The UK has seen a significant increase in its contingent labour force over the past two years, with an estimated 1.7 million temporary workers as of April 2022 compared with just over 1.45 million in January 2020.
Phil Nott—Senior Director, Financial Services EMEA
To remain agile and meet business objectives, employers are engaging and hiring more temporary workers to supplement their workforce. In fact, 74% of UK companies plan to hire new external staff in the next three months. As employers scramble to source and onboard new contingent workers, there is increased pressure on hiring managers to recruit and onboard workers quickly.
Many managers feel overwhelmed and under-supported as they struggle to keep track of and hire contingent staff while attempting to build cohesive and productive teams in a hybrid work environment.
In many cases, managers are frustrated over the lack of resources and support in their hiring process. Research shows that 70% of HR leaders say managers are overwhelmed by increased hiring and onboarding responsibilities, citing the absence of support and adequate training.
In the new world of work, companies need access to the right partners, tools and resources to keep ahead in the evolving candidate marketplace. With a strategy and hiring support, managers can make informed hiring decisions based on current business needs and forecasted demand.
Investing in a Managed Service Provider (MSP) programme is one way to alleviate hiring manager burnout. With an MSP, you have a dedicated team of advisory consultants and supplier partners who manage and facilitate candidate sourcing, supplier management, risk avoidance, regulatory compliance and onboarding. Once the logistics of hiring and onboarding external labour are off your hiring managers’ plate, they are free to focus on business-critical activities. The more managers understand how their teams interact and the skills and resources needed to get the job done, the easier it will be to hire the best talent.
Communication channels are organised and automated through a central repository or VMS. This collaborative tool will save your hiring managers time by freeing up space in their inboxes and allowing them to quickly track candidate status in the hiring process.
“Communications throughout your MSP implementation are a critical success factor. Ensuring you consult your hiring manager population and business unit owners is a fundamental MUST to guarantee the programme’s success.”
Feliciana Canellas – Global Implementation Project Manager – Pontoon
Candidates are matched with open requisitions and quickly shortlisted for manager review. This saves hiring managers hours of resume review and interview scheduling time, decreasing the overall hiring time. All document gathering, pre-screening of candidates, and interview schedules are coordinated and executed by the MSP.
Measuring time-to-hire is critical and understanding its contributing factors is essential to help reduce this metric and onboard candidates quicker in a competitive hiring environment.
Pontoon recently consulted with a global Financial Services client to understand what drove their time-to-hire and ultimately contributed to candidate drop-outs. By analysing their background screening processes and providing insight into corporate compliance benchmarks, we decreased their time-to-hire by five working days.
Sourcing and recruiting the right mix of contingent talent is essential. With an MSP, a network of experienced supplier partners does all the legwork in searching for and onboarding talent. The MSP liaises with suppliers and hiring managers to develop programme strategy and evaluate performance.
You must invest in your supply chain and understand how valuable they are to the success of your programme. Ultimately, your suppliers carry your EVP out into the marketplace when attracting new candidates. By building relationships and sharing insights with your supply chain, they can represent your organisation successfully in the candidate market.
It’s time to level up your hiring manager’s knowledge through insights and analytics that empower them to make informed hiring decisions. To accomplish this, MSPs provide access and training on reading and understanding market data and candidate analytics. With this knowledge, hiring managers can stop guessing and start predicting future business needs.
Given the market’s scarcity of data/analytic skills, I question whether hiring managers have the right tools to determine what or how they need to hire. There are many factors to consider, such as candidate availability, location strategy, competitor hiring, etc., all of which will impact how quickly you can hire.
Accessing data in an easy-to-consume and interpretable manner along with a clear story is critical to real-time decision-making. Using data-driven insights and prescriptive/predictive analytics, you can better understand your hiring options, channels, cost, and location using data-driven insights and prescriptive/predictive analytics. Your hiring managers will know where talent exists in the market, the cost of that talent, and how you stack up against your competition.
Your hiring managers have a voice that needs to be heard – likewise, your candidates’ (successful and unsuccessful) and supplier opinions matter. Obtaining feedback on worker performance directly from your hiring managers gives them a voice in shaping the future state of contingent labour within the organisation, a benefit that helps develop and retain high-performing managers.
Additionally, constructive feedback helps to initiate the future evolution of your MSP programme. Understanding experience, challenges and ‘niggles’ helps the MSP team refine programme processes, driving further efficiencies in recruiting contingent workers.
I’ve always been taught that feedback is a gift. You need to obtain the feedback in such a way that it’s not seen as a burden or cumbersome. Take the feedback, and qualify it further if you need to, but ultimately it needs to be understood so you can act.
An MSP drives significant value by freeing up hiring manager time, alleviating risk, providing insight and driving improved candidate experience. To win in today’s talent market, employers need a flexible, scalable solution customised to meet their business objectives.
