Today’s post is by Mark Davis; Sr. Vice President of Operations and CTO at SafeSourcing.
Temporary staff has long filled gaps within the departments of companies all over the world and no place is this truer than in today’s IT departments where highly skilled technical staff are needed but generally not required on a continued basis. Companies are beginning to realize that it is more cost effective to supplement their technical staffs with experienced temporary employees; reducing the long-term commitment but getting projects moving quickly.
This contingent labor force, which includes both independent contractors and temporary employees hired mostly through Temporary Labor agencies, is typically managed by a department head or by Human Resources directly. In some cases, as with large companies, having a more organized model to manage this process becomes a necessity. Today’s blog will touch on three of these.
Option I – Internally managed
In this approach, the company manages the entire process of working with the different temporary agencies; including tracking their progress and the processes they are following for supplementing your workforce. This approach is the most widely used for mid to smaller sized companies or for companies whose need for a contingent labor force is small. The drawback to this approach is the lack of scalability as the company and the temporary labor force grows.
Option II – Master Vendor
The Master Vendor model is popular for businesses because it allows the primary temporary labor agency to handle all of the details for the client. The tracking, the screening, the hiring, the placement, the metrics of the Service Level Agreement are all items that the client lets the vendor handle so that the client can focus on running the business. Generally any technology/software use is on the vendor side only and the client has little to no visibility into the day-to-day management of the placement process. This works for many companies as a first step to begin leveraging the focus of their vendor to help them manage the process, but is lacking in the level of insight provided to the client.
Option III – Master Service Provider – Vendor Management System
The third, and increasingly popular, option is to employ technology in the way of a Vendor Management System (VMS) to help provide the visibility and control that many companies are wanting in this process without having to management every little detail of the placement process.
VMS Software can either be obtained independently by the client or can be included in the contract with a Master Service Provider. In either case, the Vendor Management System tool can help track requisitions, research candidates (whether from agency or independent contractor), monitor the status of placement as well as other day-to-day metrics, and manage the invoicing and payment. The advantages of a quality VMS Tool is that it allows the flexibility to work with more than one contingent labor source while at the same time establishing a compliance to process across all of those sources. With increased implementation, the efficiency will increase and costs will go down; making it a very popular choice of managing a temporary labor workforce
For more information about how begin to develop a contingent IT labor force model for your organization, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.
We look forward to your comments.
