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Insight
Defining & Achieving Contingent Workforce Program KPIs with Worksuite
Admin December 13, 2021
Whether your company is managing an existing contingent workforce, planning to hire contractors, or you’ve just started growing your freelance talent pool, it’s crucial to establish and track the KPIs that matter for your organization. These might take into account data points such as cost, quality, and efficiency.
In this article, we look at a detailed approach for how to experience direct and indirect ROI on three key KPIS. We also include some modern KPIs that customers ask for and the relevant functionality that we’ve created to manage these.
Lastly, we’ll look at some sample adoption metrics that your organization can use when reporting to executives.
What are your program KPIs?
At Worksuite, the most common KPIs we see customers indicating in terms of their contingent workforce are:
- Reducing Time from Hire-to-Pay
- Increasing Candidate Quality
- Reducing Cost
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.
Reducing Time from Hire-to-Pay
How long does it take for the freelancer to go through onboarding? How many individuals from your team are involved in onboarding a freelancer? How many tools/systems are you using to bring one freelancer through onboarding? What does it take to pay a freelancer?
This KPI looks at whether you’ve set up efficient and automated onboarding workflows to ensure that compliance requirements (agreements, tax information, data collection) are being met while reducing administrative burden.
Reducing the time to onboard, consolidating tools, and making your freelancer’s experience enjoyable during the onboarding process can provide major benefits for all stakeholders involved!
Increasing Candidate Quality
This metric can reveal deeper insights into your recruiting process. Optimizing your processes based on this KPI can improve turnover rates, performance, retention, and engagement.
Ensuring your Talent Directory consists of a curated list of talent that is delivering quality results and actively engaged in your organization’s objectives means your freelance talent will be more likely to stay with you over the long term – reducing your sourcing and retention costs.
When you’re tracking this metric, it can help your recruiters actively determine where they’re finding quality candidates, which screening methods are most effective, and which of these candidates go on to become your top talent.
Reducing Cost
There are multiple components of spend when it comes to KPIs, including Freelancer Spend and internal resource management efficiency.
Within these, there are three key components:
- Identifying current spend, plus accurate forecasting
- Setting goals to reduce spend and increase return without creating an entirely new process
- Measuring success of spend reduction while increasing agility
You don’t necessarily need to add more internal resources as your contingent workforce grows. If you manage a large talent pool, you should be able to quickly scale and accommodate your changing customer needs without adding significant extra headcount and cost.
This can be achieved by using the right technology to give you transparency into your existing talent pool, and the ability to leverage insourcing as a means of quickly hiring quality talent for upcoming projects.
The key success factors to managing your price KPIs include large-scale engagement through bulk actions in your technology platform, together with the agility you need to meet your customer demand.
Achieving large-scale engagement requires actions such as a tailored dashboard, custom branding to showcase quality of your organization, providing resources early and a direct channel of communication, and (most importantly) ease of use.
The worker shouldn’t need training for how to use a tool, and we’ve factored that into our design elements to make them simple and user-friendly.
- Candidate quality: Reviews
- Visibility of data & performance analysis: Tasks & Projects and Workforce Analytics
- Cost savings: Requisitions – Collect Rate info
- Engagement cost & efficiency management: Time to identify and Time-to-work via Availability calendars and Requisitions.
- Program ease-of-use by Engagement Managers: User Experience
- Minimize and proactively control program risk: Workflow agreements & process standardization.
- Raising invoices through tasks.
Sample adoption metrics for Worksuite KPIs
Let’s take a look at some example metrics in Worksuite that can create value for your business when you’re optimizing for overall efficiency of your contingent workforce.
Our customers typically report that Worksuite has helped them significantly in these business value metrics areas:
- Significant time reduction in searching, finding, and placing freelancers: the higher the onboarding and profile setup rate, the more data Engagement Managers can leverage to make educated placement decisions
- Indicators of active workforce members, and ease-of-use of the custom onboarding process for populating their profiles
- Opens the door for future initiatives via bulk messaging, agreement signing, additional data collection
Talent Directory
Business value for centralized Worksuite Talent Directory:
- Reduce time-to-find and time-to-fill based on on-hand metrics & Talent Directory filtering/search
- Combined regional directories into a single network for sharing resources
- On-demand insight & statistics on vendor classification, industries, titles, skills, location, and freelancer type of full workforce for Resource Managers and Producers
Assignment Management
Business value for Worksuite Assignment management:
- Ease of use: Single platform for submitting new engagement requests, with routing to different workflows based on talent resource type
- Reduced time to send Deal Memo / Contracts: Automated sending and signing of 1099 Assignment Agreement (Deal Memo)
- Reduced time in approval/counter-signing Deal Memos: Automated counter-signing of 1099 Assignment Agreement
- Eliminate duplicate data entry of Engagement Manager completing resource request form and sending it to Resource managers to enter into Worksuite. Producers to enter resource requests directly into Worksuite for Resource Request approval & freelancer placement.
Sourcing
Business value for Worksuite Sourcing:
- Diversify workforce with new talent from virtually unlimited sources
- Secondary talent pool allows you to fill skill sets that may currently be lacking
- Provides agility to a new network of talent as the markets evolve
In summary
The KPIs to monitor and optimize a contingent workforce will be different for every organization, but they all have quality, hiring, and price at their core.
Using a technology platform like Worksuite makes it easy to set KPIs for your business, and then track and optimize your metrics to ensure you have efficient processes for every part of your contingent workforce management.
Author,
Aaron Anderson
