A PeopleFluent® White Paper

Maximize the Value of Your Blended Workforce Today’s enterprises increasingly rely upon a mix of full-time and contingent workers As a result, they must rethink the strategies, tools and systems they use to manage their sourcing and recruiting—and choose solutions that facilitate a holistic and blended workforce management approach.

The enterprise workforce makeup isn’t what it used to be That’s the unmistakable message of “Freelancing in America: Rise of the Contingent Workforce,” a thought-provoking article published recently on FoxBusiness.com. It cites a number of sources that confirm just how dramatically our workforces are changing. “A new research report titled ‘The Future of Work’ commissioned by online platform company Elance and conducted by Tower Lane Consulting revealed that 60% of enterprises plan to increase freelance hiring in 2014.” “The Labor Department’s recent monthly jobs reports have shown that companies are focusing less on longer-term hires and more on filling short-term needs and hiring part-time workers. Essentially, employers are adapting a ‘just-in-time’ model for staffing.” “According to Accenture’s 2013 ‘Rise
of The Extended Workforce’ report, to compete in the future, organizations will need to push talent management beyond the confines of the enterprise wall to include the new extended workforce: a global network of outside contractors, outsourcing partners, vendors, strategic partners and other nontraditional workers.” Clearly, today’s enterprises are relying more
and more on a mix of fulltime and contingent workers to achieve their goals and get work done expediently, regardless of worker classification. But managing this blended workforce presents challenges on almost every front—sourcing, compensation and benefits, learning, development, compliance and legal matters, and so on. These challenges are especially difficult for large enterprises because many are still siloed in their structure and processes, particularly when it comes to sourcing and developing talent. Full- time workers are often the responsibility of the HR department, while contingent workers are the responsibility of the Procurement or Purchasing departments. Historically this has worked fine for both camps but, in today’s highly competitive “talentscape,” this makes for a disjointed—
even broken—approach to talent acquisition, development and management. In today’s siloed enterprises, the various talent managers and recruiters often end up using duplicate processes and technologies, missing opportunities to source for skills and competencies for the work at hand (rather than on requisitions alone). In this siloed world, there are no comprehensive talent pipelining

Maximize the Value of Your Blended Workforce | 2

Here’s a small sampling: 60 percent of enterprises plan to increase freelance hiring in 2014 Long-Term Outside Contractors Outsourcing Partners Vendors Strategic Partners Nontraditional Workers

or workforce planning activities. Talent acquisition decisions are made reactively and in a vacuum, using systems and tools that aren’t connected and which provide extremely limited visibility of the total talent pool. In fact, without a holistic view of their talent or
the systems to engage talent in uniform ways, enterprises feel the pain at every point in the talent chain. Their sourcing methods lack an effective social recruiting strategy. They send inconsistent messages to candidates who may want more flexible work versus permanent work. Plus, these messages also present an inconsistent employment brand. Many use outdated candidate databases and labor-intensive manual recruiting processes. And their onboarding lacks consistency across full-time and part-time new hires. Even when they are dealing with some of these challenges, large enterprises still have to overcome obstacles related to their sheer size, geographical footprint and the scope of their talent needs—all of which add to the increase of stagnating talent pools.

Sourcing & Recruiting: Don’t Typecast Your Talent One of the key lessons learned by enterprise employers with blended workforces is not to typecast their talent, especially during sourcing and recruiting. When they have trouble filling a full- time role, for example, they’re now far more willing to fill that role with two part-time employees. Not that long ago, this would have been unthinkable. But these employers have shifted their focus away from the “type” of labor called for on job requisitions; their focus is on finding the right talent. The same holds true for their readiness to choose virtual (offsite) workers over less-qualified individuals who can be onsite every day. Thanks to a growing cadre of mobile, SaaS and collaboration technologies, it’s becoming less and less necessary for certain types of workers to be physically located within the enterprise’s walls. These organizations have learned to think about work in a new way and adjust nimbly to their competitive, economic and human capital challenges. Their primary objective is to create a single, steady pipeline of top talent from both inside and outside of the organization.

