To tackle the ongoing economic uncertainty and the fluctuating talent demands businesses are noticing the utmost need for workforce agility.
Does it feel like the sheer volume and these intricacies of managing contingent labor and staffing suppliers overwhelm your daily schedule?
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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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
To learn more about our solutions and ecosystem approach, please visit our website or schedule a demo below.
Direct Sourcing is an increasingly popular contingent workforce strategy that promises superior talent acquisition and lower costs. That’s why it is expected to grow exponentially over the next 5 years. In this article, we’ll cover some of the basics of Direct Sourcing.
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Disparate data sources, metrics, and reporting timelines are barriers to making data-driven decisions. Learn how to change it.
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When it comes to staffing suppliers, more is more – the bigger your supply base, the better your access to quality talent. Achieve an exponential ability to hire using a hiring marketplace powered with the latest technology to facilitate the end-to-end management of your contingent workforce program.
Despite the benefits, having a large staffing vendor list isn’t always the preferred choice for hiring businesses. Usually, businesses try to manage their supplier relationships by ‘optimizing’ (i.e., cutting down on) their supply base and partnering with a few ‘trusted’ suppliers. But often this strategy is backed by perception rather than factual data. Here are some things to consider when thinking about your supplier list:
Just as concentrating your investment portfolio subjects you to more risk and volatility, depending on a few suppliers to fulfill your contingent hiring needs can jeopardize the success of your external workforce program.
Changes in supplier capabilities are increasingly common because the staffing industry is extremely volatile and suffers from a high turnover rate. Just like a concentrated investment portfolio can expose you to downside risk, operating with a restricted vendor list can increase the likelihood of facing hiring delays or compromises in candidate quality if one or more of your vendors is experiencing turnover or volatility.
The solution here, in both investments and contingent hiring, is diversification. A diversified ‘portfolio’ of suppliers minimizes volatility, decreasing the likelihood of a dip in performance across the whole based on changes in a few vendors, and ensures a smooth-running contingent program supplied with quality talent.
Knowing the current price of a stock is imperative for investors looking to buy or sell. In a rapidly rising or falling market, relying on delayed stock quotes is virtually useless since the stock could have moved by a significant percentage in that time frame.
In the same way, depending on quarterly performance data to evaluate your talent suppliers doesn’t shield your business from the dynamic nature of staffing organizations, increasing your risk of engaging with poorly performing suppliers. This can lead to a continuous cycle of onboarding and offboarding suppliers.
In short, backward-looking data governing supplier performance does not give you a continuous performance guarantee and can lead to losses in time, money, and valuable resources.
Having a limited supply base limits your reach across niches, geographies, and talent pools.
In situations of rapid growth where you need to meet unanticipated hiring demands, a lean vendor list may not be able to deliver at pace or meet the desired quality. When you fill these gaps by sourcing, vetting, and onboarding new staffing firms, you consume time and delay your ability to utilize talent from your contingent workforce program.
The internet has made it easier to bring crowds together, leading to groundbreaking innovations over the past decade. Businesses see crowds as innovation partners and humans are increasingly depending on the wisdom of crowds — whether it’s deciding the next Netflix binge or obtaining live traffic updates.
Likewise, the ‘human cloud’ is shaping the future of staffing by providing businesses with new and innovative ways to automate their connection to talent. Human cloud platforms serve as an attractive and inexpensive means of accessing contingent workers, as businesses prioritize resilience and efficiency during these uncertain times.
These modern hiring platforms are built on crowd-based networks of independent and international recruiters, boutique, national, and regional firms, along with the respective talent pools they represent. As opposed to traditional hiring solutions, human cloud platforms can span across cultures, geographies, business sectors, and ideologies, amplifying businesses’ reach over skilled talent at reduced costs.
Human cloud platforms are becoming sought-after ‘talent suppliers’ in today’s technology-fueled gig economy. During 2019, these platforms reportedly grew by ~15% and are expected to continue rising in demand as workers laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic pursue new opportunities.
