Increase Hiring Efficiency With Real-time Analytics

While the availability of data is plentiful, the ability to deliver insights in real-time as opposed to historical data analysis is a key differentiator between traditional and modern staffing vendor management systems.

HR expert Tim Sackett explains:

“We don’t truly listen to what all the data is telling us. We gather all of the information. We get assessment scores, we get personality and cognitive measures, we do in-depth background screening, we perform behavioral-based interviews, we check the candidates’ professional references, we stalk their Facebook page, we check informal references the candidate doesn’t know about, we do just about anything to get as much knowledge as we can on a candidate. And then what happens? We make a decision based on a gut feel.”

Traditional recruitment techniques involve decisions rooted in emotions rather than data, often resulting in slow and cumbersome processes, excessive costs, and bad hires. Identifying these downsides, more businesses are moving towards evidence-based hiring where decisions are data-backed, not prediction-backed. The emergence of Big Data and its corresponding technologies within the staffing industry has vastly improved the accessibility and availability of data. Big Data provides businesses a warehouse of data to analyze along with wide analytic options. But, there’s still a lag in how that data is processed and put to use. Many companies that consider themselves to be data-driven too often are looking at historical data to prove a hypothesis rather than analyzing current data to uncover ongoing realities.

As Michael Skapinker observed in the Financial Times, “It is not just our biases that get in the way but that past performance cannot predict results.”

Real-Time Data-Driven Insights to Boost Contingent Program Success

The frequent market shifts and the extreme volatilities in the staffing industry make staffing suppliers susceptible to constant change. Consequently, this impacts their staffing capabilities, thereby affecting performance. Relying on historical data to drive your contingent program decisions not only risks you engaging with poorly performing suppliers, but also can lead to losses in time, money, and valuable resources. This is why real-time analytics and scorecards are key. They provide contingent workforce programs illumination rather than (just) support by helping businesses make timely data-backed decisions in addition to ensuring overall program health.

Here are some benefits of real-time analytics for contingent workforce programs.

1. Optimize Hiring and Control Costs

Every business strives to make cost-optimized decisions wherever possible and businesses that utilize data effectively can realize cost savings more effectively.

Using real-time data to compare market rates ensures the bill rates for your program are equitable for specific roles in specified locations. Having access to this information also ensures you don’t miss out on great talent by underpaying or go over budget due to excessive rates.

Additionally, real-time notifications for submittals above pay/bill rates help businesses promptly identify suppliers that are outside the rate guidelines, giving them more visibility and control over program spend.

The benefits don’t end here — real-time metrics also aid businesses in improving targeted hiring. By identifying the best sources of candidate inflow, businesses can optimize investments in the right channels to attract the best candidates.

2. Regulate Process Efficiencies

A real-time data-driven approach can proactively identify bottlenecks that are slowing down hiring and inform businesses on the right actions to take to fix them. For example, metrics like pipeline speed indicate the average time each candidate spends at every hiring stage. By actively monitoring this metric, businesses can avoid candidate stagnation occurring due to burdensome processes, sluggish review times, or recruiter inefficiencies.

3. Forecast Hiring

Accurate forecasting enables businesses to reduce costs, improve planning efforts and maximize efficiencies while ensuring they have the necessary resources to meet demands. Intending to realize this, businesses are starting to incorporate Data Science into their talent acquisition strategies. Real-time metrics act as enablers of predictive hiring, allowing businesses to make estimates on the hiring demand for specific job roles, especially high frequency or high volume roles. This requires a combination of a real-time and historical data view on your pipeline velocity, including metrics that reveal the average time it takes to generate a successful candidate at each hiring stage. Not only do these metrics help businesses in benchmarking their hiring, but also in improving visibility into their strategic workforce planning initiatives.

4. Improve Candidate Quality

Aiming to truly assess hiring quality calls for businesses to look beyond the speed and cost of making hires. Instead, businesses should consider tracking other essential attributes that measure a candidate’s level of interest throughout the hiring process.

Real-time candidate dashboards give businesses a comprehensive view on candidate-centric information including candidate quality, acceptance rates, interview rates, and disqualification reasons. These data points help businesses understand candidate preferences and priorities in addition to evaluating candidate engagement and the overall interest in the business brand. By incorporating this information, businesses can improve their talent attraction and engagement efforts, leading to a healthier pipeline of candidates to hire.

Data-driven hiring hasn’t always been an easy concept to implement – disparate data sources, metrics, and reporting timelines all contribute to lag, confusion, and barriers to making intelligence-based decisions. Prosperix’s end-to-end workforce solutions (Vendor Management System, Hiring Marketplace, Direct Sourcing, and On-Demand Talent Pools) all incorporate real-time analytics and provide data-driven intelligence and insights. Real-time data is also foundational for our AI/ML algorithms which distribute, manage and automate capabilities in our solutions, giving you extraordinary ability to build and manage a thriving contingent workforce program.

