Struggling to Hire Contingent Talent? Here’s How to Help your Supply Chain
The shortage of skilled workers is nothing new. But if procurement adapts, it can help take pressure off recruitment suppliers.
It’s easy to see today’s global talent shortages as a recent phenomenon. In truth, they’re anything but new. Covid-19 and, in the UK, Brexit didn’t create a shortage of talent – they just made it much worse, bad enough to be shunted into the spotlight.
The fact that the UK government’s shortage occupation list has been running for over a decade, for example, proves there was a dearth of skilled workers long before Britain left the European Union.
In the public and private sectors, certain skills have been hard to come by for a long time. Now, as demand for these skills surges, the true extent of shortages is finally being revealed. And whether we’re talking about HGV drivers, social care workers, or IT specialists, there simply aren’t enough qualified people to go around.
The result?
Wage inflation and high turnover, as desperate employers poach skilled workers from their competitors by offering extreme financial incentives.
In this context, procurement teams must do all they can to make it easier for their recruitment suppliers to attract the people they need.
Here are three ways procurement specialists can help ease some of the pressure on their talent supply chains.
1) Articulate and communicate your unique value
A great question for procurement teams to ask right now is this: if we were the supplier, would we want to work with us? Would we choose to send scarce talent our way first?
We’re living and working in exceptional times. If you’re still insisting on ‘supply or die’ terms and pricing, there’s a good chance you’ve become a less attractive customer than your more flexible competitors. You must solicit feedback about how you can improve your relationships, and then act on it.
The same is true for how you go to market with your employer brand. Candidate priorities have shifted greatly over the past couple of years, and what people want from an employer now is very different to what they wanted pre-2020.
How well does your overall package match up with these new expectations? How successfully are you articulating this to your supply chain partners, so that they can entice potential candidates?
For most businesses, an urgent and thorough review of their value proposition would give their recruitment suppliers a much-needed helping hand on the candidate attraction front.
2) Prioritise hiring manager needs and workflows
Who should take ownership of the contingent workforce: procurement, or HR? In my experience, it depends. For single-site, ‘straightforward’ businesses, HR often owns contingent labour as part of a total talent management strategy. But in complex, multi-site firms, it’s probably better suited to procurement.
But this age-old question rather misses the point when it comes to contingent labour supply chains. The one essential question to ask is this: does the system work for our hiring managers? If the answer is no, your relationships with the suppliers in the chain will never reach their full potential.
In a tight market for talent, any process that makes life difficult for hiring managers is a blocker to getting the talent you need. Businesses should review their working arrangements with suppliers from a hiring manager perspective, requesting feedback from these ‘end users’ about what is – and isn’t – working for them.
In practice, a model based on the principle of ‘central control, local autonomy’ often works best. That means the hiring process becomes fast and easy for managers – regardless of who actually ‘owns’ the spend – without compromising compliance or quality.
3) Inject greater flexibility into processes and terms
There’s been a lot of focus over the last 20 years on putting rules, technology, and processes in place around the procurement of talent. As a result, more businesses than ever have enjoyed the cost, visibility and control benefits that come from having a well-managed recruitment supply chain.
Often though, supplier contracts are signed and moved into BAU – where they stay, without ever being reviewed. But when circumstances change mid-contract, BAU may no longer be effective. All of a sudden, our rules and systems become a blocker to responding quickly to fast-moving situations.
Firms must step back and ask how they can be more flexible than their established ways of working allow. Look at your processes and be honest: are they conducive to contingent hiring? In other words, do they allow you to move quickly, with smooth candidate communication and onboarding?
A partnership approach that’s based around regular communication with suppliers, and a shared willingness to adapt, is the obvious way through this current challenge.
In short: procurement must be willing to adapt
In complex recruitment markets like the ones we’re operating in today, lots can go wrong. Talent supply chains can break when there’s high demand, low supply, and unnecessary blockers to finding new ways of sourcing skills.
Those with responsibility for the contingent workforce must be ready and willing to adapt, and to lean on the support of their specialist staffing partners, to find ways to cut through the complexity and make things simple again.
Jon Milton is a Director at Comensura, a leading managed service provider that helps businesses with their complex contingent, permanent and other sourcing requirements.
On 1 December, Jon will take part in our webcast ‘Talent supply: Are you breaking your own chain?’ Register for the webcast here!
