Contingent Work: From Where We Work and When We Work to How We Should Work

More important than just where we work, and when we work, even with all the seismic shifts in the status quo in the past couple of years, is the increasing scrutiny companies are starting to focus on the much more foundational, much more complex question of how we should work.

With so many companies tightening their budgets and freezing or cutting headcount, employers are accelerating what’s been a fairly significant shift towards fully adopting a ‘total talent’ approach to talent acquisition; that is, embracing the concept that the workforce that works best doesn’t always have to work only as full time employees.
 

Too often, anyone other than a full time employee was treated like a second class citizen, often excluded from certain meetings, company activities, team building or employee development programs, and denied access to certain facilities, perks or perquisites extended to every employee as a matter of course, because of course, contingent workers weren’t, by definition, employees at all.

This seemingly anachronistic attitude towards contingent workers might explain why non-traditional talent has never been a core component of most corporate talent acquisition teams which, at an enterprise level, are almost exclusively focused on filling open headcount with full time hires, to the exclusion of all other forms of talent that could otherwise be acquired.

Often, hiring contingent workers wasn’t even a TA function at all, with that significant segment either outsourced completely to third party providers or else handled internally through procurement, not hiring, processes - a capital expenditure rather than an investment in that proverbial “greatest asset.”

Times, though, as they say, are changing - and so too is the attitude and imperative importance of the contingent workforce to in-house talent acquisition teams, their stakeholders and the bigger business picture.

This is because the pandemic has forced us to redefine the very nature of work itself. Work is no longer a place we go, but instead a thing we do. Work is no longer about employment status, but empirical outcomes.

Today, even the workforce that works best for a company might not work for that company at all. And TA is finally starting to pay attention to the fact that talent transcends worker classifications, and the future of recruiting requires employers incorporate strategies for acquiring all forms of talent, rather than simply filling (and backfilling) reqs with full time, traditional employees.

The result of these developments is one of the most important, and potentially disruptive, developments in recruiting and talent acquisition in recent years. That’s why we’ve decided to dedicate an entire issue of Talent Acquisition Excellence to this very important - but often overlooked - talent topic.

In this issue, you’ll find articles by some of the very thinkers and leaders who are actively helping to shape the changing world of contingent work. They’ll delve into topics ranging from the impact of automation on the gig economy, to the rise of generative AI and its implications in recruiting, to the trends around employers of record and the rise of the distributed global workforce. We’ll look at ways in which contingent workers are changing the nature of work, and the ways that employers, and recruiters, are adapting to this new reality.

Because in recruiting and hiring, you can’t truly have Talent Acquisition Excellence without considering the state of the contingent workforce. The good news is, we’ve got the research and resources recruiters need right here - so consider this edition the total package when it comes to total talent.

Happy hiring.