Hiring with Purpose to Boost Profitability
Hiring flexible contract talent for your specific needs, rather than maintaining large, fully staffed departments, can boost profitability, especially in uncertain times.
The most successful businesses in the 21st century are the ones making strategic innovations, as opposed to product innovations. That’s according to a theory known as the “wheel of strategic innovation.” In other words, businesses that continue to succeed also continue to innovate instead of leveling off with their peers.
Ideally, then, the leadership of small- and mid-sized businesses would spend most of their time focused on the future of their organizations. All too often, however, leadership’s time is filled with various tasks that gobble up their day. Earning the full ROI for your time does not simply mean you’re busy throughout the day; it means you were able to prioritize and accomplish the most valuable tasks.
Optimizing Time and Efficiencies to Achieve an ROI
For business leaders to earn a true ROI on their time, they need to understand the value of their time, prioritize how that time is spent, and efficiently delegate the remaining responsibilities.
1. Valuation: Understanding how much your time is worth goes beyond simple math (i.e., dividing how much you earn per week/month/year by the number of hours you work). For leadership, there is an intangible quality to the value of your time and understanding that value is paramount to systematically evaluating and prioritizing your everyday tasks. Investing your time vs. spending it is essential to business success – especially during uncertain times.
2. Prioritization: Since no two schedules are the same, this element differs from person to person. Is it better for you to focus on existing policies that earn $2000 a month or innovate new strategies that could earn $20,000 per month? The answer to that question seems obvious, but you cannot afford to sacrifice existing income. That’s why the third aspect is important.
3. Work Delegation: When it comes to your business, you may view every task as essential. However, some elements require your or your team’s attention while other work can be delegated.
Understanding the difference between core work (tasks that provide direct value to clients) and non-core (behind the scene tasks that are necessary to support client value) is the starting point for effective delegation. This is where a company’s talent strategy becomes important. Because not only is it essential that there are enough people to perform the remaining tasks, you need to trust that their performance will be excellent.
However, following the COVID-19 pandemic- and economic downturn-sized twist that impacted every business in 2020, some business owners find it is more challenging to balance the complexity of staffing and work models with the demand for nimble strategies to innovate and deliver customer value.
There is a surprise silver lining to this cloud. The instability of 2020 has made it much easier for many companies to transition to a nimble hiring strategy in order to meet pressing needs for both themselves and their customers.
ROI of a Nimble Hiring Strategy
“In a nimble hiring strategy, businesses utilize a supply chain of on-demand contractors that can easily be scaled up or down, as needed,” said Elizabeth Eiss, Founder and CEO of the talent curation and freelance recruiting platform ResultsResourcing.
Companies that employ a nimble talent strategy continually seek to optimize the perfect blend of core employees, and supplemental skilled contractors or freelancers who work together in a talent ecosystem to achieve business objectives and deliver client value.
“Often the biggest concern, when shifting to a nimble talent strategy, is the fear that evaluating and hiring a pool of contractors will become even more time-consuming – and costly – than maintaining a full-time staff, especially for businesses with limited HR expertise. However, the simple solution is for companies to work with a trustworthy contract recruiting provider. Once that relationship is established – vetting and recruiting contractors occurs seamlessly behind the scenes. This is how small- and mid-sized businesses earn a substantial ROI from their time and their freelancers,” said Eiss.
