Top 10 Benefits Of Hiring Contractors
Today, contractors are an integral part of many companies’ staffing strategies. If you’re trying to decide what makes sense for your organization or just wondering why companies hire temps, we thought we’d share some of the reasons we hear from our clients.
Meeting with our customers’ hiring managers, where CTOs, CIOs, Engineering and Operations Managers share their hiring forecasts allows us to anticipate and best prepare for their budgeted staffing needs.
What projects will demand hiring attention, timing, how many have they been approved to hire, and knowing what portion will be designated as temporary are all important factors to take into consideration.
As a matter of course, our clients have different reasons for bringing in contractors. Straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak, here are some of the biggest drivers of contingent workforce hiring that we hear:
- Experts are the X Factor: Supplementing staff with subject matter experts, whose skills are cutting-edge sharp from working on a variety of advanced technology projects, can fill in the talent gap. Savvy managers are wise to give themselves a competitive advantage by pairing up with the industry’s top hired guns.
- Hire for the Hills: The very essence of contract hiring is the flexibility to ramp up for peak sales and demand, and then back off during the valleys.
- Try Something New: Smart companies manage risk by using contractors to test new initiatives without committing large numbers of full-time staff. Jim Collins, the best-selling author of Good to Great summarized this experimentation best when he said, “Fire bullets, then cannonballs”.
- Cost Opportunity for Lost Opportunity: For every minute organizations aren’t getting the work done, there’s a hidden cost to missed opportunities and longer development times. Pro tip: Take advantage of the quicker time-to-hire by bringing in a contractor to move work forward while looking for the right full-time hire.
- Keep Troop Morale Up: As work piles up, your staff is playing an exhausting game of whack-a-mole. Even if market-value-compensated, the constant crisis management breathes life into the perception of being overworked and underpaid, leading to retention problems.
- Hide from Headcount: Some of our clients have their cake and eat it too by charging the contractor cost to their end-customer as a P.O. on the project, instead of getting dinged for headcount overhead.
- See the Proof in the Pudding: There’s a reason temp to perm hiring is so popular. By trying before buying, companies get to see the actual work product of the person they are hiring, and know they can actually deliver.
- Know the Intangibles: Just as importantly, by hiring temp to perm, you get to know the employee’s work ethic, personality and cultural fit that, try as you might, you can’t fully assess in an interview.
- Mulligans: People and companies aren’t always perfectly aligned. Where contractors are employees of the temp agency, the agency can handle terminations and unemployment filings and help move on to a better solution.
- You need a Bigger Pool: When you post a job, you’re just getting the low-hanging fruit. By working with contract recruiting firms who are building and nurturing their database all day, every day, you can expand your candidate pool to find those highly-skilled personnel who are always hard to find.
Whether it’s a singular reason or a combination, many organizations have successfully integrated contract hiring into their hiring strategy to compete in markets where flexibility and talent is the name of the game.
According to the Staffing Industry Association’s 2022 Workforce Solutions Buyers Survey, 22% of the respondents’ workforce were “contingent”. Indications are that percentage is on the rise, as economic uncertainty has historically driven a shift to a temporary workforce.
Regardless of economic headwinds, these insights from the perspectives of hiring managers show that utilizing technical contractors to compliment full-time staff can be a timeless and effective way to adjust staffing levels as needed.
