Flexible IT staffing solutions: A new hiring norm SMEs must embrace now
Talent acquisition has been a demanding discipline for SMEs to drive innovation and stay competitive. On the other hand, in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak, business owners and recruiting teams are grappling to find the best ways to attract and engage with skilled candidates.
Due to the advancements of technology, the hiring landscape has changed dramatically for the past few years, and companies are trying to gauge the consequences of hiring challenges. Furthermore, to find specialized skilled resources and fill talent gaps most companies are relying on IT staffing services rather than traditional tedious hiring practices.
On the other hand, with the rise of remote working most employees are likely to work on temporary or contract roles instead of full-time hiring roles. As skilled resources engage with various companies or projects, SMEs are finding it difficult to hire talent whenever there is a need.
Problem with traditional hiring strategy:
The traditional hiring process is more like a football game, where the players keep on passing the ball and even sometimes end up failing to hit a goal.
So, to win the game, it is essential to eliminate unnecessary steps that don’t drive success. Similarly, while planning to hire resources, it is crucial to identify unnecessary steps in the hiring process.
In the traditional hiring process, companies spend countless hours to find and qualify candidates. It eventually leads to delays in hiring skilled candidates.
Here are some factors that affect the hiring process. Have a look.
- Conducting multiple telephonic interviews.
- Asking an applicant for multiple face-to-face interviews.
- Conducting an interview and ghosting.
Furthermore, the delayed hiring process sometimes even ends up indecisive. Therefore, the top candidate you have been trying to pitch might not be available when you are ready to hire him.
Traditional hiring strategies can help you get skilled candidates in-house and ensure you can have total control over them. However, a long hiring process and delayed decision making often lead to missing the best talent.
Let’s have a look at the top benefits of leveraging flexible IT staffing solutions for SMEs in the current talent-dominated market. Before that, have a look at the challenges with hiring freelancers for your project.
Challenges with hiring freelancers:
Another way of engaging skilled talent is by hiring freelancers. By hiring freelancers you only pay for the job that gets done. Even though hiring freelancers save time and cost, it has a few challenges.
As freelancers work on multiple projects concurrently, it may hurt the quality of the projects and cause delays in development, failure to meet deadlines. Moreover, freelancers might suddenly drop out from your project leaving it in uncertainty.
So, to address the above challenges you need a comprehensive staffing solution strategy that can scale with your business requirements. Let’s look further into the top 12 flexible IT staffing model benefits for SMEs.
Flexible IT staffing solutions: A new way of hiring and engaging talent
It seems natural for companies to scale up and scale down their workforce according to the project requirements. On the other hand, hiring resources on a project basis and regular layoffs will impact employee morale and eventually deteriorate productivity.
Flexible talent acquisition strategies allow you to identify the must-have and temporary resources to meet your business objectives. Rather than filling positions as soon as you start a project, flexible IT staffing strategies help you by bringing the best talent across the globe on a project basis.
In contrast to the traditional hiring process, flexible IT staffing solutions will considerably take less time to hire a resource. Thus, allow you to focus on strategy building, mission-critical operations, and revenue generation models.
Here are the top 12 ways SMEs can benefit from flexible tech IT staffing solutions.
1. Save money:
Cost is one of the predominant factors most SMEs consider while planning their hiring strategy. In the case of permanent hiring, you need to pay employees regardless of the projects and downtimes.
With flexible IT staffing solutions, you will hire resources as per the project requirements and pay accordingly. The flexible staffing strategy will considerably reduce costs associated with hiring, training, and infrastructure expenses.
2. Have a competitive advantage:
Time is one of the crucial factors that can make or break relationships with your clients. Staying on the same page and delivering projects on time are the differentiating factors of a successful SME.
The traditional hiring process often takes more time than we expected and further delays project development. While with a flexible IT staffing strategy, you can get quick access to the talent pool to develop your project — further accelerates your project development and gains a competitive advantage.
3. Save infrastructure cost:
Apart from hiring and training costs, office space per employee is another key factor to consider in SMEs.
By leveraging flexible IT staffing strategies, you can save a huge amount of costs associated with infrastructure maintenance.
4. Improve employee retention:
Tough times like the Covid-19 pandemic freezes hiring for a while — further puts pressure on in-house employees to meet the project deadlines and even end up unproductive.
