Ardent Partners recently released their 2017-2018 State of the Contingent Workforce Management report. Ardent Partners is an analyst firm focused on corporate procurement and supply chains.
The report is targeted at procurement and HR professionals who manage contingent workforce programs at larger organizations. This is the 5th year of this study on the use of non-employee talent by corporations.
The report is available on the sites of its many sponsors, but we got ours from Shiftgig's site.
The lead finding of the study is that roughly 40% of today’s total, corporate workforce is considered contingent, including temporary labor, professional services, independent contractors and on-demand workers.
But what we found most interesting is the list of the top contingent workforce management challenges.
As the report chart below shows, the desire to be more agile and the need to find, engage and source talent are the top challenges.
These are not new or surprising. Upwork talked about the same issues at their corporate event last August. And the need to increase business agility and flexibility is a topic we've covered for years.
Rapid change is driving the business need for increased agility.
The resulting corporate "need for speed" means that companies have to be able to quickly staff up and down, often with hard to find talent. These needs have reached the point where corporations have no choice but to increase their use of contingent talent.
Also interesting is that reducing cost has fallen to 5th on the challenges list. Four or five years ago, it would have been first.
The reason is contingent workers at corporations no longer just do low level or low skill work. Key quote from the report on the growing strategic role contingent workers play:
It is important to note that these are not augmentative, supplemental workers, as today’s non-employee workforce plays a critical role in how mission-critical work is handled, addressed, managed, and completed.
Because contingent talent is involved in mission-critical work, cost is less of an issue.
This also explains why the need to find, engage and source talent is number 2 on the challenges list. If you're in need of mission-critical talent, how you find and engage that talent becomes much more important.
BTW, this is not to say cost isn't an issue. But what is happening is contingent labor is bifurcating into two types. For mission-critical talent, cost is not a key issue. For non mission-critical talent, cost remains an important issue.
Ardent is forecasting continued growth for the contingent workforce. They are also recommending corporations should embrace contingent talent and see it as part of their broader total talent pool. Again from the report:
Today’s total talent pool consists of a variety of skillsets: independent contractors, freelancers, professional services, “gig” workers, robotics, and, of course, traditional/permanent workers. A perfect alignment between an open job/project and the internal or external skills within the enterprise talent pool is the ideal way to address work.
This approach to talent is clearly emerging, both in large corporations and small businesses.
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