Audio Voice Source: Aaron R. Plush

Musical Bed: Journey (produced by Ted White)

Additional Audio Source: Foley Sounds (curated by Ted White) ,

Extra Extra Read All About It (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXvqCxEqxis),

That Boy Is Good – Coming to America (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0MWxgDi1sw)

My Road to Contingent Labor

Contingent Labor / Workforce Management

While most of my career has been in the Consultancy realm, the discipline where I have gained the bulk of this experience is in the Contingent Labor / Workforce Management space.

I have had the distinct honor and privilege of working as a Contractor/Consultant both independently and through Staffing Firms. At the Staffing Firms, I worked on the actual team as an employee on the staffing firm full time employee team and I have also worked on the client side and managed the staffing firms. I call this a triple threat in the Contingent Labor space allowing me to have the empathy and the understanding perspective of what is important on all 3 sides (1. Contractor side, 2. Staffing Firm/Supplier/Vendor side, 3. Company/Corporation/Client side) of what is typically related to Contingent Labor holistically in the corporate space.

My first role in this realm was an Operations Coordinator role with a small IT Consulting firm in Columbia, SC right after undergrad by the name of NewSystems. This firm allowed me to gain my first exposure to how companies used staffing firms to secure qualified talent. What I am referencing here are the non-employees of companies (Contractors, Consultants, 1099s, etc.), the folks who are not Full Time Employees (FTEs) of the companies. The folks who are typically not recruited by the in-house talent acquisition team of companies.

My role specifically as Operations Coordinator allowed me to be the conduit and liaison between the account managers and recruiters of the firm. The role was created out of this necessity and a major problem. That major problem was that the 2 roles were not effectively communicating and quite frankly were operating in silos and selfishly!

The Account Managers were doing a great job of gaining the requisitions from the clients to fill. They were selling NewSystems and having the corporations to buy in while churning out a lot of new business and requisitions to be filled and gaining much traction at a high volume in gaining new potential business. The recruiters were doing an amazing job of recruiting applicants/candidates and doing this in a high volume and as a high performing recruiting team as well. All sounds great thus far, right?! No, wrong! The major problem was communication. We found that the Account Managers were too focused on getting the requisitions to fill only; and the recruiters were too focused on recruiting only. Again, you may ask where is the major problem?

Well, here it is, let us go to the lowest common denominator and the true objective of what the IT Staffing firm really wanted to do. The firm existed to place candidates at its corporate client sites and/or either have these folks to be permanent employees of the corporate client or the people to be actual employees of NewSystems and be contractors for the corporations. Keeping in mind the company gained its livelihood by providing quality applicants/candidates to the clients and getting paid a percentage of these placements for finding and being the employer of these folks.  

Newsflash: Keep in mind NewSystems would not exist if there was not success of gaining new reqs. from the corporations/clients and filling the roles with NewSystems recruited and placed Contractors. The income and business model of the small IT consulting firm was placing candidates, as a staffing firm focused on IT roles.

My solution was that with each new requisition the Account Managers would debrief and download with me. During these downloads I would gain specific detail of each requisition beyond the high-level dump of information that the Account Managers were providing to the Recruiters previously. Once I gained all of the information I added it to a shared electronic tool with specific detail, any niche qualifications the clients were seeking to help assist us with placing the right applicants in front of engagement managers on the client side who truly were the decision makers of which applicant would be selected is what was included. When placing your applicants up against the other people that were submitted by other staffing firms you want to ensure you are submitted the applicant that most fits the client Job Description. All Account Managers and Recruiters had access to the tool. I also met with the recruiters to ensure they had crystal clarity in relation to the roles they were recruiting for at the time. We saw significant improvement in the filling of requisitions and gaining new business, with this simple yet quite effective solution. The difference was that when the Account Managers were just focused on new business, they would just throw together a description for the recruiters that simply was not hitting the mark. The recruiters would find many applicants/candidates for the job descriptions they were receiving but their applicants/candidates were often overlooked by the client because specific detail of what the engagement manager was really looking for on the corporation side was just not there. This is a lesson in effective operations and a focus again in this forum about the importance and significance of detail.

The bottom line is that in order for New Systems to survive; a sense of belonging and camaraderie around teamwork had to be created. The Account Managers and Recruiters had to understand the beauty of communication and how it did not matter how successful they were in their individual capacities; the true test for the company was in them working together and being successful and understanding that the 2 roles depended upon each other and had to work hard and smart together hand in hand to have their contractors placed with the clients. That truly was the end goal of the company.

I am happy to chat with you today about how I may work with you in relation to your Contingent Labor & Workforce Management needs.

With each entry we take a deeper dive into the how of this process; how the implementations really work, and how we make The Spectacular happen together.

Until next time, that’s all folks…

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