What is a just in time workforce?
It is simply one that comprises of on-demand talent, people who prefer taking on short-term projects where pay scales are decided based on the complexity of the job on hand. In India alone, there has been a shift towards the on-demand style of working, especially when it comes to age groups between 20-35. With organizations understanding the needs of this evolving trend, they have also started delegating jobs of great importance to specialized part-time employees, with the skill sets required to get the job done efficiently and independently.
How does this effect internal employee relations within organizations?
Traditional workplaces comprise of full-time employees working together in the same work space, delivering quality output in teams. With the adoption of on-demand employees, internal teams and managers will have to gradually learn to trust part-time employees and to blend cohesively with people who may not cohabit the same physical work space as them. However, it is also crucial for the management and HR to carve a completely different approach to managing these different skill sets with full-time and part-time employees. With dissimilar career paths, it is up to the management to create an effective balance between the two, while also addressing differences in engagement, pay structures, benefits and much more.
What is the ideal approach while looking for on-demand talent?
With India having the 2nd highest share of on-demand talent, only next to USA, adding up to 40% of freelance jobs globally, we have a whopping 53 million strong on-demand workforce ready to fill the ever rising demand of start-ups.
Popular in-demand skills include cloud marketing, content marketing, graphic and user interface design, social media marketing, SEO, translation services, etc. This premise brings the lucrative opportunity to rope in quality talent, without the cost, infrastructure and training that goes into their full-timers. To do so, companies need to have absolute clarity in terms of project details, to match requirements per assignment to the skills sets on offer from part-time employees. To do so, recruiters need to have real-time access to a diverse talent pool in terms of both cost and availability.
What are the challenges posed by an on-demand workforce?
The implementation of on-demand workers poses a unique set of challenges for hiring departments, for both sourcing and hiring new talent. They have the power to shape the way the overall workforce of the company performs in conjunction with their external part-time employees. For smooth running of the company, making an informed choice will hold them good with regards to assessing skill sets, real-time performance, risk management, command chains and quality control.
Psychometric assessments are the perfect tool that can be utilized by HR managers to fill the gaps caused by outsourcing tasks to part-time employees. By depending on analytics to identify talent and what skill sets can be matched to the organizational needs, the HR can access reports that provide an in depth understanding of what type of productivity the person would bring to the desired profile in the future.
The future involves a larger population of contingent workers, most of whom are looking to move away from traditional job roles and expectations. What they are looking for in any contract job is flexibility, fair compensation and the ability to collaborate without changing their own working style. This movement has led to increasing number of talent pools serving the purpose of connecting organizations and part-timers. Mobile recruitment platforms are the ideal way to source, assess and hire talent based on in-house demands.
Psychometric assessments can also be used to create a database of external contributors, filtered down based on their skills and output quality. Not only does this serve the purpose of re-skilling, it also provides HR with the analytical intelligence to hire right and predict part-time role transformation.
Another aspect that is often overlooked is ‘How do you benchmark the performance of a part-time employee?’ The advantage of having a pure play assessment partner to evaluate your organization’s on-demand talent is that it uses technology to do the analysis for you, leaving you with sufficient data to make informed decisions when it comes to one of the most pivotal aspects of an organizations success, its workforce.
MeritTrac is India’s premier pure play assessment services company providing innovative assessment services to leading educational institutions, government organizations and corporate entities.
To know more on how behavioral assessments can positively boost your bottom line and motivate your workforce, get in touch with us at info@merittrac.com.
