Why now is the time for SMEs to embrace technology and expertise in managing their external workforce

There have been significant changes in the world of work over the last few years, in part reacting to unprecedented events that include the pandemic, cost of living crises, political and economic uncertainties, and massive skills shortages.  

Where individuals are reassessing their priorities in terms of finances and work/life balance, companies are looking to be able to respond to change in as agile a way as possible – maximizing efficiency in terms of both cost and time. 

At Guidant Global, we're finding that with present skills shortages, any size of company has use of an external workforce. In a survey of 2,700 executives in 27 countries by Oxford Economics, over 80% of executives stated that they are increasingly using contingent employees, including intermittent and seasonal employees, consultants, freelancers, and part-timers. 

We’re also finding that this non-employee workforce isn’t always managed as efficiently as it could be, due to said cost and time constraints.  

Traditionally, small to medium-sized businesses have focused much more closely on their permanent workforce management. They now need to pay equal attention to their external workforce if they are to ensure they aren’t wasting money and time on recruitment that could be spent on development and growth.  

It’s time to use technology and outsourced workforce management to work smarter, not harder.  

Contingent workforce management experts Guidant Global and technology leaders SAP Fieldglass have created @Pace in order to do exactly that. By bringing together industry leading VMS technology and contingent workforce management, and by providing this at a cost and implementation timescale suitable for businesses of all sizes, SMEs can harness enterprise level technology for their business.   

Integrated technology provides visibility of the gaps in their workforce as well as current or previous workers that might be able to fill that gap. This enables businesses to plan how they might use workers already known to them to fill a role they know they will need to fill in plenty of time, instead of having to recruit from scratch. 

“Being able to redeploy existing external workers back into another department; maintaining and keeping all of that intellectual property and loyalty to the business is absolutely critical,” states Mary Nichol, Director of Sales, Guidant Global.   

“It could just be a matter of tweaking one or two skill sets to keep an existing worker instead of having to spend the time and money finding a new one. This is the beauty of having access to all of that data through a technology and workforce management solution such as @Pace.”  

Unlock your non-employee workforce’s full potential through a unique collaboration of recruitment industry leaders. 

If you’re ready to rethink your non-employee workforce management, find out more about @Pace in the video below or at the @Pace webpage.