The Importance of Hiring Contingent Workers Who Know Your Business

Whether it’s accomplished through strategies designed to re-hire former contractors and recent retirees, hire employee-referred candidates or by developing sourcing practices to focus on relevant industry experience and cultural alignment metrics, hiring contingent workers who have preexisting knowledge of your organization and/or industry can be highly beneficial to workforce management efforts. Heres how hiring contractors with company and industry specific experience improves workforce efficiency and success.

Reductions In Sourcing Time

Starting a candidate search cold requires the significant legwork involved in separating the qualified from the unqualified. If a workforce management program has made the decision to source either former workers as contingents (or to only entertain candidates with proven, industry-specific experience), they will almost always experience a decrease in sourcing time since hiring managers won’t be wasting time reviewing weaker candidates. This translates into time savings, and ultimately, internal cost savings as there will be fewer manager/recruiter-hours spent in pursuing unlikely candidates.

Cultural Match

Workers with previous experience in an organization who return as contingents are already well aware of culture within the organization. Similarly, referred workers are as good as prescreened by existing employees prior to being referred. They come to the role with an implicit endorsement from people who know what the job entails and how the candidate may align temperamentally with the organization. These referrals yield a shortened timeframe to achieving success in their roles. Moreover, the employees who did the referring are often tapped to mentor their referred candidates once onboarded. And, the quality of the work the referral performs can be endorsed or evaluated in advance. Simply, these candidates either have an employee within your organization or previously completed body of work that illustrates and endorses the quality of their work. It is a no-cost process for employee pre-screening!

For previously engaged workers, the cultural learning curve will also be truncated. Previous employees can begin new engagements on day one already aware of simple yet critical considerations such as the structure of the organization, key contacts, and how to access resources for issue resolution, such as equipment needs. This level of familiarity helps to produce lower turnover rates and higher job satisfaction levels among all workers.

For more information on the benefits of engaging contingent workers using this strategy, contact your nextSource representative.