Schedule a demo with us today to power your hiring efforts using real-time data!


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Contingent Hiring Marketplaces – The Solution to Overcoming Hiring Hurdles

The word “marketplace” instantly brings to mind throngs of business people vying for the attention of customers. Much like any physical marketplace, a hiring marketplace aggregates the vital components of staffing, i.e., hiring teams, job seekers, and recruiters in the digital realm.    

Along the same lines, the advantages of a traditional marketplace translate to a hiring marketplace. Hiring marketplaces act as an additional channel to connect with candidates. They are not limited by territories or time, allow you to connect directly with job seekers, and give you the opportunity to establish new supplier partnerships. However, with unique benefits come unique issues, and it’s imperative to understand the challenges faced by hiring managers, recruiters, and talent acquisition teams.  

Prevalent Challenges of Contingent Hiring

1. Finding capable candidates

Whether your approach to finding candidates is fueled by the mindset of “there’s plenty of fish in the sea” or veers to the other end of likening it to “finding a needle in a haystack”, one aspect remains common between both schools of thought – that hiring is portrayed as a numbers game.   

Typically, an online job posting is viewed by a 1000 candidates, of which 200 start the application procedure, 100 finish applying, 75 get screened out, 25 are evaluated by a hiring manager, only 4-6 are invited to interview, and a single candidate secures the job at the end of the day.    

The effort involved in whittling down 1000 to 1 can dilute the quality of the outcome, which beats the purpose of hunting for the perfect candidate. Quality is just as crucial as quantity, but recruiters often lack that guarantee. 

2. Levelling the playing field

It’s impossible to achieve optimum contingent hiring without staffing vendors but involving them is easier said than done. The intricacy and challenges of managing staffing vendors is proportional to their volume; as the latter escalates, the former follows suit.

In seeking to fulfill staffing requisitions through a wide web of vendors small and big, the negotiating power seldom lands in your court. Individual vendors facilitate different facets of the requisition process. Without healthy competition and grounds for price comparison, vendor markups can peak.

3. Gleaning spend visibility

Companies often expect that their contingent labor spend is fully and efficiently utilized towards hiring and managing the workforce.  The reality is that nearly a quarter of the approved or pre-negotiated spend is eaten up by rogue spend.

Given the increasing demand for contingent workers and decreasing turnaround times, hiring managers are pushed to make decisions on the fly without the input of other internal teams, causing a rift between the spending intent and end result. Consequently, the dearth of direction in overarching budget strategies of the contingent labor program renders its potential unrealized.  

4. Minimizing bottlenecks in hiring stages

An average of 42 days – that’s how long it takes to hire for each opening. Depending on the particular industry or nature of the role, the period can range between 14 and 63 days. This scenario in a landscape where 64% of American organizations want to replace or retrain a fourth of their workforce by 2023.

Factors like multiple rounds of manual review, miscommunication, disorganization, budget constraints, and other business concerns are culprits of dragging out the hiring flow. Only the extremely ambitious and resourceful are able to shove aside these roadblocks, and with difficulty at that.

Achieve Congruence with the Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace

Without assistance, overcoming the challenges of contingent hiring can seem daunting. Though, armed with an online platform like the Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace, you can be well on your way to combat these common staffing hurdles. You’ll gain: 

1. The ability to hire at scale

Nothing like being able to access an endless supplier network that includes but is not limited to national and international suppliers, boutique and niche suppliers, independent recruiters, and RPOs. The diversity of the network doesn’t stop at location (spanning across North America and overseas); it also applies to suppliers’ ability to identify talent pools of varied skillsets. Sourcing local and remote candidates – check. Exemplarily competent suppliers and talent – check. Recruiting at scale like never before – check.

2. Greater reach to available talent pools

Candidates on the Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace are represented by suppliers, consolidated by intuitive technology, sourced directly from internal talent pools as well as externally, and reviewed and approved by you. Our marketplace is adept at handling all this for multiple job postings simultaneously, lifting the burden of finding and evaluating fresh candidate sources off your shoulders.  

3. Automated supplier management

It’s not enough to establish in words that suppliers are integral to your successful contingent hiring plans; our hiring marketplace embodies and facilitates every supplier’s seamless functioning. With the aid of automation, suppliers can self-register, easily provide business information and complete onboarding, utilize in-app training to increase efficiency, be matched to jobs by high-performing algorithms, and obtain real-time scorecards to be aware of and improve their performance. 

4. Active curation of quality candidates

Remember how discovering quality candidates is one of the biggest thorns in the sides of hiring managers and talent acquisition teams? Our Talent Advisors proactively curate candidates for each posting on the marketplace, ensure they meet the criteria on predefined screening requirements, assess candidate-job fit, and coordinate communication between all parties involved – thereby increasing candidate quality without soaking up valuable time in the process. Further, once a candidate has been zeroed in on, our Advisors also take care of the follow-up and onboarding procedures.

