use of contingent workers and the extended workforce is something that characterizes organizations effectively responding to the crisis. By looking outside their organization, companies can connect with specialist, highly-skilled professionals at favorable rates before they are snapped up by the competition.
In this article, we’ll look at the strategies organizations can use to make their labor spend go further and ensure that staying competitive doesn’t come with an unsustainable financial burden.
The cost of talent is soaring. The market forces that are causing these are strong: strong enough to change many organizations' approach to the extended workforce.
From an aggressive cost-minimization approach, the organizations seeing success are seeking to adopt a people-first approach; looking to optimize their spend, rather than cut it. To do this, managers need the tools that give them the insight and ability to fill positions quickly, yet ensure procurement processes get followed.
It takes a combination of timely insights, management automation and careful planning to ensure your costs are optimized. These three traits could give you a vital edge over your closest rivals.
Beeline helps organizations design and implement more efficient management processes for the extended workforce.
With Beeline, you can create highly personalized experiences. Clients have taken the platform’s customizable API and ran with it, designing management touchpoints designed around employees’ preferred communication channels to improve user experience and increase engagement.
If you always rely on the same tried and tested talent channels to recruit, you’ll always pay the same market rates you’ve been used to, and right now, that means paying historic highs just to stay abreast of the competition.
Accessing new talent channels could give your recruitment efforts a huge cost-effectiveness boost, and casting your net into highly competitive global labor markets could help you discover top-tier skills without paying a premium.
Beeline’s Talent Pools & Direct Sourcing solution gives employers direct access to global talent pools from the dashboard. The Direct Sourcing Platform integrates seamlessly into your sourcing process from requisition to settlement, with full international compliance built-in.
Studies from Beeline users show the Direct Sourcing platform lowers direct-sourced worker markups by an average of 30-40% and reduces overall acquisition costs by 10-20%.
With all this discussion about discovering, hiring, and retaining new talent, it’s easy to forget about the solution that could be hidden in plain sight.
Recruiting contingent talent from private talent pools that include retirees, former interns, “silver medalists” who interviewed for permanent positions but were not ultimately selected can significantly cut recruitment costs and means you’ll find yourself working with talent that is already a close cultural fit with your organization. And you can do so without paying out enormous salary rises or signing on bonuses that are now so commonplace when recruiting for specialized and hard-to-fill roles.
Beeline’s resource tracking tools give you a comprehensive, global workforce overview that helps you see your internal talent at a glance.
You can use resource tracking to identify contingent workers whose terms are expiring and may soon become available for other assignments. This will save on recruitment costs by recruiting from within without creating labor shortages elsewhere in the organization.
You can also use Beeline to keep track of projects and completed statements of work and redeploy successful teams to new projects before the competition snaps them up.
Almost every workforce interaction generates data. So it’s likely your organization has vast stores of data you could use to make talent acquisition and retention more streamlined and cost-effective.
But if you’re like most organizations, that data is probably siloed across many separate management systems and databases, which makes accessing, understanding, and actioning the numbers a mammoth task.
By making information more accessible and establishing a real-time ‘single source of truth,’ you can make more informed decisions and design data-driven strategies for recruiting more cost-effectively and retaining talent longer.
Beeline’s extended workforce management platform gives you instant access to every workforce metric that matters about your contingent program.
But more than that: From recruitment to beyond, the platform’s AI-powered analytics effortlessly converts data into actionable insight with automated reporting and elegant topical dashboards that let you explore data freely.
Beeline’s data tools operate at every touchpoint so that you can find the right talent at the right price. And because you’ve used data-driven analysis to understand what works and what doesn’t—you can go on to design more effective cost optimization strategies.
Over 350 organizations and almost a third of Fortune 500 companies use Beeline to help them navigate the talent crisis and build more effective extended workforce programs.
Contact us or request a demo to find out if Beeline could do the same for you.