In part one of a two-part series, the Prosum team outlines why tech talent at the consultant level is a viable resource for your staffing needs.

As companies build, or rebuild their tech infrastructure following the market uncertainties we experienced over the last two years, an important element to consider is the short- and long-term implications of your staffing strategy.

Questions arise like “How can I hire faster but without investing the time of my current staff? Or, “How do I mitigate risks of over or under-hiring for an important brand technology initiative? “Won’t it cost more to hire contract workers?”

The answers to these questions and more are why hiring contract tech consultants makes sense.

Work with Experts: Augment Your Tech Workforce with Consultants

Contract tech consultants are an added value for a number of reasons. Forbes shared the top 15 requirements IT leaders are looking for in tech contractors and they include, among others, specialization, experience, flexibility, and being a fast starter.

As tech staffing and recruiting experts, those requirements are precisely what an organization will get when hiring contract tech consultants, and here’s why:

• First, the nature of what they do is to begin work on a project immediately since it’s often a finite engagement and every minute counts. Ramp-up time is minimal, and when working with an experienced tech staffing agency to find tech talent, they manage the onboarding for you. This means more productivity, earlier.

• Secondly, tech consultants are specifically hired for their expertise and specialization in the exact field you are looking for and may have additional knowledge to share as a bonus. Suppose you are looking for a software developer with a certain amount of experience, specific coding skills, and language knowledge. In that case, your tech staffing agency will work to source candidates that match your job requirements and provide only the most qualified candidate slate for the interview process and ultimately the hiring phase.

• Finally, bringing a contract tech consultant on board will be a boost to your current workforce in immediate productivity as well as a source of transferrable knowledge from previous project experience. Consultants, like most professionals, are building their resumes through experience working in multiple companies and possibly within multiple industries. Knowledge-sharing, fresh perspectives, and being able to pivot on priorities will be a benefit to your team, offering upskilling and reskilling opportunities for them. Plus, with many successful contract relationships, when new projects arise, you can work with your tech staffing agency to redeploy these professionals once their project ends.

Saving Time and Managing Costs with Contract Tech Consultants

As mentioned before, hiring contract tech consultants saves time in onboarding and acclimation to an organization. With the help of a tech staffing agency doing the heavy lifting for an organization, current staff will not be pulled off of other important company initiatives to manage recruiting and hiring. From sourcing, writing job descriptions, pre-qualifying, background checks, the initial interview process, and more, your team saves time and will be brought in to participate in interviewing and hiring decisions. Once the contract consultant’s project is completed, there is less process involved for offboarding and ending the engagement as well.

These reasons can also affect budget concerns. While typically bill rates to hire consultants are seen to be 15% higher, in the long run, this can be quite cost-efficient!

For one, contracted tech consultants are separate from full-time employee requirements, so there are fewer costs involved with onboarding, benefits, ongoing training, bonus structures, etc.

Essentially, organizations are making up the cost outlay in the flexibility of securing the tech talent you need fast while being able to scale workforces up and down with hired specialists delivered by an agency doing to the recruiting and hiring for you. There’s also no longer a worry of severances or probationary times if an employee is not meeting requirements.

Consider this:

• Research shows that the cost to replace an employee could reach 33% of their annual salary. With the rapidly changing need for specialized tech skills, it could become costly when employees leave or must be replaced. Since Forbes also notes that nearly 30% of new employees leave in the first 90 days for various reasons, both budgets and project outcomes could be greatly affected during critical moments. By staffing with contract tech consultants, finding a tech professional who can pinch hit if there is a mismatch is a quicker alternative.

• The costs associated with the recruiting process are often difficult to quantify as recruiting processes change. We know that there are hard and soft costs associated with hiring a new employee, hard costs being ads, technology tools, etc., while soft costs are often measured in time invested and disruption to business operations, especially if hiring goes awry. Hiring contract tech consultants through a staffing agency minimizes loss in productivity as well as eliminates internal recruiting and hiring time (or rehiring due to turnover) which can be lengthy.

As your organization determines the best route to building a strong tech workforce, consider the positive output that specialized, experienced contract tech talent can offer when time is of the essence. In our next installment, Prosum experts will discuss why hiring contract tech consultants through Prosum experts is worth the investment.