Bath & North East Somerset Council Case Study
02 Aug, 2023
‘The world of work is changing’ – how many times have you heard that in the last 18 months? Talent delivery is evolving, and the brightest tech talent has more options than ever for work as remote working becomes second nature to us and business booms again. Legal legislation like IR35 has also brought with it new hurdles for businesses getting outcomes, making talent solutions an increasingly attractive option.
Within our recruitment business during our every day, have had clients ask for new ways to help them beyond just providing candidates or ‘bums on seats’, as the market picks up, and we have thought carefully about how we can use our skills, huge resources, and impressive pool of talent, to provide a service, clearly defined deliverables and achieve great outcomes for partners.
So, we’ve built something new we’re extremely proud of.
Why expand into talent solutions, and why now?
We’ve seen first-hand how the contracts industry is being affected by IR35 and COVID, and the difficulty in recruiting tech talent in Architecture, Development and Data, in addition to the need to manage resources in a different way.
We felt a pressing need to offer a comprehensive solution for the clients we’ve been successfully partnering with as Understanding Recruitment, so have been working behind the scenes for several years to launch Understanding Solutions.
Understanding Solutions is about empowering our clients and candidates to come together and deliver against a set of defined outcomes – this can be anything from a consultancy led-solution to delivering whole teams as a service.
Let’s break down the benefits of working with a Talent Solutions provider:
1. Access to the best professionals in your tech market
We understand that it can feel challenging to get the right tech talent in the marketplace right now. Digital transformation is a growing need, but the professionals you may need and agile squads aren’t easiest to come by – it’s competitive and expensive.
Within permanent recruitment, it’s a huge challenge to attract and retain the best talent within the market and salaries are at a premium right now as a result. Counter-offers are increasingly common, employees are being held to their notice period and asked to stay longer to try and keep hold of talent.
Time constraints can be tighter because of the pandemic, and service to permanent can really help in getting projects off the ground and running effectively, quickly.
A service to permanent model allows you to bolster your team with the right skill set and give them a great handover – the perfect blend of both worlds. It allows partners to start projects, have what’s needed inhouse and when the ideal permanent talent is available within the team or externally roll back the service, and have exactly what they required. This can work for outsourcing projects, building apps, and more, as it keeps development and projects ongoing. The internal knowledge and innovation are kept in-house, whilst issues are addressed and outcomes are delivered effectively.
Working with a solutions provider that is part of a recruitment organisation, brings with it the ability to scale very quickly. There are 100,000 people on our bench that want to engage with us and are specialists in the market – we know who’s available and can offer different options and move quickly, dependant on a partner’s needs.
If one day, you need a front end developer for two weeks and then you need a back end developer – working with a talent solutions provider offers that fluidity and scale, with only 48 hours' notice needed.
2. Save time with team augmentation
Team augmentation or Teams as a Service is the ideal option for clients that want to integrate quick, reliable teams on the ground and scale them up as quickly as possible and introduce a service through a provider. This works particularly well for projects that have pressing deadlines.
If you don’t wish to completely outsource projects, but still need extra resources or skills to fulfil project needs team augmentation ensures knowledge transfer internally but deliver measurable outcomes quickly.
3. Benefitting from outcome-based work and safeguarding from IR35
Working with a contractor obviously has benefits in a traditional recruitment sense, but what it doesn’t provide is safeguarding from IR35, unless real due diligence is done. There also aren’t any guaranteed outcomes, and if you don’t quite get the service you wanted you are still liable to pay for it.
There’s a pressing need to provide more measurable, accurate, and trackable ways of working and rewarding.
This pain of finding the right talent can be minimised by working with a provider focused on outcome-based work and through having an SOW (Statement of Work), you get exactly what you needed delivered. An SOW framework can be used for any type of service that is clearly defined, with managed outcomes between parties.
It also is time-consuming to manage contractors and work out the processes in place to do so, putting a strain on senior managers to deliver resources as well as do their day job. Completely outsourcing this means less of a headache internally, whilst still training the great tech talent and benefitting from governance and increased reporting.
4. Better cost control
When a client needs a certain skill set but doesn’t need to retain it on a full time and permanent basis, a talent solutions provider can be the ideal partner. If a company, for instance, doesn’t have the funds to pay an Enterprise Data Architect permanently, for example, but they do need a service to be delivered to a very high standard and for someone to set up and manage the service for a reasonable price, it’s hugely beneficial.
Following over a decade in the market placing the most sought-after developers, we already have the talent to get you to where you need to be. We also don’t believe in providing you with a very expensive service due to our brand reputation, but pricing to suit different budgets. We don’t see clients paying through the roof and getting little outcome and deliverables achieved as a win for anyone, but instead are laser-focused on building true partnerships.
If working with a talent partner on an outcome-based basis to a manageable budget and having access to high-performing teams that can be easily scaled up, appeals to your business needs, get in touch to find out more about partnering with Understanding Solutions. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn too.
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