5 Effective Freelancer (or Contingent Worker) Redeployment Strategies

For future and long-term success, restructuring within a company is often essential — and that means making changes to your staff. But as most business leads know, bringing on new hires brings various associated costs. That’s why companies choose to enact redeployment strategies.

Workplace redeployment is when a staff member leaves a team or position to work in a different role for the same company. For instance, a worker might leave an overstaffed team to work with a different group that has a greater demand for their skills. This method offers greater opportunities to position contingent workers inside your company from project to project, department to department.

Especially amidst the pandemic landscape, companies are searching for business continuity methods and looking for cost-effective solutions. And since insiders cannot be redeployed easily, redeploying freelancers has become the best way for companies to access skilled talent.

Instead of having to go through the process of sourcing and hiring for new positions, hiring managers can tap into their existing worker pool, reducing the time involved in most hiring methods.

The key is to match freelancers with the right skill sets and motivation to learn to newly opened positions in the company. Not only does this method save money on severance and other costs, but it also reduces costs of recruitment, hiring, and onboarding.

By filling open positions internally, redeployment strategies will allow your organization to mitigate these costs and improve efficiencies. But how do you apply a redeployment strategy? And what are the best strategies to implement? Here are five effective freelancer redeployment strategies.

1. Find the Right Person for the Right Job at the Right Time

In some cases, companies might experience surplus staff or an employee whose role has become excess to requirements. Before you can start redeploying contingent workers in your organization, the first step to successful redeployment is ensuring you have a worker available to fill a position — someone who has the right transferable skills, and someone who is looking for a new opportunity.  

Next comes the transition period. The process of transitioning doesn’t happen by chance; matching career goals, talents, and available opportunities is a deliberate decision.

Growing in a new role with a new team will take more than just a manual HR team. In fact, most HR teams don’t have the right resources to implement a redeployment strategy. Fortunately, there are effective tech solutions to streamline the process. 

Companies can partner up with career transition services that offer the right support. Specifics like interview counseling, job matching, and branding materials can help you match the right freelancer for the right job. What’s more, these technologies can show freelancers the key areas in which they can most effectively apply their skills.

2. Target Skill-Sets

As businesses continue to change, hiring top talent with unique skills is vital to improving the productivity of your company. However, company leaders are concerned there might be a skill shortage, according to Gartner Inc. 

Enter, freelancer redeployment. 

As Harvard Business Review explains, highly specialized skills are often not available internally and must be found through outside, or freelance, talent. And since skills are the glue that holds your company’s departments together, targeting skill-sets among freelancers is the way to go. 

A contingent worker’s ability to formulate persuasive emails, conduct presentations, and build networks and strong relationships could make them ideal for another internal role. Product managers and salespeople, for example, are very different roles, but both positions require similar strengths involving the ability to explain the functions and goals of a product or service. 

Rather than just reassigning and diverting tasks, your company should maintain a focus on transferable skill sets. You can edit job descriptions to describe a position’s desired skills or organize communications to create awareness of which skill sets are required for open roles. 

3. Offer Opportunities for Internal Networking

When optimizing the redeployment strategy, it’s important to make sure all your employees know about the new job opening within your company. Plus, not all employees who are looking for new opportunities might be confident enough to voice their interests. By facilitating communications between different teams and departments, you can create opportunities for collaboration amongst all team members. 

Whether it’s virtual team-building activities to create internal connections, offering outreach suggestions for less-confident workers, or creating opportunities for people to showcase their talents and skills, you can introduce new internal connections to enhance your redeployment methods. 

4. Communicate With Your Staff

For any redeployment process to succeed, you’ll need to be in frequent communication with your managers and employees. Managers can offer support for your redeployment strategy by staying in the know with employees’ career goals and aspirations. Then, when an employee feels they’re ready to further their career, your company can swoop in with a suitable position that will help them achieve their goals.

That way, instead of going through the work finding and hiring candidates, most of the work has already been completed, and you can quickly transition the employee into their new role. Even if a worker might not be ready for full redeployment, staying open with department heads about small project openings can create opportunities to collaborate with other teams. 

5. Create a Culture of Continuous Learning

As your company evolves, it’s important to encourage a culture of growth. Spotlighting team achievements and outcomes can promote a positive company culture, which can further promote connection within the company. 

That way, when it comes time to start your redeployment strategy, your team members are already open to new ideas, company changes, and developing new skill sets. This will also help you notice changes with your employees early on, so you can develop new capabilities for future roles. 

Even hosting initiates where leaders can share stories about key career steps or employees share reproach articles about future careers and changing work trends can establish a learning-oriented company culture. 

A company should always be structuring itself to be future-ready. Utilizing these five freelance redeployment strategies can help your organization stay agile and engaged with new talent. 

 

Author: Cesar Jimenez, myBasePay CEO
Cesar A. Jimenez is an entrepreneur, investor, and military veteran with over 25 years of staffing industry expertise successfully leading technology staffing organizations. His expertise in the IT industry allows him to use his experience as a thought leader for talent acquisition, staffing, IT, and recruitment technologies with a passion for contingent workforce solutions. Cesar has held various leadership roles for both a global staffing organization and technology solutions companies. This expertise has enabled him to develop alternative workforce models that provide the agility for organizations to be competitive in today’s marketplace. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with hisfamily, working out, and coaching high school baseball players.