With unemployment hovering at historic lows, technical and project leadership skills scarce, and critical business activities becoming increasingly task- and outcome-based, competition for talent is at an all-time high. Organizations need a growing number of specialized skills for short-term projects at specific times. Ensuring workers with those unique skills are available when your company needs them may be the most important labor-related task your firm faces. The risk that you will not be able to source the talents you need from either your internal workforce or the contingent labor market is too great to be left to chance.
Smart enterprises are taking steps to develop sources of rare talents they can tap into when critical tasks arise. Mitigating talent risk requires steps to identify and attract the right kinds of workers, ensure they can be brought into projects at reasonable cost, and comply with government regulations when engaging consultants, freelancers, and other non-traditional labor. Talent risk exists for all worker types, full-time employees as well as external workers. Your company’s ability to mitigate all kinds of talent risk – from capability and accessibility risks to compliance and security concerns – will go a long way toward determining how robust and comprehensive your workforce strategies can be. Your ability to win the war for talent rests largely on the efficacy of your strategies for filling key vacancies, nurturing prospective playmakers, and bringing in outside skills quickly and efficiently.
Building the Talent Pool
Building, filling, and expanding a talent pool is one of the most effective ways to ensure the skilled workers you need will be available. Your talent pool should consist of people whom you know possess the talent, experience, and cultural fit that would make them viable applicants for positions in your firm. These include internal candidates ripe for promotion, former employees, previous applicants, freelancers you have used in the past, and other individuals with whom you are familiar. You should also seek to establish relationships with previously unknown workers with the potential to bring critical skills to your organization. These include people from diverse populations, those returning to the workforce after raising families or leaving the military, full-time employees in other firms who are not actively looking to leave their jobs, contingent workers, etc. Establishing a database of apt candidates from various sources for important business roles brings several benefits:
- Shorter Vacancies – Filling your talent pool is similar to completing the preliminaries of the hiring process. Your pool holds only prequalified applicants and your database lists their skills and compatibility for specific project roles so you can winnow the field even further. You can skip directly to the interview stage. Filling vacancies quickly minimizes workflow disruption and allows you assemble project teams and launch initiatives when opportunity comes knocking.
- Lower Costs – With a vibrant talent pool, you can eliminate the costs of recruitment such as advertising, traveling to or hosting job fairs, sorting through resumes, etc. The money you save can be allocated to training, onboarding, or other activities that support a productive workforce.
- Future Needs – Taking the time to create and maintain your talent pool gives you access to valuable market data. If you notice your pool is becoming shallow for a particular skill, you can take steps to refill it – through worker training, working with specialty recruiters and talent suppliers, or hiring full-time employees to lock in their abilities. You also can keep tabs on market rates for salaries, empowering you to create pro forma budgets to ensure an acceptable return on investment before you commit.
- Engaged Prospects – With a talent pool, you can focus your employer branding on a finite, targeted prospect list. You will be able to customize social media interactions with each potential candidate, taking extra time to engage them on their preferred platforms. Cementing a sincere relationship can be the difference between onboarding top talent and watching it go to work for your competitor.
A formidable talent pool is one way to mitigate the risks of talent shortage when demand is strongest. With contingent workers in the pipeline, you build a reliable bench you can call on whenever a new opportunity presents itself or a key worker leaves the organization. But ensuring your talent pool is both large enough and contains the best workers available requires resources. You have to reach out to potential candidates, stay in contact with them for months or years, give them useful information and contact to keep them interested in your company, and ensure you handle their employment correctly when they do come on board.
These responsibilities may be better handled by a managed service provider (MSP). For instance, Metasys can fill and maintain your contingent talent pool with greater efficiency thanks to our streamlined process, economies of scale, expanded data sets, data analysis capabilities, and unshakable contacts with the best and most diverse talent suppliers. As your MSP contingent talent partner, we can build a proprietary talent pool specifically for your needs. Using our experience to ensure quality by vetting candidates based on experience, training, education, etc., we can make the perfect applicants available to you as soon as the position opens.
As experts in the industry, we also can help mitigate your firm’s other talent risks. The more contingent workers you utilize, the greater the chance for misclassification, off-contract hiring, security breaches, safety concerns, and operational dysfunction. Metasys has developed safeguards against all these potential disasters. With established protocols for ensuring transparency into the hiring process, data gathering, analysis, and reporting and insights into labor costs, supply, fill rates, and times, we deliver valuable management advice. Metasys delivers peace of mind, taking the worry out of worker classification. With meticulous documentation, comprehensive knowledge of laws concerning contingent labor, and symbiotic relationships with vendors, we ensure your contractors are subjected to the most rigorous standards for proper classification and labor regulation compliance.
Contact Metasys for a demonstration of how our end-to-end contingent worker management process can virtually eliminate your company’s talent risk. Our service ensures you have access to workers with the skills you need. We then administer contracts, oversee payment and worker classification, and actively manage the participants in your talent pool.