5. Higher cost transparency and lower hiring spend

Safeguarding your right to know and pay fair market rates matters to us. The Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace promotes transparency and competitiveness amongst suppliers, and denotes the appropriate rates based on data from earlier hires. Ergo, you only have the best talent secured at the best rates on your hands. 

6. Faster time-to-hire by leveraging AI

The Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace uses AI algorithms such as the Multi-direction Matching Algorithm, Job Distribution Algorithm & Job Attention Algorithm, to match jobs, candidates, and suppliers, making connections in all directions in real-time. Suppliers can therefore be aligned with the candidates and jobs that are the most suitable to them based on their skills, location, and prior success.

7. Payroll and EOR services

For all hires made through our hiring marketplace, Prosperix looks after the EOR and compliance responsibilities that accompany them. This consists of managing payroll procedures, employment taxes and withholdings, verification and administration of W-4, I-9, and W-2 information, ACA compliance, enrollment, and maintenance, ongoing employee relations, and more.

8. Tools to manage the complete hiring process

Utilizing the Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace will help support not one, not two, but all six stages of the hiring process, i.e., Sourcing, Assessment, Hiring, and Onboarding, Offboarding, and Redeployment. The marketplace has been designed with key innovations to enable you to customize your hiring workflows through the Applicant Tracking System, engage candidates with the help of the Talent CRM, assess talent using customizable Smart Forms, store and manage audit and compliance-related documentation, and collaborate via unified communication channels.  

If you’ve made it this far, you’re quite likely ready and eager to reap the benefits of a hiring marketplace. Get started by posting your next opening on the Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace.

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The Ascent of Direct Sourcing

Direct sourcing allows businesses to leverage their existing candidate pools to fill openings for contingent roles. It reduces hiring time and costs, widens reach of available talent pools, promotes brand awareness, and improves candidate experience.  

Give our introductory post a read to learn more about what direct sourcing can do for your business.  

Direct Sourcing Adoption Trends

Given the trajectory of today’s agility-driven markets, Staffing Industry Analysts’ (SIA) latest report ‘Achieving Excellence in Direct Sourcing for the Contingent Workforce’ states that the contingent workforce share is anticipated to reach 40% by 2025.  

This upsurge in contingent workforce recruitment indirectly points to a jump in direct sourcing practices. Thereby, the report predicts that the next two years will see a 1.6x growth in implementation of direct sourcing, indicating an adoption rate of approximately 60% and extending beyond early movers.  

As it penetrates contingent hiring processes, this sourcing method is proving to be a positive driving force towards:

1. Fortifying Company-Candidate Relationships

A Harvard Business Review survey found that 65% of 2800 job applicants dropped out in the midst of the recruitment process because they found the work-life balance to be inadequate or didn’t resonate with the organizations’ methods, especially during testing times.

“In today’s large talent market, contingent workers can choose their employers and they want to understand what benefits – in addition to pay – they can expect from the collaboration. In the past, many corporations viewed these workers as “a commodity.” That mindset is outdated. Every organization needs to develop strategies that allow them to attract this highly qualified talent directly – and that’s the sweet spot of direct sourcing”, says Tim Proehm, Vice President of Digital Product Development, KellyOCG.

Direct sourcing gives companies the opportunity to attract candidates on their own merit. This means they don’t have to rely on the picture a third party might paint. But more importantly, they have to actively find ways to connect with candidates, be it through online presence or outreach.

2. Meaningful Curation

It’s not enough to merely have a mixed bag of a talent pool. The true advantage of this strategy lies in proactively and meticulously curating a talent pool that is diverse and skilled before the need to fill an opening even arises.   

More organizations are seeking to build talent containers by this method that will help them in accessing candidates for continuous hiring and growing talent pools at lesser per-hire costs. Candidates across multiple online and offline sourcing channels are merged within a container, making it much easier and quicker for talent acquisition teams to fill any volume and nature of roles. 

3. Joining Forces to Accelerate Success

On first impression, this sourcing strategy might be perceived as an entity’s individualistic endeavor, given that the act champions finding talent from within the business, often by the business.  However, while the objective is to make internal contingent hiring more efficient and effective, optimum results are accomplished by partnering with a Managed Direct Sourcing (MDS) provider.   

Companies choose to outsource to an MDS provider because it reduces the pressure to have all the necessary resources in-house. Moreover, handing over the reins to a provider hastens planning and execution, utilizes their knowledge of best practices and industry experience, makes direct sourcing more scalable and trackable, and minimizes chances of friction and risks.

Implement Direct Sourcing with Prosperix

 Prosperix offers Direct Sourcing solutions that will guide you through amplifying and fortifying your recruitment processes.  

Our solutions can help you bring your winning strategies such as attracting talent through brand recognition, harnessing technology and recruitment tools to curate and nurture candidates, and developing talent pools for future roles and hiring needs – to life.

