The work economy continues to evolve, driven in very large part by how corporate human resources teams are increasingly turning to long-term contract employees to fill critical roles within their organizations.
In fact, an Intuit report found that 80% of companies plan to increase their use of contract workers in the coming years.
But finding the right talent for these positions can be a challenge. How do you ensure that your team is hiring people who are both a professional and cultural fit for long-term projects? How do you find people who are happy knowing their job has an end date?
Here, we’ll discuss how to find the best talent for long-term contract positions in today’s extremely competitive job market, where talented workers possess more options and leverage than they’ve had in many years.
1. Practice radical transparency
One of the first steps employers should take is to create a comprehensive job description outlining their specific requirements for long-term contractors or gig workers. This should include a detailed overview of what skills, qualifications, and experience are necessary for the successful completion of the project.
Employers should also prioritize clear communication when sharing their expectations, proposed compensation, as well as how they plan to evaluate each candidate’s performance on a regular basis.
This might sound obvious, but many people take job descriptions for granted. It’s even more important to be fully transparent on job descriptions for long-term contract roles than it is for full-time jobs.
People who have built careers out of freelancing are fiercely independent and protective of their time — vague job responsibilities or cagey language about compensation is the best way to drive off qualified talent and attract novices or the desperate for work. You can always answer a candidate’s questions in an interview, but clarity is your best tool for attracting high-quality talent.
Of course, employers must also ensure they have a clear, signed contractual agreement stating the candidate’s responsibilities, compensation, and work dates, and that provides liability protection for all parties.
2. Manage expectations
Most employers would love to hire a contractor to do the work of a full-time employee. After all, contractors aren’t entitled to the same worker protections or benefits that employees are.
They’re also tax-free. But if you want to attract the best gig talent, don’t expect them to work like full-time employees.
Nearly half of gig workers say the ability to set their own schedule is the most important factor to them. Expecting someone to work 40 hours per week for a retainer or hourly rate rather than a salary and benefits is naive, unethical, and may even be illegal if proposed worker classification amendments pass.
To reiterate, successful full-time freelancers did not attain financial independence by wasting time or undervaluing their labor. They have certain expectations from clients, just as clients have certain expectations from them.
The biggest mistake most employers make when outsourcing for long-term projects is expecting to find cheap, tax-free, dispensable labor that’s just as good as a full-time worker. That’s the wrong attitude.
You should really look for highly qualified, long-term, part-time employees. Remember, even if you pay a contractor 20% more than you would a full-time employee for six months, that’s a fraction of how much a full-time employee would cost when you account for benefits, tax liability, in-office expenses, and a full-time employee’s tenure at a company.
Experienced, well-qualified contractors don’t have the time of day for companies that are going to nickel and dime talent or make unreasonable demands of their time.
3. Leverage your network
As an HR professional, your network is your most valuable asset. Maybe someone you worked with in the past has gone independent. Maybe you’ve worked with long-term contractors in previous roles. Referrals are one of the most effective ways of connecting with talented candidates who have proven themselves in previous positions and have already been vetted by someone you trust — especially if that person is yourself.
By leveraging your own professional connections, you can quickly build a list of qualified candidates that could potentially become part of your team. Lean into social media, LinkedIn, and other professional networks to let people know about the role you’re trying to fill and what the ideal candidate looks like. You might be surprised how quickly you find someone qualified.
4. Work with a qualified staffing firm
So you have more than 1,000 connections on LinkedIn, but you really only know about 200 of them. It’s okay to admit this: We all have a lot of connections who don’t exactly add anything to our professional networks. So, if you’re not sure where to even start with your networking and internal efforts, don’t waste your time. There are recruitment and staffing firms that specialize in this kind of thing.
Staffing firms work with companies in virtually every industry, and their experts have both the experience and connections to find the right talent when you know you’d like somebody to stick around for a while.
Today, 73% of staffing jobs are for full-time roles, which is important to bear in mind when looking for contract workers. It’s going to be more competitive and, again, a tougher sell to workers when you’re looking for a contractor to work full-time.
Still, most agencies (there are more than 12,500 in the US alone) devote at least a quarter of their business to part-time or more gig-focused roles. That number is more likely to rise in coming years as the gig and contract-hire economy gains a bigger foothold in the professional world. You’ll have less competition for talent when you’re looking to fill these more part-time or temporary roles.
Either way, staffing and recruitment agencies have massive networks to pull from, experience in your industry, and the resources to identify the top talent for whatever roles your company is looking to fill.
That way, you can focus on the next two important points and less on the tedious work of scrolling through LinkedIn profiles and sorting through resumes.
5. Simplify onboarding and management processes
Hiring good long-term contract workers is about more than hiring one person — it’s about setting up a productive system for leveraging the gig economy both now and in the future. 48% of new freelancers say they view freelancing as a long-term career choice. The gig economy isn’t going anywhere and it’s only going to get more crowded with talent. If your company wants to make a habit of using contractors, make sure the onboarding and management processes work well.
Once you’ve identified your ideal candidates, you must create an efficient onboarding process that will help ensure smooth transition into their organization. This could involve conducting thorough background checks and interviews, setting up project timelines and milestones, introducing contractors to relevant teams or departments within the company, providing access to necessary resources such as software or equipment, or explaining policies related to confidentiality or intellectual property rights.
The entire process should be designed to give contractors the complete support they need to do their jobs well, and be repeatable enough to scale as you bring on more long-term contract workers. The best contractor strategies are ones that can grow over time.
Make sure your contractors know who their contacts are, understand their expectations and deliverables, and encourage your managers to keep open lines of communication with contractors. Contractors enjoy independence and they don’t want to be micromanaged, but they also want to understand exactly what it is they’re doing and be able to get answers to questions when they have them, especially when working on collaborative projects.
6. Be open to the future
Finally, employers need to make sure that there are sufficient opportunities available for further engagement with potential long-term gig workers beyond just one single job posting on a freelance website.
Establishing strong relationships with talent networks or industry influencers who specialize in recruiting remote talent can be advantageous when it comes time for rehiring former contractors or freelancers for future projects. And, of course, you can always communicate directly to gig workers that you may have more work opportunities for them down the line.
Contractors value flexibility and independence, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to keep working with you as long as you maintain a strong working relationship. You don’t even have to put an end-date on a contract if you don’t know exactly when you won’t need a gig worker anymore — just maintain clear lines of communication so they know when to expect the relationship to end. You can always work together again down the line.
The flexible new worker economy is booming and more companies than ever are trusting long-term contractors for important jobs. But such a competitive market with so few worker protections is rife for mistreatment and mistakes. You want good long-term contract workers who will help your company. You don’t want to shuffle through contractors over and over until you find the right fit. Employers who are upfront, open, and reasonable with expectations and compensation will find the best long-term help.
As the this dynamic new gig-based economy grows and hiring contract help continues to normalize, put these practices in place so you’ll be able to hire the best long-term contract help available on the market.
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