Article Talent On Demand: How to Win With a Scalable Workforce

In business today, the abilities to acquire, train, manage, and retain top talent are key sources of competitive advantage. But in every organization, opportunities requiring different skillsets arise and dissipate. How can businesses stay lean and agile, fully responding to important initiatives with the necessary resources, while being able to place projects of undetermined value on hold as markets and strategies shift?

A Rising Trend

We are seeing more and more companies tapping into an external workforce to access talent when and where it’s needed. When asked, organizational leaders say that they plan to increase their use of contingent, outsourced, contract, or part-time workers in the future. They see that using on-demand talent offers many advantages—allowing organizations to respond to opportunities with more agility, scale their workforce up or down as business conditions require, and, most importantly, gain access to crucial skills and world-class experience that might be too costly or too difficult to acquire with short notice or on a full-time basis.

Win-Win Way to Work

Some companies are starting to recognize that the on-demand workforce is extremely talented with an invaluable amount of real-world experience. While businesses are seeing the advantages of this talent pool, people in the workforce are happy too.

Today, talented workers—from instructional designers and technical writers to IT specialists and training professionals—are realizing the benefits of offering their knowledge, skills, and expertise to companies for a certain length of time or for particular projects. Workers value the flexibility, new challenges, adding variety to their experience and skillset, and being in control of where they work and what projects they take on.

How to Get Started

• Evaluate the technical, project management, and creative skills your project needs and explore how to meet those needs with a combination of in-house and on-demand talent.
• Harness technology and data analytics to develop insightful, data-driven forecasts of workforce needs—don’t leave it to instinct, “gut feeling,” or guesswork.
• Ensure that work is designed in a way that allows on-demand workers to do it. Companies should review the way work is structured and redesign work so that tasks and deliverables can be done or provided by workers outside the company. This will enhance an organization’s ability to tap into a vast array of external talent.
• Form trusted partnerships with companies like Insight who specialize in building networks of reliable and skilled consultants to help you find the right people to work on your projects. Insight can help staff a variety of positions—functional consultants, ERP developers, testing resources, instructional designers, training or communications specialists, and more. This is usually a faster and more cost-effective solution than recruiting and onboarding full-time employees. Insight's team researches your environment and prepares those who are going to join your team to enable consultants to reach top productivity from day one.

The on-demand workforce is quickly becoming a key part of nearly every company’s talent pool. As global competition for on-demand talent intensifies, organizations that develop a solid understanding of their skill needs and identify where to access the talent they need will have the advantage.