To make direct sourcing a part of your contingent hiring workflow and to learn more about its benefits, schedule a demo now.  

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The Power and Allure of Recruiting Automation

What is Recruiting Automation?

The fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are uncovering new applications for their technologies on a seemingly daily basis. In the field of hiring, recruiting process automation, or recruiting automation, is one of those recent developments. Recruiting automation is now an industry buzzword, and has many wondering what it is and what promise it holds.   

What is recruiting automation? To put it simply, recruiting automation supports the work of talent acquisition teams. It enhances every hiring stage, including planning, strategy ideation, candidate sourcing, screening, and post-hire performance.

17% of organizations have adopted automation for these purposes, and the number is set to rise to 30% by 2022. A further 38% are directing their resources towards AI enhanced talent acquisition. Organizations are increasingly recognizing that paying attention to automation yields exponential returns.   

Why is Recruiting Automation Important?

The myth that automation will replace recruiters is just that – a myth.

If a huge chunk of recruiting time and energy is devoted to manual and housekeeping duties, it leaves a limited amount to concentrate on the interpersonal requirements of the job. On average, 23 hours of a recruiter’s productivity goes towards screening for one hire wherein at least 75% of candidates are unqualified.

When automation is employed to work hand-in-hand with recruiters, it allows recruiters to place an emphasis on enhancing the candidate experience through personalization and high touch points from start to finish.         

Entelo’s report on the state of recruiting trends in 2020 corroborates areas where automation is most useful. 39.6% of recruiters find the most value in sourcing, followed by candidate qualification and interview scheduling equally at 15.8%. Engaging candidates was cited as essential by 11.9% and team collaboration by 7.9%.

How Recruiting Automation Can Elevate Your Hiring Efforts

1. Extend Reach

Less is more in some instances, but not with hiring. In this case, more is more. The larger the candidate pool, the better the chances of finding the right candidate for your role and company.

Automation can simultaneously boost access to external candidate pools while prioritizing internal talent pools. This way, you’ll always be able to leverage the widest range of workers based on skills and diversity.  

2. Reduce friction in pre-hire tasks

There’s only so much that handpicking can get you. And it is more often a bottleneck than a benefit because of how arduous it gets. When manually assessing resumes and shortlisting candidates in high volumes, it’s near impossible to get it right every time.

Employing resume parsing along with AI matching technology allows the intelligence of automation to tackle organizing and evaluating applicants, especially in the initial stages. If combined with digital questionnaires and assessments to validate skills and experience, automation can become a game changer. When the sea of candidates are smartly narrowed down to a handful, picking from the best ones is a lot simpler.

The other major time-draining gripe for hiring teams is setting up and rearranging interviews. Stories of miscommunication and missed interviews resulting from coordinating issues are more common than you would think.

Sidestep such downsides; simply integrate automation tools to take care of candidate assessments, interview scheduling, calendar syncing and other pre-hire necessities. It will free up the manager and recruiter’s bandwidth for conducting the interview and making the right decision.

3. AI-driven matching algorithms

Hiring teams can observe the potential of AI shine through in its capability to pair candidates with jobs almost perfectly. A hiring marketplace like the Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace harnesses the capacity of AI algorithms to achieve multi-direction matching between candidates, suppliers, and recruiters, and prioritizing as well as distributing jobs optimally. These dynamic algorithms use a combination of factors like prior success, skills, job priority, geographic expertise, and recruiting scope to analyze job-candidate fit.

The Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace also uses AI to produce probability-of-hire scores to reveal the likelihood of securing a perfect hire for every job. It also works to reduce any potential recruiter or manager bias in play.

4. Candidate engagement and nurturing

In a people-centric practice like hiring, recruiters value building a relationship with the candidate and guiding them at every point. The candidate’s experience takes prominence as much as any other facet.

Automation provides you with various communication channels to connect with candidates, and the ability to streamline the tone of communication across all of them. The added advantage of developing relationships with candidates from the start is that it becomes easier to reach out and engage them for jobs as warm leads rather than cold ones. Conversion rates are much higher for candidates that are engaged and nurtured as part of a talent community over time, allowing for on-demand hiring of candidates through an active talent pipeline.

5. Candidate screening and assessments

Every worker that joins the company becomes a member of your corporate family. Automation can help you get to know who an individual is by giving you a full picture of their professional history and how it maps to your company.

Not only are you looking for individuals of merit, it’s also important that they are able to easily embrace your company culture. Moreover, the standards you set for your work clan are bound to be aspirational. Automation can take on the responsibility of verifying capabilities and compatibility based on screening requirements predefined by you.

6. Real-time analytics

Recruiting happens in the real world in real-time, so extracting data three, six or twelve months later is counterproductive to the purpose of analytics; especially to understand what’s effective and what needs to be improved.

