We talk a lot at PeopleCaddie about the value of contingent labor and the importance of building a workforce with the right balance of contractors and full-time staffers. Generally speaking, contingent laborers can be hired faster, at a lower overall cost, while providing a company business flexibility in any market. But what about where to find those contractors?

Some of the largest organizations maintain their own network of contractors – a massive human resources investment that still doesn’t always meet a company’s needs. (If tax auditing is your organization’s business, you probably aren’t ideally equipped to hire a cybersecurity administrator.) This is why companies have often turned to a third-party vendor for hiring help – usually a staffing agency. And while working with an agency may be more effective than building out a well-rounded in-house HR staff with the capacity to fill both your full-time and contract reqs, it isn’t necessarily the most effective option.

Rather than defaulting to a traditional staffing agency, modern organizations are increasingly engaging with talent clouds to land (and stay connected to) their preferred contingent laborers. To answer why, let’s take a closer look:

Quality

For any firm that’s in the business of hiring, success begins with identifying the best talent. But you have to give that talent a reason to join (and stay engaged with) your network, or they’ll gravitate to a competitor who will.

This is where talent clouds shine. Whereas traditional agencies take a scattershot approach to tracking down a contractor after receiving a request from a client, talent clouds already have a network of known contractors at the ready. At PeopleCaddie, we’ll even work directly with you to help curate your search and find the very best candidate for the role you need to fill. We’re searching for the perfect fit for every party involved, which is why the best contractors like working through us.

Differentiated Supply

Any company seeking outside hiring help should prioritize firms that already have strong ties to the population of contractors needed for the job. For example, at PeopleCaddie we’ve cultivated a network of over fifty thousand contractors in the public accounting space. While that sector isn’t our only area of focus, any organization looking to hire a razor-sharp CPA can feel confident that we’ll understand their needs and be able to help them find the right resource for their role.

Again, relationships and network-building are the name of the game here. The more we are able to identify the best candidates and place them with choice companies in high-quality roles, the more likely we are to attract even more top talent – which allows more of our clients to access deep wells of talent and quickly hire for hard-to-fill roles. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Faster Response

Part of the expense – and hassle – of hiring comes down to one thing that may be every company’s most precious resource: time. The longer a position stays unfilled, the greater the drag on production. Moreover, even after a candidate is hired, the onboarding process may be slower for some than others.

When working through an agency, the expectation should be, at minimum, 3-4 days before your company begins seeing viable candidates. Talent clouds, on the other hand, rely on pre-existing pipelines and advanced technology (often connecting clients to prime candidates within a day or two) and are thus better suited to identify the best talent for the job and the contractor most likely to hit the ground running. That saves a company time and, ultimately, money.

Verifiable Credentials

Traditional staffing agencies typically aren’t as connected to, or familiar with, the talent they eventually put in front of their clients. They lack an overarching strategy, often playing the volume game, rather than focusing on effectiveness. The PeopleCaddie platform, by comparison, allows employers to access our network of talent, including verified ratings and performance histories of candidates – all of it provided by previous employers.

The level of specificity within each profile, as well as the ability to verify a candidate’s credentials, aren’t just competitive advantages for companies hiring contractors – they’re game changers. And we can curate the experience for you, offering you varying levels of touch – all the way up to our white glove service, depending on your comfort level and the significance of the hire. In short, PeopleCaddie provides technology when you want it and people when you don’t.

Check out the contingent roles the PeopleCaddie talent cloud can fill for your business.