Preparing to Manage Your Workforce for the Turnaround

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Provide adequate information about your brand, employee expectations, milestones, and other internal initiatives to staff members who are not full-time. This includes detailing specific skill-set requirements and standard use of every area of operations.

If you use third-party companies to assist with recruitment, there must be a strategy in place to communicate the right message about your employment brand to the marketplace. That's just the bare minimum. HR managers should also work closely with marketing and PR colleagues to communicate a clear, strong employment brand through advertising, job postings, the press, social media, and other outlets. That way, incoming recruits and candidates already have an accurate and consistent perception of your company before walking through the door. The value of your brand hasn't been diluted by outside influences.

It is essential that this strategy be used not only in the recruitment of full-time staff, but for any individual recruited into the organization. Too frequently outside groups are not required to adhere to employment brand standards.

• Differentiate deliverables vs. skill requirements.

Evaluate all projects and statements of work (SOW) to determine if they are being abused as a way to get around mandated head count restrictions. This tactic frequently helps managers produce the required deliverables but doesn't translate into compliance or efficiencies for the organization as a whole. Typically it's possible to convert a small percentage of the workforce's skills currently being used to complete projects or statements of work into standard skill requirements. Most companies have 3% to 5% of true SOW work. The rest of their SOW teams are better classified through skill-oriented requirements. By looking closely at this segment of the workforce, there is an opportunity to save money and retain the right talent.

• Brush-up on the rules.

It's not unusual for companies to discover that about 25% of their independent-contractor use violates state compliance regulations. Many operate "the way it's always been done," but today's procedures need to be consistent, compliant, and reproducible.

If you employ independent contractors, immediately make sure hiring procedures and management policies are well-documented. It's easy to lose sight of basics amid summer vacation season or the rush to build your workforce quickly, but poor management or indiscriminate hiring of this classification of workers could end in very costly mistakes.

Even if you get the right talent into your organization, you must do it the right way or you could at best find yourself paying premium prices for contractors and at worst wind up paying a hefty fine to the Internal Revenue Service, affecting your results. Prepare by performing independent-contractor audits and creating a more stringent process for their hiring and management.

Overall, policies and procedures put into place should not inhibit your business' ability to place talent quickly. Instead they should manage all sources and types of talent and connect them to very specific measurable performance expectations. By having a comprehensive view of the talent pool, contributors from various segments may be leveraged more efficiently throughout the enterprise within legal parameters that today's businesses can't afford to breach as the economy rebounds.

Joel Capperella is vice-president at Yoh Talent Solutions, helping global companies achieve supply chain-like efficiencies throughout their workforces. He also blogs regularly at seamlessworkforce.com.

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