From retail to transportation to entertainment, the marketplace model has profoundly altered almost every industry. Consider how Amazon’s retail revolution is changing the way we shop or how Netflix is transforming our entertainment purchase and consumption.
In the same way, hiring marketplaces are re-shaping the future of staffing. How?
Just like Amazon acts as a centralized hub for third-party vendors with similar offerings, hiring marketplaces unify the fragmented staffing world by bringing businesses, staffing agencies, independent recruiters, and candidates together on a common digital platform. Unlike traditional hiring models, businesses needn’t navigate through disjointed sources, including multiple staffing suppliers, social media, job boards, and internal talent pools, to find the right candidates.
Another reason for the success of marketplaces is personalization. Netflix has perfected the secret formula to customer-experience using smart AI algorithms to interpret data. Similarly, intelligent hiring marketplaces are highly cognizant of business’s talent needs. They automatically match jobs to the most qualified candidates and vendors within the ecosystem and facilitate better user and candidate experience in addition to boosting overall hiring outcomes.
As the pandemic is accelerating the trend towards contingent hiring, early adopters of these hiring ecosystems end up gaining a competitive advantage. How? By shifting their investments from performing routine and repetitive work to encouraging their internal talent acquisition teams towards strategic thinking and decision making.
The Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace combines machine, network, and human intelligence to deliver businesses the best hiring outcomes. Our hiring marketplace consists of a vetted and diverse list of talent suppliers, guaranteeing you access to the best talent in the market.
Real-time performance metrics constantly monitor suppliers on our platform and our smart algorithms automatically match your job descriptions to the best-performing vendors with the most qualified talent.
Forget lengthy implementations and extensive onboarding timelines; suppliers can join our platform by completing a simple registration form and start recruiting in 30 minutes. We also ensure 100% compliance by serving as the Employer of Record, offloading most of the employee management complexities from suppliers.
To top it all, our cost-neutral plug-and-play hiring solution comes with absolutely no initiation costs.
Sound interesting? Post a job on our hiring marketplace now!
The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tells a story of stasis and small improvements. The good news is that businesses hired 5.3 million professionals. The not-so-amazing news is that all industries, in aggregate, witnessed labor turnover rates to the tune of 5.1 million workers. The 0.2 percent difference would indicate that just as many people left their positions as came aboard. Other sources, such as Compensation Force, depict employee attrition rates close to 17 percent, based on a survey of 28,000 companies. That’s the highest level of churn since 2008, the dawn of the recession. What happens when turnover spikes? Organizations scramble to backfill positions, oftentimes creating opportunities for staffing providers. However, backfilling is usually a short-term fix for what can be a longer-term issue. Instead of backfilling, let’s see how progressive filling can innovate a fresh approach to a stale situation.
With fierce competition for skilled workers, retention and performance are big concerns for employers. Even in contingent labor programs, it’s imperative that workers remain committed to the mission, see their assignments through and deliver high-caliber, on-time results. Findings by Impact Instruction Group reveal just how pronounced the issue of turnover has become.
Retention has taken its place as one of the most important topics in the future of talent. There’s an even more pressing problem, however. Too many companies keep underperforming or mediocre talent, which hobbles their growth. Many rationalizations spring to mind: the workers are loyal, they have niche skills that would be hard to replicate, budgets are tight, recruiting takes too much time, and so forth. In the end, many leaders settle on the compromise that an occupied desk is better than an empty one.
Yet continuing to rely on recruitment methods like backfilling, won’t necessarily satisfy the needs of organizations in the fast-paced digital world. That’s why we need to examine an alternative approach to keeping businesses competitive, dynamic, inventive, and pushing ahead.
