Increase the quality and speed of your contingent workforce
12 January 2022

3 Ways to Improve the Quality, and Speed, of Your Contingent Workforce

2 min read

To stay competitive in the market and fill open positions, your organization is likely making use of the contingent workforce to access skilled workers and fill current vacancies. 

Whether your contingent workforce program is successful relies on a few important factors:

  1. The quality of the contingent workers in your organization.
  2. The speed at which you are able to source and onboard those workers.
  3. The cost of your contingent workforce program
  4. The mitigation of risks (such as compliance and vendor risk) within your program.

To get the full benefits of a contingent workforce program and get a step up on your competitors, it’s crucial that you improve both the quality and speed of your contingent workforce

Optimize the Quality & Speed of Your Contingent Program - Free Assessment

Improving workforce quality means that you’re hiring the workers you need to meet your business goals, while increasing the speed in which you hire workers will ensure you aren’t losing talent to your competitors - which is particularly important given the workforce shortages right now

In this blog, we take a look at three ways you can improve the quality of your contingent workers and ramp up the speed in which they are placed into your organization. 

#1 - Make sure you are sourcing talent from the right vendors

Most organizations with a contingent workforce program work with a number of staffing vendors. The most effective way to ensure the quality of your workers and the speed in which positions are filled, is to work with the best staffing agencies you can afford.

When choosing your staffing vendors, make sure they fully understand your staffing requirements, they have experience in your industry, and set expectations around rates and hiring times.

Once you’ve partnered with the appropriate staffing vendors, it’s time to measure their performance to ensure they are delivering the results expected. 

#2 - Use analytics to gain insights into how your program is performing

Your contingent workforce might involve some direct sourcing, but most of your program will be externally-sourced through staffing agencies. That means your entire program is reliant on the success and effectiveness of your vendors. 

To ensure your vendors are performing as expected, your business must measure staffing agency performance. Analyzing data and insights will help your company to understand whether your staffing vendors are helping you to achieve your workforce targets - giving you the information you need to understand vendor ROI.

To do this, track important metrics such as turnover, time-to-fill and fill rate. These KPIs will give you unique insights into the quality of your contingent workforce and how fast your current program is filling positions.

#3 - Invest in either technology or expertise to manage your contingent workforce

Contingent workforce management is far from easy. In fact, it’s a highly-complex and strategic program that requires expertise on the contingent category, standardized processes across your organization, centralized management across all departments and innovative technology.

Without all of these components, your business won’t have the visibility and control it needs over its contingent workforce to gain any truly valuable insights for future progress. The problem is, all of these components require large investments and lots of resources.

To overcome this challenge, it’s important that your business invests in a solution that will help you better manage your contingent workforce program. 

If you want to manage your program internally, a Vendor Management System (VMS) can give your business the visibility it needs into its contingent workforce program to measure these metrics. 

However, we recommend combining this with either a Managed Services Provider MSP program or MSP Lite program, which will give your organization access to the contingent category expertise it needs to improve the quality and speed of your contingent workforce program.

Interested in learning more? Contrax offers a range of contingent workforce management solutions to ensure our clients are able to realize true ROI from their contingent workers. Get in touch with us today for more information.

Ready to learn more? Contact us today!

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