By collaborating with a flexible staffing solutions provider, you can bring the best talent onboard without hurting employee morale and productivity. It further helps in improving your employee retention.
5. Prevent bad hires:
An unfilled position for a long time will eventually frustrate you and the hiring team as well. However, you can not hire a candidate who lacks technical skills and doesn’t live up to your standards. Moreover, a bad hire will cost you more than an unfilled position.
Whereas, with flexible IT staffing solutions, the external vendor will provide a pool of talented resources that can meet your requirements. You can choose the right fit and can prevent the chances of bad hires.
6. No need to wear multiple hats:
An SME doesn’t mean it has limited operations and challenges. Compared to established firms, SMEs will undergo disruptive transformations and try to be on top of their competitors. During this process, employees of SMEs will wear multiple hats to get the job done. It eventually diminishes productivity and often loses control over the project.
If you are an SME business owner with a growth mindset, having flexible IT staffing solutions as a hiring strategy will free up your employees from wearing multiple hats. Thus result in improving productivity and efficiency within your budget.
7. Quick access to the top and best talent:
Access to top talent is the major challenge for most SMEs with limited internal hiring capabilities. On the other hand, companies that lack hiring strategies struggle to find and reach active and passive job seekers at the right time.
If your new project requires specialized technical skills that your team doesn’t have, flexible IT staffing solutions can help you fill those skills gaps. As the external vendor has a large data of qualified and pre-screened candidates, your selection process will become easy and effective.
8. Scalable tech team:
Unlike permanent hiring, flexible staffing allows you to quickly scale up and scale down the team according to your project requirements.
If you collaborate with an external vendor, they will assess your project requirements and hire resources. By leveraging flexible IT staffing strategies, you will get an opportunity to work with technology experts as long as you need them.
Know the impact of tech talent shortage on the U.S. SMEs and how to overcome them?
9. No training cost:
If you are planning to hire a resource for an entry-level position, in addition to the hiring cost, you need to invest in training them.
With a flexible IT staffing model, you can engage with experienced tech resources at a lower cost than permanent hiring. It further eliminates costs associated with training a fresh graduate and making them ready to handle your project.
10. Improve collaboration:
Collaboration is the key to the success of any business. As you get a chance to work with experienced and culture fit resources, they collaborate easily and augment your internal team capabilities by sharing knowledge.
Collaborating with an experienced IT staffing solutions provider like Amzur can help you bring the best talent and develop turnkey solutions.
11. Have a perfect business backup plan:
While demand for temporary staffing is increasing amid ongoing disruptions, many companies have made flexible IT staffing as their core hiring strategy to ensure business continuity.
Unlike permanent staffing, with flexible staffing solutions, your business can become responsive and competitive with access to a large pool of skilled talent. Regardless of the downtimes, you can hire talent across the globe with specialized skills.
12. Bring diversity:
Together with expertise, flexible IT staffing solutions allow you to get access from various corners of the globe — thus increases workplace diversity. Resources from different regions will boost your company’s culture and further help in closing the gender gap.
Gender diversity and employee engagement have a direct relationship. According to Gallup reports, women at work are more engaged than men.
Above all, a team with a diversified skill set, expertise, and culture will provide a competitive edge and bring innovation to the table.
How can Amzur’s Flexible IT staffing solutions and services help you?
Are you planning to hire resources and struggling to find and qualify them? No worries, Amzur has been in the IT staffing industry for the past 15 years and offered scalable tech talent staffing services to many small and mid-sized businesses.
We have a proven track record of assessing staffing needs and tailoring solutions to meet the evolving business objectives of our clients. For three consecutive years, Amzur received the TechServe Alliance “Excellence Award,” which recognizes IT and engineering staffing and solutions firms that have demonstrated outstanding performance, team productivity, and dedication to continuous improvement.
Being in the industry for a long time and as early adopters, we embrace modern technologies like video interviewing platforms and maintain a repository of skilled and qualified resources.
Amzur’s end-to-end IT staffing services provide the best talent solutions for the following disciplines including software development, application support & DBA, mobile app development, QA & testing, NetSuite ERP implementation, automation, and web technologies.