What is backfilling? In employment law, it’s the practice of replacing a departing worker as quickly as possible, regardless of whether the former individual left the company or simply moved into another position. The hope is to retain the same headcount with minimal disruption. In our industry, backfilling is more commonly used to replace a regular member of a corporate team during a long absence — planned or unplanned. In days past, the process was straightforward and relatively easy to accomplish. The mechanisms of commerce, production, and service delivery in this century have contributed to new challenges.
Successful backfilling involves identifying positions with no redundancy and establishing sources to replace talent before a dire need arises. Our current economy, however, runs lean and mean. Very few positions offer inherent redundancy. And that creates hurdles.
Writing for ERE, organizational development expert Brian Formato explored how business cultures find themselves in periods of stagnation and why backfilling may not resurrect their productivity. He opens the piece with a well-known quote by Steve Jobs: “A players hire A players and B players hire C players.” Yet too many business leaders remain content to shuffle along with underperforming teams — until the crisis reaches a head and drastic steps become necessary.
“The typical approach that leaders take is to let the problem fester until it becomes too late,” Formato says. “At that point they are forced to take action and terminate the underperformer, creating a hole with no clear succession plan.”
It’s at this juncture where companies frantically work to backfill the positions. Unfortunately, this late-in-the-game effort can lead to losses in time, productivity and revenue. That’s why we need to propose a modern twist on backfilling — a proactive method of progressive filling.
Formato questions why we don’t use the same mindset with underperforming workers as we do with underperforming appliances. Think about it. If your computer is still running an operating system from seven years ago, you’re suffering. Programs take too long to load. They crash. The machine’s available memory can no longer handle the demands of current business tools. It’s become unreliable, unpredictable, and incapable of taking you to the next level of your work. So what happens next?
You see an ad for new computers. They’re sleek, top-of-the-line performers that are already configured to address your existing and future requirements. You go online, research the options within your price range, narrow down the best fits and prepare to make a purchase. Ultimately, you’ve convinced yourself that you need a new model before the old one finally fails. This is where progressive filling takes the reins.
“If you have an underperformer on your team, the best way to upgrade the position is to identify the replacement first,” Formato suggests. One of the core tenets behind Six Sigma is to seek out and identify defects in the process continually. It’s less pleasant than hoping or pretending that everything in the organization is hunky dory, yet it’s necessary for finely tuned operations. When you proactively spot pitfalls looming on the horizon, you can quickly forecast new needs — with the luxury of time.
Even with no open requisitions, the best recruiters are always sourcing for top talent in the positions they support for clients. They understand the unforeseen peaks and valleys that accompany talent acquisition. For instance, if a staffing provider supports a company that thrives because of software development, that agency is constantly sourcing for the best and brightest in the field. When needs are identified, these staffing curators are already prepared to offer a superior candidate.
Formato, as many industry experts, recognizes that passive job seekers often become the best employees. On average, staffing providers spend 80- to 90-percent of their efforts developing networks and courting passive talent. Corporate teams, conversely, often have time enough only to source active candidates.
Engaging staffing professionals can help. They are adept at creating performance profiles that define and sell the job – its rewards, opportunities, and challenges. They partner with clients to gain a comprehensive understanding of the role: how it relates to the work, how it fits the organization’s culture, how it can shape sourcing initiatives, and how it will encourage the right candidates to apply.
They also know how to reach passive candidates by targeting communications to their audience using emails, social media, newsletters, career sites, and other resources. Active seekers on job boards and recruitment platforms represent about 25 percent of the prospective talent pool. That means efficient staffing providers are accessing an additional 75 percent.
There is no crystal ball that enables us to predict the future. With unprecedented speed, industries are changing, companies are changing, the nature of work is changing, and our very roles in society are changing. The reality is that we don’t need a crystal ball. The solution is to keep our eyes open, study performance data, actively look for areas of improvement, and then act progressively. Engaging innovative staffing professionals won’t just help you see the forest for the trees — it will allow you to plant the seeds of a stronger crop before a drought hits.
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