how an HR solutions company can help you overcome the global labor shortage.

For years, the global labour shortage has been impacting organisations across industries. Recently, unprecedented business challenges, including supply chain disruptions, quarantines, remote work transitions and shutdowns, only helped to intensify this shortage. Current economic uncertainties are now forcing organisations to find effective ways to recruit top talent, while also focusing on budget restraints.

Combining this with the increase in workers’ expectations and the continuing demand for tech skills makes overcoming the labour shortage even more difficult. The good news is that partnering with an HR solutions company can improve your hiring and retention outcomes, while also helping your company save both time and money.

Here’s a look at just some of the ways an HR solutions partner, like Randstad, can help your company overcome the labour shortage.

leverage contingent workforce

Given the complexities of today’s global economies, such as supply chain disruptions and fluctuating consumer demands, more and more organisations depend on contingent workers to meet production demands. Studies show that the global contingent workforce industry is set to more than double over the next decade.  

This strategy makes sense for many organisations, especially those that face frequent market shifts and seasonal trends, such as manufacturing, warehousing and retail. Using contingent workers allows you to scale your workforce up and down, as needed, to meet current production demands.

Randstad specialises in contingent workforce management. Through our Randstad Inhouse Services, our teams can handle many of the tasks involved in managing a contingent workforce, including recruitment, training and scheduling. These services include a dedicated on-site specialist who can handle day-to-day communications with your contingent workers and be on hand to immediately resolve any issue that may arise.

Through a partnership with Randstad, you can benefit from the use of a qualified pool of contingent workers without adding any extra pressure on your staff.

access to a large talent database

Sourcing skilled talent is the first, and sometimes the most difficult, stage of the recruitment process. It involves identifying candidates that match your set criteria, knowing where to find and engage with them, and enticing them to complete the application process.

When you partner with Randstad, we can often help you eliminate this step by connecting with our pool of pre-vetted candidates. Rather than spending time and money posting job ads and connecting with prospective candidates, you can search our database of prospective candidates.

You have the option of using our advanced filtering system to search our database and request more information about candidates who match your set criteria. Or you can work directly with our talent recruiters and allow us to identify candidates that may be an ideal match. We focus on job fit, as well as company fit and boss fit, to ensure you find a candidate that not only meets your needs, but one that is likely to remain with the company.

Despite our large talent pool, there are times when clients are unable to find the specific skill sets their company needs within our candidate database. In these cases, our teams can work with you to develop a strong job posting and job description to post on our subsidiary site, Monster Worldwide, one of the world’s largest online job posting boards, to find the talent you need.

Through our services, you can cut recruitment costs, save your HR team both time and resources and speed up your time-to-hire rate. Ultimately, this means that you can fill open roles faster with candidates who have already successfully passed through our screening process.

insights in the latest market trends

Events over the last few years have significantly shifted market trends and workers’ expectations. While salaries remain a top priority for today’s workers, offering a good salary may no longer be enough to entice candidates to accept a job offer.

Today’s workers expect more. For instance, our Randstad 2024 Workmonitor shows that 43% of UK workers claim that they wouldn’t accept a job offer if it didn’t provide flexible hours. 46% of workers also state that they would quit their jobs if it prevented them from enjoying their lives.

It’s also important to understand how your competitors are handling the recruitment process. For example, our Global Talent Trends report shows that 76% of global employers are putting a greater emphasis on creating a positive talent experience. If you’re not following suit, it can not only make it more difficult to acquire talent, but you’re also at a higher risk of losing your current workers.

To create effective recruitment and workforce management strategies, it’s crucial to understand these various shifts in today’s job market and workers’ expectations. Working with an HR solutions partner can help you obtain this information without wasting valuable time.

At Randstad, our teams regularly track market trends and candidate insights to ensure you fully understand the changes transforming the job market. Every year, we conduct our Randstad Employer Brand Research, which surveys talent expectations in more than 30 markets as well as our Global Talent Trends report.