Maximize the Value of Your Blended Workforce | 3

Internally, they strive to give employees assignments that will be engaging and meaningful. Their performance management isn’t a once-a-year exercise; it’s frequent, ongoing and focused on motivating employees. They provide both vertical and lateral career opportunities. They support formal and informal learning opportunities. They’re diligent about rewarding and compensating employees appropriately. They provide mentoring and leadership development. For these employers, it’s all about maximizing the value of the workforce. They do this by investing in the right talent, developing individuals to their full capacity, keeping them engaged in and excited by their work, and retaining them for the long term. Externally, these employers focus on building and promoting a powerful employment brand—one that’s uniquely relevant to the talent they’re seeking. This means engaging with candidates
in the right ways (through the right social networks, talent communities, job boards, etc.) and through consistent and strategic outreach tactics (timely emails, calls, videos, invitations to apply for appropriate jobs, etc.). It’s a comprehensive and carefully coordinated approach to building relationships with the right kinds talent, whether for contract or full-time roles.

Talent Profiling Your Blended Workforce Once you’ve brought your blended talent in the door, of course, you need to measure and track their performance. This is something that many enterprises do well where full-time employees are concerned but not nearly so well regarding their contingent workers. Often, it’s because one set of tools and systems are used to measure and track full-time workers and another set (if any) are used for contingent workers; tracking employees’ goals and reviewing their performance is a different process than evaluating whether contractors completed their work on time and within budget. This fragmented view of the workforce once again results in a lack of comprehensive talent pipelining and workforce planning activities. Talent profiling, an integral part of talent pipelining and workforce planning, isn’t new to the enterprise but it’s not something usually done on the Procurement side of the house. However, internal talent mobility would be significantly bolstered if every individual “employed” by a company had
a talent profile within a unified or integrated system—especially if that profile contained
their background, skills and competencies, work performed and evaluated, career aspirations
and development plans (including “part-time” project work as well as full-time work), and recommendations

Maximize the Value of Your Blended Workforce | 4

from managers, peers and Procurement. For example, talented fulltime employees who need to dial back their work hours due to personal responsibilities, or talented contractors looking for full-time work, could then be easily sourced internally for the right opportunities that suit their changing needs. Obviously, integrating these kinds of talent profiling systems—or replacing them with a single solution that manages all kinds of talent—is
the key to effective performance tracking and measurement for the entire workforce. Integrated systems provide better analytics, which enables organizations to strengthen the link between their overall business planning activities and their contingent workforce data. Unfortunately, workforce analytics are still not widely leveraged by today’s employers, as shown in the Aberdeen Group’s 2012 report, “Driving
a Blended Workforce Strategy: a Total Talent Approach.” According to the report, 34 percent
of employers do not utilize for their blended workforce strategy; 48 percent utilize analytics infrequently or somewhat; and only 18 percent utilize analytics heavily. Without a doubt, this gap in the effective use of workforce data represents a huge opportunity for improvement for many enterprise organizations—one that could be realized in large part through integrated human capital systems and database.

The Movement Toward Total Talent Management As today’s enterprise organizations build their blended workforces, they’ve gone in search of talent management solutions that put all of
the pieces together—from strategic sourcing
and recruiting ... to measuring and tracking performance ... to development. These “total talent management solutions” or “total workforce solutions” are designed to provide a single, centralized set of strategies, technologies and processes to help employers manage all of their workers. In their current state, total management solutions typically require a careful combination of tools and systems (HRIS, candidate tracking, and VMS, for example) all working in a seamless manner to combine, track and analyze an organization’s comprehensive workforce data. The result: greater insights regarding and visibility into your total workforce. Using a system that provides this kind
of holistic vision, you can do a much better job of executing the right sourcing strategy (i.e., procuring the best talent at the right cost) and managing the performance of your total workforce over the long- term. Maximize the Value of Your Blended Workforce | 5

