Resources Sponsors Articles Links Education & Certification

Forler Massnick / Tribune

When asked to name the most-pressing issue facing their businesses, executives have repeatedly said hiring and retaining workers.

Yet for all their concerns, senior executives and human resources people have been slow to change their thinking in ways that can ease recruiting pressures in today's high-employment economy.

Many companies are stuck in past practices that are blocking a simple, cost-saving solution.

Did you know that there are at least 10 million independent professionals out there who would love to get a call from you about doing the work you need done? They will work as contractors, consultants, and temps, saving you a significant amount over what you would have to pay a full-time employee.

Many of these independent professionals honed their skills and gained experience in responsible, leading-edge corporate jobs. Corporations hiring them now for part-time assignments get the benefit of all that training and experience without having to underwrite it. How can you find these talented professionals who can make your recruiting problems vanish? The best way is to subscribe to one or more of the Internet services that have resumes of independent professionals accessible through a database.

I run one, experiencenet.com. But others do, too.

These databases are rich with talent, including highly trained and experienced people who are in transition for any number of reasons. For example, a number of the professional people recently laid off by Honeywell and the St. Paul Companies have made themselves available through the experiencenet.com database.

Outplacement firms such as Right Associates and Lee Hecht Harrison recommend this channel of opportunity.

Mental blocks
There is no charge to people listing in the database. Internet companies make money by charging corporate clients for access to the database. Some, like experiencenet.com, function solely as a matchmaker and are not involved in hiring. So what's stopping companies from dipping into this very large talent pool?

• A fixation on hiring only full-time people.
• A bias against consultants.
• Timidity about dealing with IRS regulations concerning permanent, as opposed to temporary, employees.
• Rigid thinking in the management ranks.
• Faulty or nonexistent cost accounting about the cost-saving potential.
• Lack of knowledge about independent professionals and how to find them.

Before dismissing this idea, for whatever reason, ponder what an MIT professor wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 1998. Thomas W. Malone describes a model for a new kind of business organization that could form the basis for a new kind of economy.

"The fundamental unit of such an economy," he writes, "is not the corporation but the individual. Tasks aren't assigned and controlled through a stable chain of management but rather are carried out autonomously by independent contractors. These electronically connected freelancers -- e-lancers -- join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services."

Economics and technology are driving this trend. The use of independent professionals can reduce recruiting and operating costs by as much as 50 percent.
Besides, it is not going to get any easier to find the right kind of help. Growth in the labor force will be slower in the years just ahead. The inevitable result will be more outsourcing and contracting-out of functions, more temps and part-timers.

Welcome to the e-lance economy.

You're out of the box. You're ready to solve some of your recruiting problems by using independent professionals. There is one thing left to do, though.

Jobs checklist
You must decide when it is better to use independent professionals as consultants or contractors rather than struggle to hire full-time employees. Here's a checklist for recruiters:

Projects. A project is work with a beginning and an end. It doesn't make sense to pull people off regular operational jobs for projects. If their work was important, they must be replaced. If it weren't important, they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place. If their reassignment simply means more work for others, there is a price to pay in burnout and degradation of morale.

Skills gaps. Sometimes work comes up that regular employees are simply not equipped to handle. For example: process redesign, organizational development, long-range planning, unique procurement, problem solving. Assigning people work they don't know how to do rarely produces satisfactory results. Training for one-time, new tasks is not cost effective. Learning-curve expense is often overlooked.

Burnout. Employee abuse is not good business. It results in high turnover, degradation of work quality, hidden sabotage, diminished innovation and creative contribution. It is good business to relieve excessive temporary work pressures with outside help.

Delays. When job requisitions go unfilled for too long, it means that work deemed important is not getting done. Instead of tolerating this condition, consider getting the work done by an independent professional. Occasionally such assignments can be converted to full-time employment.

Seasonality, growth spurts. There are jobs that are not full-time by definition. Rather than shuffle and disrupt a work force to accomplish tasks that are sporadic, it is better to bring in temporary help. Growth also occurs in unpredictable spurts. Greater-than-expected success for a new product is an example. This is an obvious opportunity for short-term help from the outside.

One-time assignments. Every company encounters challenges that are likely to be faced only once. For example, Y2K updates, ISO 9000 registration, reengineering, design of a new process. It is far more cost effective to hire expert contractors for such assignments.

It is human nature to become accustomed to familiar surroundings and situations, and to overlook opportunities for improvement. Objective outsiders can see problems and find solutions that would not occur to workers settled in their routines. In the vast pool of independent professionals, there are people who have worked for and been trained by companies that have solved the problems you are wrestling with. Their experience and expertise is available at minimal cost when compared with the cost of internal development.

The e-lance economy can provide short-term solutions for today's tight labor market.

But more significantly, I believe it is the precursor of a whole new way of doing business. If you're not tapping the e-lance market, maybe your competition is. Companies realize the potential of e-lancing.

© Copyright 2000 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.