Why You Should be Building a Candidate Pipeline of Your Contingent Workforce

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

The job economy is different now than it has been for the past several years. We’ve seen unemployment drop and jobs grow, which has led to a newly competitive and fluid marketplace for job seekers. Workers are freer to go from job to job and expect a great deal from employers looking to woo them. These changes have also brought about a change in the way companies are staffing as they rely more and more on project-based contract workers.

Why a contingent workforce makes sense

These temporary, specialized workers fill knowledge gaps and meet an immediate need. This is a huge consideration as the struggle to find an employee who is a perfect match is one that’s all too familiar and the average time to hire in currently at almost 60 days! For all these reasons, a contingent workforce has become a valuable part of keeping the business going.

Contract workers also offer companies the flexibility to seek out specific skills they need to solve a problem or complete a project. The workers offer experience and expertise that current employees may not possess and limit the time required to onboard, train and get them started on their job responsibilities. Contract workers may also be a great option for companies that have a temporary employee gap to fill, such as when a worker is out on maternity or paternity leave. Overall, the freedom and expertise that comes with utilizing a contingent workforce just makes sense.

Maintaining a contingent workforce

The same things we consider advantages of utilizing a contingent workforce can also be drawbacks. For instance, the freedom goes both ways. You are free to hire and dismiss based on your needs, and a contract worker is free to come and go as their needs dictate. This can create a challenge for hiring managers and business leaders who need to maintain a productive workforce. However, one way to meet this challenge is to develop a candidate pipeline of contingent workers.

Building a pipeline

Building a candidate pipeline of contract workers not only makes it easier to find the types of workers you need down the road, but it also takes away the element of mystery when you and the temporary worker don’t know, or necessarily trust, each other. Another major advantage is that the workers in your pipeline will already know your business. Though there’s usually a much smaller learning curve for a contract worker than a permanent one, there will always be one to some degree. A pipeline of people who know your company eliminates that.

One of the biggest obstacles to creating a pipeline of contract workers is the fact that their short stay in your company makes it hard to develop relationships and engage these subject-matter experts. This challenge is the reason that many companies work with outsourcing, staffing and consulting firms or technology platforms that specialize in these particular areas, such as oDesk.

While these resources can be effective, companies relying solely on these channels to engage, recruit and hire project-based workers are missing a huge opportunity to engage personally. By getting to know your contingent workforce in the same way you would your full-time, permanent team members, you’ll see greater success both now and in the future.


TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

Business is Fluid: The Case for Courting the Contingent Workforce

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Having worked in the retail industry for much of my human resources career, facility payroll and headcount requirements ebb and flow depending on holidays and time of year. If you work in retail organization that relies heavily on holiday and Christmas sales to finish out your sales cycle, you are likely planning and evaluating your temporary and contingent workforce strategies to fill the gaps of your permanent employees.

Contingent workers whether project based independent contracts or seasonable employees are more important than ever before. These free agency workers fill in short gaps whether and are growing in popularity among workers who are demanding flexibility and the opportunity to choose their projects and work-related activities like I, myself do.

Aberdeen recently released a report earlier this month titled, “Contingent Labor Management: Strategies and Solutions for a Flexible Workforce” and given my experience working in seasonal industries and those that are project and creative focused, I tend to agree.

• Quick Onboarding. 5 days is the average time it takes for contingent labor to get up to speed.
• Cost Savings. These temporary and contingent workers result in a 16% cost savings for the company.
• Business & Talent is Fluid. While your business likely follows a sales cycle of somewhat predictable ebbs and flows, having a little wiggle room is good business. Sixty-three percent of Best in Class organizations agree relying heavily on contingent labor.

While contingent workers remain a great way to beef up your staff quickly, human resources teams are often seen as unnecessary when hiring the free agent worker. I hear time and time again from business leaders who use contingent labor to sidestep HR and their own department head count goals because either staffing goals are already met or HR processes get in the way of hiring and scaling projects quickly. Managers use temporary workers or independent contracts to beef up their headcounts and production outputs without these costs and numbers being reflective in their human capital expenses including payroll, overtime, and other employee related expenses. As someone who has used this tactic myself working in HR for my own department, it’s not right but I understand.

Even so, the argument for using contingent labor to subsidize your department or location efforts remains strong with or without HR’s approval. Strategies to quickly adding manpower to your project generally happen three different ways:

• Outsourcing Your Contingent Workforce. Companies use staffing agencies as a way to try out these workers before they buy. These organizations are responsible for pay, benefits and other compliance and documentation responsibilities.
• Billing and Invoicing Through Procurement. Consultants work directly with someone in accounting and procurement to make sure they are 1099’d properly.
• Centralized Contingent Workforce Plan. HR or Recruiting manages the centralized process of permanent employees through their ATS as well as the contingent workers ensuring that contingent workers stay independent contractors in the eyes of the IRS using their 20 factor test.

Whether permanent, temporary or independent worker, building a network of quality candidates with real-time updated information about where they are at any given time and where their availability will be over the next days or weeks is absolutely critical. TalentCircles is the ideal platform for this.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit.