Defining & Achieving Contingent Workforce Program KPIs with Worksuite

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. 

At Worksuite, the most common KPIs we see customers indicating in terms of their contingent workforce are:

Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.

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!

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.

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:

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.

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:

Talent Directory

Business value for centralized Worksuite Talent Directory: 

Assignment Management

Business value for Worksuite Assignment management: 

Sourcing

Business value for Worksuite Sourcing: 

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