How to take the pain points away when managing your contingent workforce

If your business operations involve managing a contingent workforce, you’ll be aware of how many moving parts this entails.

Whether it’s managing contractors and temporary employees, or consultants deployed under Statement of Work (SoW) agreements, there’s a lot to consider and it can create a lot of pain points for busy hiring managers.

You might find yourself buried in administrative tasks, dealing with clunky hiring processes that need a refresh, budget concerns if you’re not sure where all the costs are coming from, or even up come up against a brick wall when you need to bring in the right people to achieve your goals but don’t know where to turn.

This is where a Managed Service Programme (or MSP) comes in.

In this blog we’ll get stuck into the three most common pain points that might arise when managing your contingent workforce and how working with an MSP partner can help to take them away.

Let’s get started…

Attraction, Selection and Screening Candidates

So, you’re looking to hire contingent workers for a new project, but which route should you take (contractor / temp / consultant) and how do you find the time to attract and select the best talent when you have so many other demands on your time? With an MSP in place, your MSP partner will take the reins so you can sit back and focus on the day to day of running your business.

They will optimise processes to make it easy to gain approval for new hires and have access to the latest market intelligence to help your resource planning and budgeting. The MSP partner can either source directly or tap into a wide range of suppliers to create a pre-screened talent pool for you and take away the admin for scheduling interviews and managing offers, which saves you time and helps you engage with the best talent in the most cost-effective manner. An MSP also means consistent points of contact for both hiring managers, candidates and suppliers, ensuring consistent engagement whilst enabling you to concentrate on other priorities – a win win!

‘A common piece of feedback I receive from Programme Leaders is that they often opt for more expensive consultancy resource because the approval and selection process is so much easier. MSP solutions optimise processes to enable hiring managers to realise cost savings by hiring contractors and reduce the time to deploy and admin overheads’, Tom Moss, Head of Client Solutions.

Onboarding Contingent Employees

Once the interviews are completed and your candidates are selected, it’s time to onboard your people and, the need to ensure robust compliance can create a lot of bottle necks.

You ultimately want to mitigate risk in as smooth a process as possible and an MSP can provide that for both you as an employer, and your candidates. Your MSP partner will support your hiring managers with compliance documentation and process standardisation which will reduce your back and forth with suppliers – and they can even be on site to assist on the day.

And say goodbye to arranging laptops and IT set ups in time for a candidates start date, the MSP does all of this for you so you can get back to business.

“You took personal attention in lots of aspects of onboarding to help achieve great outcomes without compromising any of the important rigour, and the result is that our resource is in the building in time for a critical start date. I’m massively thankful for your help.” Feedback from hiring manager at Insurance client.

Offboarding your Contingent Workforce

Now the project is complete, and your temporary contracts are coming to an end, it’s time for offboarding. A time-consuming process with lots of boxes to tick and admin to complete, this can become a dreaded task for overworked hiring managers, particularly if the decision whether to extend or offboard comes at the last minute.

An MSP can take all this stress away for you. Your MSP partner will manage the full contract process, whether that’s an extension or a termination. The enhanced visibility and reporting provided by an MSP means this process can start 6-8 weeks before the end date, with regular check-ins to support your decision making. They’ll even sort the nitty gritty like the returning of tech and the closing down of IT accounts.

Looking to take your own contingent hiring pain points away?

If you’re looking to deliver real business value from your contingent workforce and are ready to ditch the admin and hit the ground running, getting started with an MSP could be the way to go. Why not download our Ultimate Guide on how you can get started today?

Answering all your questions from what types of MSP are available to you, a full brief of the benefits through to how exactly you can get started, this Guide will set you up for success – and all you need to do is fill in the short form below.

Have any more questions? Please do reach out to Tom Moss for a chat about how you can take away the pain points when managing your contingent workforce today on [email protected]