Obtaining data that is instantaneous and updated with every change is invaluable. Automation gives you that and the ability to track KPIs like candidate coverage, job performance, and spend management. It also enables talent acquisition teams to recognize efficiency of hiring actions, by gathering comprehensive data using metrics such as hiring scorecards, talent supplier engagement, and pipeline activity, among others.

7. Applicant tracking

Your recruiting endeavours are bound to be more fruitful when you have a strong understanding of how and where they are being used. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) can be that crucial component to augment your hiring workflow.

Incorporating an ATS will make all applicant-related and job listing information available in one place, increasing clarity for all involved. Every step of the hiring roadmap is visible through the ATS dashboard, ensuring that recruiters are aware of progress level and areas that need more focus. 

8. Vendor Management

Just as important as paying attention to candidates is managing vendors and suppliers. The matching competencies of automation can ensure that you partner with ideal vendors who align with your organization’s workflow and ethos.  

The Prosperix VMS establishes this using AI algorithms that gauge parameters like skills, success, expertise, and more. Further, the algorithms couple suppliers and jobs based on the 3Ps of each supplier, including their Profile, Performance, and the Pools of talent they represent. 

It doesn’t stop there. Post selection, the VMS takes the weight off your shoulders of vendor information collection, handling agreements, and other onboarding processes. It also equips you with real-time scorecards so you have full transparency and concrete data to bolster hiring results.  

For most businesses, automation tools that address individual elements of the hiring process can be powerful in increasing the productivity and success of hiring efforts. Now imagine how transformative it could be if each of these capabilities were combined and you will understand the design thinking that Prosperix has incorporated by leveraging multiple layers of recruiting automation and AI across an end-to-end workforce solution that addresses the complete hiring lifecycle.

Ready to witness the wonders of recruiting automation? Schedule a demo with us now.

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Make Hiring Predictable Using Talent Pools and Talent Pipelines

Picking the most qualified candidate for a job opening is the number one priority for hiring teams, but gathering and maintaining candidate information in advance of immediate hiring needs can help make your hiring program consistently successful. Talent Pools combined with proactive Talent Pipelines ensure greater hiring success. By collecting and enriching candidate information, Talent Pools serve as the building blocks for Talent Pipelines. Talent Pipelines, in turn, allow candidates to be nurtured from cold leads to warm candidates — enabling ‘On-Demand Hiring’.

So, what is a Talent Pool?

Talent Pool Definition

A Talent Pool acts as a repository of candidate information that can be leveraged at any time. Using a Talent Pool, businesses can make their recruitment processes proactive and hire for critical roles quickly. 

A talent pool comprises a list of candidates that have been added to a company’s internal talent database. Typically an internal talent pool consists of candidates who have expressed interest in the organization and whose skills and competencies align with the company’s goals and objectives. The talent pool database includes detailed information about candidates — their skills, domain expertise, level of experience, education, potential jobs they can fill, and more. Your internal talent pools consist of:

  • Candidates that are in your internal database (ATS or Applicant Tracking System)
  • Candidates that have applied through the career website (Applicants)
  • Candidates that were interviewed but not selected (Silver Medalists)
  • Candidates that are referred (Referrals)
  • Candidates that come through an internship program (Interns) 
  • Candidates that have previously worked for the organization (Alumni)

Why Should You Develop A Talent Pool Strategy?

Starting the recruitment process from scratch for every job opening is time-consuming and strains resources. In a fast-paced and increasingly competitive hiring landscape, having access to potential candidates immediately speeds up the hiring process and reduces cost.

Enter Talent Pools.

Talent Pools: The stepping-stone to solid talent pipelines

Talent Pools are a great way to build robust talent pipelines by collecting, filtering, and managing candidate records. Using a talent pool, businesses can stay on top of their recruitment needs by having a steady flow of interested and qualified candidates to fulfill jobs, all tagged with relevant information. Well-managed talent pools don’t just collect information, but also keep it up to date and enriched wherever possible so the records are useful when they are needed. Having a well-managed talent pool gives hiring teams immediate access to potential candidates to fill their open positions. 

A well structured talent pool paves the way for proactive talent pipelines that are strategically designed to meet a company’s current and future hiring needs.

Importance of Talent Pipelines

Creating solid Talent Pipelines is essentially a proactive and predictive hiring strategy. Talent Pipelines help businesses identify upcoming talent needs early and also provide access to engaged and nurtured candidates on-demand to fill positions immediately. Talent pipelines are especially effective for high volume and recurring roles when the similar candidates are often required. In short, by developing talent pipelines, businesses can become agile and proactive in their hiring efforts. 

Apart from providing a stable flow of talent and rapidly reducing the time-to-hire, using Talent Pipelines improves the overall candidate experience. By carefully analyzing your existing talent pool, you can engage different pipelines of talent with personalized content and customize your application/hiring processes to suit specific candidate categories. Catering to your potential candidates’ needs garners trust and reflects positively on your employer brand. In fact, a survey conducted by Careerarc found that 82% of the participants considered employer brand and reputation before applying for a job — a 7% increase in the past five years.

Expand Your Talent Pools with Prosperix

Prosperix helps you build a stronger workforce by extending your reach into additional talent pools to find quality candidates in addition to your internal talent pool. Our on-demand talent pool offering includes:

  • Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace which consists of a vetted list of suppliers and their talent pools
  • Direct Sourced talent pools
  • Externally sourced talent pools from job boards, LinkedIn, social sites, web destinations, and online marketplaces
  • Local, remote, and offshore talent pools

With more haystacks to search and select from, your ability to find ideal candidates increases exponentially. Use our diverse and expansive talent pool solutions to find the best candidates for your business.

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What Is The Right Descriptor For Your Contingent Workers?

What’s in a job title? A job title isn’t just a moniker that’s assigned to someone to distinguish their role in a company; it is a part of their professional identity. And this importance is no different for contingent workers versus employees of a company. 

Much like an employee, a job title is significant to a contingent worker, regardless of if they are an agency hire, directly sourced, leased, or independent. It shows their standing in the organizational ladder in the course of their stint and can stick in their portfolio for years to come. It’s no surprise then that a 2021 report by Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) found that contingent workers felt “temporary” to be an ill-fitting designation.

“Why is it necessary to consider this matter and its repercussions”, you ask? For one, the U.S. gig economy comprises over 57 million workers, which is a sizable segment of people to discount. And two, their experience with the company is crucial to securing their loyalty and maintaining reputation, without which the future of the workforce can be jeopardized.    

Why “Temp” Can Be the Wrong Descriptor for Contingent Workers

By nature, the term “temporary” is short-lived. In the case of fixed-term labor, this can convey the wrong connotations and cause apprehension in many ways.   

  1.   Regressive involvement

Organizations are increasingly seeking flexible workers to fill integral positions. In fact, more than 80% of them intend to step up their contingent hiring efforts. But addressing them as “temp” diminishes their contribution and importance to the business. It sets the tone of fleeting commitment from the get-go, which doesn’t motivate personnel to strive for excellence.

  1.   Respect stays at the door

Seniority demands recognition. The aforementioned SIA report found that the older and better paid workers are, the less likely they will appreciate being referred to as “temp”, on grounds of respect. 10% of 56-year-olds found being called “temporary” agreeable. The number fell shorter with regards to highly compensated workers, with only 2% of them saying it is acceptable.   

Moreover, the younger generation is fluid with career choices, whereas Gen X and baby boomers take pride in longevity and stability in their roles. Consequently, the former is not as affected by “temp”, but the latter doesn’t resonate with the word.

  1.   Restricts relationships

Despite working on a short-term basis, contingent workers are well qualified for the job they are placed in. That’s one of the key reasons why companies choose to hire them in the first place. “Temp” doesn’t acknowledge their expertise and limits their sense of ownership on the project.

Plus, it’s necessary for them to integrate with their team and the company culture for the duration of their tenure, but “temp” takes away from their feeling of belonging. 

Appropriate Descriptors to Use

Though “temporary” doesn’t sit well, there is no shortage of other descriptors that can and should be used in its place. They are sometimes interchangeable, depending on the scope of work. As a business, the descriptor you use for contingent workers can make or break your ability to get the candidates you desire and build the workforce you envision. As a colleague, it’s essential that you treat contingent workers as peers. In both cases, it’s best to clarify the descriptor and definitely use an alternative to “temp”.  

The most preferred and popular descriptors in contingent worker circles are:

  • Contractor: A wide range of roles fall under the category of contractor; as such, anyone who provides independent services can be called a contractor, from a doctor to a real estate agent. Labor-intensive or technical jobs are typically associated with this descriptor.   
  • Consultant: By definition, a consultant is someone who offers expert advice. They can be a specialist of any right, in any industry. “Consultant” is most often used in the context of management, programming, finance, and supply chain strategy.  
  • Freelancer: This descriptor is generally suitable for those in virtual or creative positions, such as personal assistants, writers, graphic designers, illustrators, musicians, and so on.
  • Associate: Interns or those in junior positions can be referred to as associates, to indicate their minimal experience level without any negative implications. 
  • Team Member: This descriptor emphasizes that all individuals that are associated with the company or department are part of the same team, and that every role is essential. It also brings attention to the fact that working together is paramount to achieving great outcomes.
  • Non-employee: Some businesses describe their workforce as consisting of employees and non-employees. While this is a fact, it makes non-employees feel different and the identifier “non” has a negative connotation.

Having made it this far, you either already have a strong contingent workforce that you want to appreciate, or you hope to build one soon. With Prosperix’s suite of essential workforce solutions, our team of experts can help you grow and nurture an extraordinary workforce. To learn more, check out our workforce solutions offerings or visit www.prosperix.com. 

