There are many reasons for companies to work with contract employees. Focused skills and expertise, talent availability, and staffing flexibility are just a few of the benefits provided by freelance professionals.
Before deciding if you’ll be outsourcing jobs, the first critical task is to define which roles in your company are best suitable for freelancers. To do so, it is essential to assign roles as either core or non-core.
Determining What Is and Isn’t a Core Role
Core tasks are the roles that directly drive customer value. These tasks have a direct impact on business performance and can give a company an edge over the competition. For example, the design team is core to a toy company, while the sales team is essential to realtors. Core roles can change and evolve as a company grows and develops. So, a periodic evaluation is advisable.
Non-core roles are the positions that support core work. For the most part, these tasks are not needed 40 hours per week, every week. Some possibilities include admin, marketing, social media, HR, and training and development, but these jobs vary by company.
The term “non-core” is a little misleading. Do not fall into the trap of thinking of these roles as unimportant or “the least valuable.” Non-core work is equally important as core work. It’s just not something that directly impacts your customer’s perception of your business. For example, your company may not always need the services of a graphic designer. But when you do, it’s likely to design a piece that will market your services to the public. So, the work must be of the highest quality.
“When non-core positions are staffed by full-time employees – such as when a project takes four to six hours to complete, but an employee is being paid for eight – those costs must be recouped. And the most likely candidate to feel the burden of those expenses is the end consumer. So, companies with poorly defined core and non-core roles are placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage because they lack the pricing flexibility of their more agile peers in the marketplace,” said Elizabeth Eiss, Founder and CEO of the talent curation and freelance recruiting platform ResultsResourcing.
Core and non-core roles vary from industry to industry, specialty to specialty, and company to company. That is why intimate knowledge of a company is needed to specifically define those positions. Understanding these concepts around outsourcing jobs can help boost profitability for your business while continuing to drive results.
Contracting in Times of Uncertainty
In an unstable economy, understanding what jobs are essential to your company’s business and customer success is more important than ever.
In addition, when the U.S. went into a country-wide shut down due to the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic, businesses that could continue to operate had to do so remotely, quickly adopting unfamiliar technologies and work practices. For many, it was an awkward time. Yet, today, most of those companies have employees who sit down in their home offices and seamlessly work remotely.
These remote working experiments, the successful ones, anyway, have become standard operating procedure post-pandemic.
“Layoffs and reduced hours forced many companies to think about what roles are essential and how to make the biggest impact with their labor dollars while navigating the uncertainties like COVID-19, a down economy, and impending recession.”
“It is this thinking that has made it especially important for companies to define their core and non-core roles. By transitioning non-core tasks to contract professionals, companies open themselves up to a vast pool of resources and create a talent ecosystem where core positions are supported by a circle of professional contractors,” said Eiss.
If you’re focused on growing or scaling your business – outsourcing to freelancers can help you do it more effectively.
