​The world economy has changed forever. Your organisation will need to rethink its workforce planning and organisation structure. How you blend permanent employees with contract and interim talent will be a key performance driver.

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Re-thinking Workforce Design for Greater Agility

Some time back, our Talent Intelligence Team surveyed several hundred HR leaders about what portion of their employee base, if they were given a magic wand, they would change overnight. Over 50% replied “the lot of them”! Real agility has been on the wish list for years, now it’s an absolute must have.

AI, world economy challenges, and the influence of global conflict are not temporary obstacles. These are permanent shifts. The landscape is evolving so rapidly, even organisations with progressive HR strategies struggling to adapt. A bold transformation that blends the use of permanent, contract and interim professionals in your workforce is needed. This will ensure your organisation is continuously innovative, responds quickly to challenges and maintains competitiveness.

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New Talent Model

The future of organisation talent structures centres around a blend of core groups of permanent executives and teams that mirror those functions that drive proposition into revenue. All other employees will be retained “as needed” and deployed in a secondary set of groups. This includes hires from entry level professionals to the executives that run these functions, who will be an interim or contract service provider. We know from our own work as a contract and interim recruiting partner, many of those with higher levels of specialist expertise choose to work this way. Research on the subject on Generation Z, indicates many strive for the autonomy and flexibility that contracting can provide. They are happy to trade career advancement for new experiences, learning and work that is meaningful.

The ability to predict the right blend of talent relationship based on a wide array of analytics is already available, but demands a close working relationship with a highly competent recruitment partner. Crucially the organisation must have the commitment and engagement necessary for high performance, along with the flexibility to scale up or down when plans change. The key to this is ensuring that culturally, socially, behaviourally, and developmentally, the permanent and agile sets of employees have similar employee experiences.

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The Blend

Permanent employees are typically valued for their organisation and market knowledge, their tenure and their commitment. By comparison, interims and contractors are valued for their expertise, skills and wider perspective. The latter also bring a reduced labour overhead given there are no holiday, benefit, or employer PRSI costs. Interims and contractors also bring experience of how they addressed similar challenges that your organisation might face, from other firms. They help to inject new insights and innovative tactics.

Building a blended workforce demands new structures and methods of engagement. To ensure cultural fit, recruit for the same value set and cultural fit as you would a key permanent hire. Invest in their learning, as you would with permanent employees, in core groups. The role specification should be specific to the need and not generic. It must include expected behavioural norms and level of decision-making authority so that everyone is clear where they stand.

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The Workforce of the Future

Blending your workforce is no longer optional, it is essential. The talent you seek today and over the next ten years wants to work this way. Blending by using contractors and interims supports the elevated level of organisation flexibility, cost efficiency and rapid access to specialised talent, that your organisation needs for adapting to this strange new world.

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Get In Touch

To discuss how we can support your interim or permanent recruitment needs as you navigate this dynamic environment contact:

Arlene Moran – Senior Commercial Director | arlene.moran@hrmrecruit.com | +353 86 3656648

Ciarán McCaughey – Senior Commercial Director| ciaran.mccaughey@hrmrecruit.com | +353 83 1420673

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