Debunking the Top 6 Direct Sourcing Myths

Direct Sourcing has tremendous potential to drive cost savings and deliver incredible outcomes, but there is some confusion about certain aspects.

Direct Sourcing refers to the process of building robust talent pipelines by accessing and engaging with your organization’s existing talent pools, as well as extending your reach into additional talent pools to find quality candidates. Many organizations also utilize their company brand to attract talent and build a talent community. It is currently estimated at around $1B of annual contingent labor spend. If you’re not familiar with how it works, read our introductory blog post on Direct Sourcing here. 

Let’s start by debunking some common myths and misconceptions.

Myth 1 - Direct Sourcing will automatically save our business millions of dollars

The biggest allure of Direct Sourcing is its promise to deliver businesses tremendous cost savings post-implementation. While the savings are real, the path to receiving them is not straightforward and depends on multiple factors, including:

  • The types of roles you hire for – The competitiveness of the market, going pay rates and availability of talent will determine the cost savings for each particular role. 
  • Whether the roles are repetitive or similar in nature – The more similar roles are, the bigger boost you’ll receive from existing talent pools or from building talent pipelines. 
  • Whether your biggest hiring needs are located in a few geographies or spread out – Consolidated geographies will enable more use of your talent pipelines. 
  • The volume of positions you need to hire 
  • The availability of talent for your top hiring needs

Each situation is unique, and the eventual cost savings are dependent on the amount of efficiencies that can be gained by leveraging existing and external talent pools.

Myth 2 - It requires zero investment

There are ways to structure your Direct Sourcing initiative to minimize the upfront investment. But in reality, it requires investments of time and energy to make it successful. There are costs associated with the technology solution, sourcing channels, and the team members responsible for sourcing, curation, and hiring. Although these costs can be added to the mark-up rate, the speed of ROI for the solution directly depends on the amount of investment your business is willing to commit upfront. Direct Sourcing also includes an element of change management for processes relating to contingent hiring.

Myth 3 - Awesome technology is what makes Direct Sourcing possible

Direct Sourcing is not just technology dependent, but people dependent as well. A successful strategy requires experienced professionals that know how to leverage technology to fill open jobs. It is important to note that technology alone cannot ensure an exceptional candidate experience. You need team members that have a great attitude and are customer service oriented to make the hiring process one that candidates enjoy and want to engage in. Only a combined high-tech and high-touch approach can make this successful.

Myth 4 - It's better done in-house, without the help of external vendors

Very often, Direct Sourcing is touted as an internal recruitment strategy where managers can source talent internally, rather than relying on a third-party or intermediary such as a consulting or staffing company to fill talent needs. 

This is possible as long as you have the following:

  • Ample access to talent pools (internal and external)
  • Ability to engage and nurture talent through email, phone and text
  • Ability to leverage your brand for talent attraction and engagement
  • Access to technology that can power your capabilities
  • Access to a team of sourcers, recruiters and curators

Unfortunately, most businesses lack the technology and resources to effectively implement this strategy. In fact, working with a Managed Service Provider that understands your business’ culture and hiring needs simplifies the process and reduces costs plus overall contingent spend.

Myth 5 - Direct Sourcing will fulfill 100% of our open positions

Having access to millions of candidates in your talent pools doesn’t guarantee a high fulfillment rate. The data residing in your various internal talent pool sources are likely to be static and require refreshment by engaging and nurturing the talent.
Moreover, the ease at which open positions can be filled depends on the job details, volumes, geographies, availability of talent, talent interest in your brand, and more. The more your talent pools resemble the needs of your hiring program, the more you’ll be able to reap the rewards. High fulfillment rates happen over time. On average, you can expect 20-30% fulfillment in specific job categories during the first year with the ability to scale that to over 50-80% in 5 years.

Myth 6 - It delivers great outcomes quickly

Direct Sourcing is still in the early days of market penetration and requires time to be understood and evaluated. For businesses looking to adopt a Direct Sourcing strategy, it’s best to take a ‘crawl, walk and run’ approach.

The first step is to define the problem to be solved via Direct Sourcing.This can be done by conducting an assessment and running a pilot to identify your hiring needs and goals. Following the evaluation process, businesses can use an agile and iterative approach that allows them to improve and tweak the solution along the way, allowing them to utilize Direct Sourcing in specific areas where they get the best ROI and results.

Should You Make Investments Right Now?

Direct Sourcing has become the current hot-topic in the global staffing industry with businesses, suppliers, service providers, and tech providers starting to realize its potential value. Cost reduction is what drives this strategy – since running a contingent workforce program is expensive and approaching suppliers for volume rebates doesn’t always translate into an effective cost-cutting strategy. Innovative solutions like Direct Sourcing help to fill in these gaps. By using a combination of the latest technology, streamlined processes, and experienced professionals to manage the program, Direct Sourcing helps businesses reduce costs associated with their external vendors.

