The Impact of Time on Your Workforce Solution

The value of time is priceless and to fully understand the impact your contingent workforce management solution is making time is key to your success.

From time-to-fill, time-to-start, time-to-productivity, time wasted; each of these is an important part of your contingent workforce strategy. But there are only so many hours in a day, so where do we start? Let's break it down into three key areas:

1. How do you assess the timeliness of your contingent workforce strategy?

When it comes to workforce management, there are many time-related factors to take into account.

• Milestones: Some can and should be recorded as milestones or steps, allowing for exact time lapse measurements, reporting and trend analysis.
• Time investment: Some are time investment rather than time lapse-orientated, which is therefore interrelated to the resources available (the less resources available, the longer this will take).
• Subjective decision: Some are difficult to record because they are in people’s heads, such as when a manager starts feeling they need to hire someone, or the time any stakeholder thinks should elapse between one milestone and another.

With this in mind, here are the factors to consider when measuring the timeliness of your contingent workforce strategy:

• The overall time taken to fill a role between agreed/recorded milestones
• The overall time taken to fill a role from when the engagement manager identified the need
• The total time of the recruitment lifecycle - from job description creation and requisition approval to worker on boarding. This needs to include every task, no matter how small, whether it's reviewing attending a supplier briefing call or providing interview feedback
• Time spent calculating where amendments to the sourcing strategy need to be made, especially for those difficult to source positions
• Any time wasted along the way due to delays in kick-starting next steps in the sourcing process

An overarching factor that may impact all of the above metrics is the resources allocated to deliver the activities; many hands make light work, or more to the point, get the same work done quicker. If time to fill is imperative for your driving your business priorities, allocating the optimal amount of resources to address the workloads at each stage of the contingent worker engagement process is key.

Our supplier strategy centres on ensuring the right talent is available, at the right time and crucially at the right cost for our clients. Through our years of experience managing successful talent solutions for our clients, we’ve developed a number of strategies that allows us to measure, motivate and course-correct our supply chains. We consult with and advise our clients on the optimum supply chains, balancing our knowledge of the local market with our clients business and recruitment strategy.

In addition to Quarterly, monthly and even daily access to supplier performance, each of our clients will have a yearly roadmap designed by our dedicated Supply Chain Management team; incorporating regular optimisation strategy, mark up reviews and tiering strategies. We understand that number of suppliers is less important than engagement of suppliers, however the two are intrinsically linked. Consulting with you to set the right level of engagement with your business, fostering the right relationships and enhancing our supplier’s ability to find the right talent is central to what we do every day.

“Supply chains are not only a way of acquiring people for your business, they are also a primary way to reach current or potential customers – ensuring our suppliers understand, value and can articulate your business is critical in marketing your business, just as much as it is securing top talent”. 

     - Rob Marley, EMEA Director of Supply Chain Management

At Allegis Global Solutions (AGS), we partner with top-performing staffing suppliers who can contribute to a best-in-class supply chain. We activate the requisition process quickly and effectively through consultative intake sessions, a response evaluation scorecard and an effective judging and ranking process. By streamlining your contingent workforce management, Allegis Global Solutions (AGS) is able to reduce costs, support operational consistency and meet your exact needs

If your current talent acquisition team is struggling to monitor each of these aspects as closely as you would like, it may be time to consider outsourcing your contingent workforce staffing to a partner that has the expertise to measure and act upon each of these effectively.

2. Do you have data to show your workforce solutions’ timeliness?

It's vital that you're balancing each of the time-related metrics listed above with other sourcing drivers, which are likely to include cost and quality as a minimum. However, if you don't have an effective means of gathering data in relation to each of these aspects, it's unlikely that your contingent workforce hiring efforts are going to be as effective as you would like.

ACUMEN Workforce Intelligence, a next generation interactive enterprise workforce intelligence platform is designed to provide our clients, suppliers, and MSP programme leaders with the ability to monitor key performance indicators is available for all our AGS managed service provider (MSP) clients and draws upon in-depth analytics to develop a clearer understanding of the factors that impact their contingent worker engagement process.

It makes possible our overriding mission statement: "AGS Analytics seeks to turn data into information and knowledge for our clients and internal partners in order to enable them to make informed business decisions that lead to measurable results."

ACUMEN brings together all of our client data into a single framework, meaning there is standardised information that can be used to compare and contrast individual MSP programs between our clients.

Offering this actionable insight to our partners means we are able to determine the best choices that individual businesses can make within their recruitment function, safe in the knowledge that all of our recommendations are based on sound market intelligence and global experience in successful service delivery.

The benefits of AGS Analytics

By utilising the information collected across all of our programmes, we are able to determine what it is that a best-performing Contingent workforce programme should look like. Through comparative analytics, we allow individual aspects of each Programme and associated strategy to be contrasted against the wider marketplace.

The power of ACUMEN lies in its ability to analyse these large data sets and use this information to provide key insights to our clients into how potential changes will affect their future sourcing function. For example, a business hoping to understand how a reduction in their percentage of contingent workforce spend would impact other aspects of their business can draw on ACUMEN to determine:

• Future speed of hire (time to fill new roles)
• Cost of on boarding - will it rise or fall?
• Quality of workers at their disposal
• Any potential issues of compliance
• Likelihood of IP retention/loss

3. How does your timeliness measure up to your competition?

By outsourcing your continent workforce solution, you can deep dive into each of the metrics that are important to delivering your business outcomes. With this intel, you’re provided with the confidence that every single time-related aspect of your contingent workforce lifecycle is being catalogued and monitored via your contingent workforce solution. As a result, you'll have a benchmark from which to measure the timeliness of your workforce strategy so you'll be in a better position to see how your efforts shape up to those of your competitors and make adjustments as required.