These insights can help you better understand today’s workers and stay ahead of your competition.

use of advanced HR technology

HR technology has become so powerful that it’s nearly impossible to remain competitive in the job market without it. In today’s fast-paced job market, you no longer have weeks or months to filter through applications, conduct background checks and set up interviews. In fact, the longer it takes you to select your ideal applicant and send a job offer, the greater risk you are of losing that candidate to a competitor. On the other hand, you don’t want to rush the process and risk making bad, and costly, hiring decisions.

This is where HR technology can help. Your company can avoid losing top talent by streamlining the recruitment process through the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive technology. The combination of this technology allows your company to identify its key candidates faster and send job offers before your competitors have a chance to steal the best candidates away.

While this technology can be very effective at sorting through applications, it can’t replace the human part of the recruitment process. You must still prioritise candidate engagement and provide a positive experience for your applicants, whether they choose to work for your company or not.

At Randstad, we understand the value of HR technology, but we also recognise the importance of human touch. We believe that it’s only by prioritising both tech and touch that companies can achieve meaningful results. It’s for this very reason that we developed our intuitive and efficient tech stack suite, Randstad Relevate. This suite of HR tools includes a variety of solutions, such as Relevate Talent Search, Relevate Reference and Relevate HR Portal, to help streamline and automate the recruitment and talent management process.

customised HR solutions

At Randstad, we realise that talent recruitment and management solutions are not a one-size-fits-all offering. After all, no two businesses are the same and each company has its own unique set of pain points, goals and objectives. Our teams always take the time to better understand our client’s needs, recruitment goals and workplace management challenges. We will sit down with your company to discuss its specific hiring needs and learn more about the company’s mission and workplace culture.

Taking the time to gather this information about your company allows us to create customised strategies to effectively deal with your talent acquisition and employee retention challenges. Our customised HR solutions also allow our teams to not just help you find candidates with the right skills and qualifications, but also focus on job fit and boss fit, which is known to help improve retention rates.

Most importantly, you determine exactly what services you want our team to handle and what tasks you want to keep in-house. For instance, our teams can identify candidates that most closely match your set criteria and conduct the pre-screening and reference-checking processes, while allowing your organisation to handle the interview and job offer process. On the other hand, we can handle the entire recruitment process for you. This level of customization means that you only pay for the services you need.

HR consultancy services

Despite the ongoing labour shortage, the demand for new hires is holding steady. In fact, 44% of global employers expect to increase their hiring demands. This demand for more workers comes at a time when organisations are also working to cut costs to prepare for a potential global recession.

With the cost of a new hire ranging anywhere from three to four times the position’s salary, employers must have a robust recruitment strategy in place if they hope to meet their upcoming goals. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to identify inefficiencies within your own recruitment and workforce management strategies.

This is where partnering with an HR solutions company, like Randstad, can help. We provide an extra set of eyes that can review your current strategies and identify any practices that may prove outdated or ineffective. Our teams can recommend HR technologies or innovative techniques that can improve efficiency and streamline your recruitment and workforce management processes.

In particular, our Randstad In-House services provide an on-site consultant who has an ideal vantage point to detect potential inefficiencies within your workforce processes. Not only can we help your organisations spot these issues, but we can provide recommendations to improve these processes and workforce planning tools. Not only can this step improve workforce production rates, but it can also boost workers’ satisfaction and employee retention rates.

workforce management solutions

A professional HR solutions partner, such as Randstad, cannot only assist with the recruitment process, but it can help with workforce management solutions too. For example, our salary and benefits insights not only enable your company to determine the optimal salaries for new hires, but it can also help your company set pay increases for your current workers.

At Randstad, we also offer our Randstad In-House Services for clients with large volume workforces that include permanent and/or contingent workers. Through these HR services, your company’s dedicated, on-site consultant can handle everything from recruitment and onboarding to shift scheduling and employee training.

 Ultimately, having an HR partner working right on-site can improve training effectiveness, employee engagement and productivity, while reducing absenteeism and turnover. Best of all, our in-house services can allow you to build effective recruitment and workforce management solutions without adding stress to your current HR team.

Ready to tackle the ongoing labour shortage at your company? Consider partnering with Randstad, an HR solutions partner that can help you solve your challenges.

Download our Randstad Guide for more information about how our talent recruitment and management solutions work.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on 7 June 2022.