How to build strong talent pools during a talent crisis

During the current talent crisis, businesses have renewed their focus on extended workforce programs. Oxford Economics reports that 83% of executives have increased their contingent headcount since 2020. With this, a considerable hidden cost has arisen. Costs arise from vendors, time spent onboarding and even with the management of contingent talent, with many businesses overspending to find specialist contingent roles and unable to discern tangible value.

Instead, many are looking towards private preferred talent pools as a means of optimizing their contingent expenditure. Acquiring and re-hiring previously contracted contingent workers allows businesses to avoid paying significant margins on top of wages and speed up their time to fill vacancies. This means that businesses can build a reliable, agile, and adaptable extended workforce pool to help them scale.

What’s the value in a private contingent worker pool?

Private talent pools represent contingent workers that have already been, or currently are, contracted by an organization. These workers may already know your culture, have knowledge of operating procedures and, importantly, have already proven themselves, making it less risky to reintroduce them to your organization.

Strategies for building talent pools

There are two key strategies when it comes to acquiring and retaining contingent workers;

1. Analyzing preferred talent pools, and
2. Building a sense of trust and loyalty.

Combining these two strategies allows businesses to efficiently procure the right workers from private talent pools, cutting costs and saving time.

Audit: Who’s in your internal talent pool already?
If you’ve ever used a consultant, freelancer, service provider or similar, you may already have a casual internal talent pool. Known by your team, they may be undocumented, unknown and a missing opportunity for other teams within your organization. Having a visible history into what, how and who has been involved in your projects will give you a one-up on your competition when it comes to finding talent you need.

An extended workforce platform optimizes the talent procurement process by providing visibility of private talent pools. They display the specific skills, performance, and onboarding level of each worker, providing hiring managers with the insight they need to find talent that will cost your organization less.

Organizations that use extended workforce platforms can get this visibility and history easily. It highlights and makes hirers aware of known talent in your preferred talent pools to optimize your expenditure – so you can spend your contingent budget on workers you know will deliver the best value. It also allows you to eliminate middlemen, minimizing the number of go-betweens that add their mark-ups to the talent’s pay rate.

Optimize: Use data to identify key contingent talent
A vital component of contingent talent retention is building a sense of loyalty and trust amongst the workers in your private talent pools. If previous workers feel undervalued or undercompensated, it is unlikely they will return to fill the specialist roles in the extended workforce.

Businesses can utilize an extended workforce platform to provide the right payment and compensation for existing and previous contingent workers. As a result, these workers feel valued and are more likely to return to the extended workforce to fill talent gaps, saving the need for new talent procurement.

Strategize: Efficiently manage your extended workforce
Hiring from Internal preferred talent pools represent a cost- and time-effective way to fill talent gaps in the extended workforce. By properly analyzing and compensating the talent in these private pools, businesses can acquire the workers they need whilst optimizing costs and saving time.

A workforce management platform enables businesses to identify key talent, assess them against market rates and treat them fairly based on their individual performance. They also provide visibility on existing projects to give businesses a clear perspective on the availability of their existing contingent workforce.

To learn more about Beeline and how it can provide you with the visibility and tools to retain your extended workforce, contact a member of our team today.