With improved visibility into your blended workforce, you’re also able to pinpoint opportunities to redeploy people and skill sets when projects are completed. This helps to ensure top performers remain with your organization and that you have access to the talent you need to meet the company’s evolving goals and objectives. This is especially important if you’re sourcing hard-to-fill positions or hard-to-find skills. With full visibility and better workforce data, you also can perform market rate rationalization and take advantage of optimization opportunities. Rather than using manual processes to generate rate cards, you can set market rates for specific job descriptions based on vendor guidelines or “not-to- exceed” rates to assist with spend management. In addition, a total workforce solution also
greatly reduces your risk of violating compliance and employment laws—ensuring that proper protocols are followed throughout onboarding and off-boarding processes, for instance. You also get the advantage of better storage, access and retrieval of support documentation. If you’re in the market for a total talent management solution, don’t make the mistake of focusing only on how well it integrates with your legacy systems. While that’s important, you need to be certain that your new solution provides a great user experience. As with all HR software, a poor user experience is a deal breaker for your recruiters, functional leaders, line managers and other audiences who will be using the solution. So what constitutes a great user experience? Ease-of-use, customization, flexibility and guided participation (software that guides users step- bystep in accomplishing tasks) are all highly appealing to users, and they go a long way toward cementing high adoption and utilization levels. Configure user experiences that are role-based— specifically suited to candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, procurement managers—and that
allow for unified talent profiling and parallel workflows that diverge only at the point of specific classification and type of work.

Maximize the Value of Your Blended Workforce | 6

Cost & Visibility Are Key Drivers Without question, blended workforces have arrived. As Aberdeen’s Blended Workforce report states, cost and visibility are the main reasons that drive organizations to implement an integrated approach to acquiring and managing full-time and part-time talent. Fifty percent of the employers Aberdeen surveyed cited cost control as their primary driver but 48 percent also cited the need for visibility into their entire talent supply as a key concern. In his “Predictions for 2014” research report,
Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, offers another compelling reason for employers everywhere to better “see” and manage their blended workforces. He writes, “In 2014, the problem we face is not a shortage of people—it is a shortage of key skills. ... We need to think of all of the elements of talent management as one integrated ‘system’—each working together, but fitting into a total employee environment. No one HR program stands alone; we need to stitch these elements together to address a variety of talent challenges.”

Maximize the Value of Your Blended Workforce | 7

With the right strategies and systems in place, we’ll not only improve our view of our total talent supply but we’ll also strengthen our ability to acquire and deploy our talent strategically. And that’s an advantage that will pay bigger and bigger dividends as time goes on.

About PeopleFluent

TM

PeopleFluent, the leading total workforce HCM technology company, redefines Talent

Waltham, Massachusetts

Management with an innovative Talent Engagement Cloud that is built around people and

300 Fifth Avenue

not HR processes. By deeply integrating pervasive video, strategic analytics and collaborative

Waltham, MA 02451 USA

social technologies into its complete suite of Talent Management applications, PeopleFluent

Tel: +1-781-530-2000

redefines employee engagement to address productivity loss and diminished financial results due to an increasingly disengaged workforce. With PeopleFluent, companies can change at

Raleigh, North Carolina

the speed of business without costly IT interventions through intuitive, highly configurable

434 Fayetteville Street, 9th Floor

software that is built upon the right data. Spanning across an organization’s entire global

Raleigh, NC 27601 USA

workforce with one talent cloud, PeopleFluent equips leaders with the meaningful talent data

Toll-Free: (877) 820-4400

and strategic analytics necessary to make better business decisions.

Tel: +1-919-645-2800

PeopleFluent has worked with over 5,100 organizations in 214 countries and territories to

London, United Kingdom

engage employees to drive better business results. Today, 80% of the Fortune 100 relies on

15 Fetter Lane

PeopleFluent as part of their talent management delivery strategy, helping them successfully

London EC4A 1BW

achieve their talent aspirations.

United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 20 7832 3440

www.peoplefluent.com Copyright 2014, PeopleFluent. All rights reserved. This document contains registered trademarks and trademarks of PeopleFluent Holdings Corp. or one of its subsidiaries. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.