Direct Sourcing also helps leverage your brand to attract and engage talent from both your internal and external talent sources, thus ensuring a positive candidate experience. By building proactive talent pipelines for high-volume roles, Direct Sourcing also tremendously improves your speed-to-hire.

All-in-all Direct Sourcing is a tech-enabled services play that helps businesses develop a best-in-class Contingent Workforce or Total Talent Management program that is agile, diverse and high performing.

How Can Prosperix Help Your Direct Sourcing Efforts?

Prosperix is the first end-to-end workforce solution that addresses the entire hiring lifecycle, inclusive of talent attraction, branding, engagement, sourcing, assessments, recruiting, vendor management, onboarding, and workforce management. We help businesses propel their Direct Sourcing efforts by combining high-tech innovation with high-touch candidate experience. 

Prosperix helps businesses tap into multiple haystacks of talent, empowering them with an exponential ability to hire. Prosperix also provides complete transparency into the hiring process, available talent pools, and performance, leading to outstanding hiring outcomes. 

Schedule a demo with us today to learn more:

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Workforce Solutions Ecosystem – More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Note: This blog post is part of a series of posts that go in-depth on different elements of our Prosperix Ikigai. For more information, visit our About Us page here.

When you think of a natural ecosystem like a pond, your mind might not drift towards the complex interrelationships between the systems of plants, insects, fish and mammals that populate the ecosystem. But a complex ecosystem like a pond is more than the sum of its parts because of those relationships, leading to natural diversity and sustainability. At the same time, an imbalance in any aspect of the ecosystem can spell trouble for its relationship to other elements in the system. That’s why wildlife management programs focus on the holistic habitat in question as opposed to one species or element – the various elements are all related and dependent on one another. 

The same rings true for the staffing process. When disparate elements and tools are managed in a siloed environment, there is less ability to realize benefits gained by integration and interoperability. 

As staffing teams are working towards maximizing proficiency, it is becoming more apparent that not only do the cogs of each machine need to run without friction, but multiple machines have to work in tandem to establish a solid framework. When hiring tools and functionalities integrate and interoperate, they form the foundational structure of a workforce solutions ecosystem.   

The Advent of Workforce Solutions Ecosystems

Traditionally, the many facets of staffing have been treated as distinct business functions having their corresponding mode of operation. However, this is no longer conducive to the dynamic nature of the current staffing environment. Swivel-seating, manual data compilation, and other passive practices once had a time and place to shine, not because of efficacy but due to a lack of digital resources.  

Even before the pandemic made remote working a necessity, the demand for contingent workers was on the rise. Everything since has only accelerated the ramp up of contingent hiring and requires technology to match the escalated expectations of hiring outcomes. Such technological advancements that support hiring efforts collectively are recognized as core to a workforce solutions ecosystem.  

Workforce solutions ecosystems are somewhat new to the game. An Oxford Economics survey found that 83% of executives in North America utilize contingent workers; yet, 34% feel they are limited by technological incompetence, marking a gap in adoption of contemporary solutions.  

What the ecosystem concept highlights is the need for the facets to unite to take a comprehensive approach to talent acquisition. Liz Bradley, Director of Communications, Scout Exchange, emphasizes this: “Ecosystems allow employers to have a unified, holistic view of total talent management across the organization. It also allows for more flexibility and cost efficiency over traditional agency approaches because everything is connected and streamlined under one platform – attracting and acquiring talent, managing and developing talent, understanding and planning talent, as well as extending talent.”

The beauty of the word ecosystem is that it inherently embodies harmony. A business that employs the workforce solutions ecosystem is harmonious within itself and with its external connections, allowing it to achieve aspirational results faster and better than any singular competency.

Components of the Workforce Solutions Ecosystem

In the 2020 edition of their report on workforce solutions ecosystems, Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) delineated the six sections of the ecosystem as Staffing, Process Outsourcing, Payroll/Compliance, Direct Work Engagement, Talent Acquisition Technology, and Other Workforce Solutions. The scope of every section can be understood as:

  • Staffing – Sourcing and recruiting contingent labor  
  • Process Outsourcing – Human Resource Outsourcing (HRO), Business & Recruitment Process Outsourcing (BPO & RPO), Managed Service Programs (MSP)
  • Payroll/Compliance – Payroll Organization, Independent Contractor (IC) services
  • Direct Work Engagement – SOW consulting services, Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
  • Talent Acquisition Technology – Candidate discovery, assessment, processing, and engagement
  • Other Workforce Solutions – HR consulting, outplacement, training & accreditation

Prosperix encompasses all six functions through its offerings such as Prosperix VMS, Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace, and our Workforce Solutions suite, which help with: 

Combined, Prosperix’s solutions ecosystem reflects our ideology of making contingent workforce hiring and management a seamless experience. Users of our workforce solutions can realize the benefits of an integrated and unified ecosystem that solves the end-to-end hiring process for organizations. 

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To learn more about our solutions and ecosystem approach, please visit our website or schedule a demo below.

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