As all of us begin to adjust to life post-pandemic, one thing is for certain. The way that we work and our definition of work-life balance has drastically changed over the past several years. Together, we’ve learned how to conquer Zoom meetings. How to multitask having both a full-time job at work and oftentimes a full-time job with kids stuck at home from school closures. And perhaps a few of us have picked up a new side hobby baking bread, binge watching shows, or exercising on our Peloton bikes along the way.
So what happens next?
For many of us, remote work is the go-forward path. Many organizations, like SAP, have given their employees the option of working from home or choosing to go back into the office. Other companies have decided that their company culture is best served having everyone back in the office full time. It seems that the great debate in our post pandemic world is: what should the requirement be for the corporate workforce moving forward?
As a software company that serves the external workforce, we realize that there isn’t a one size fits all approach. We have been asked the same question
repeatedly by our customers, our partners, and our suppliers: “How can we have a flexible approach to sourcing talent?”. Many organizations simply don’t care where their talent is located any longer. Hiring Managers want to find the best talent, at the most competitive price, regardless of location.
SAP Fieldglass offers several different features to aid customers in this process:
- To begin, our contingent workforce management module allows customers to create ‘remote’ hiring locations where the supplier can specify where their worker will be located. Our job templates have a feature called “Allow Vendor to Select Job Seeker Site” to enable this flexibility. This does two key things.
- First, it allows the customer to be adaptable in sourcing new positions. No longer does the customer have to dictate where the work must be done upfront. They can simply source from the best talent available and allow their suppliers to say where the worker will be located.
- Second, it implements the appropriate rate card for the worker once the supplier specifies where the person will be located. This is huge. The system can automatically trigger the appropriate rate range, based on market location, for the given resource after the fact. It allows for flexibility up front, but compliance before hiring. This keeps both Hiring Managers and Procurement teams happy without a ton of extra legwork – rate cards are created behind the scenes and implemented at the right moment in time.
- Another feature that is heavily utilized by our client base is rate guidance. While this feature has been around for quite some time, we have recently moved where it is located throughout the hiring process to make market rates more easily visible to Hiring Managers and our MSP partners before engaging a new worker.
- Our new Candidate Profile view has become a one stop shop – it shows all the candidates’ pertinent details (resume, requested rate, qualifications, etc.) while also showing how the worker stacks up against the market rates in a single view. Historically, our customers and MSP partners had to go to multiple places to compare a candidate’s rate against the market benchmark. Now, this work is done for them in one place with one single view.
- Lastly, the Fieldglass Contextual Help feature allows our MSP Partners and Self-Managed Customer teams to create a more guided experience for Hiring Managers along the way. Almost every field in the application can be configurable to give instructions or relevant information. For example, while the Hiring Manager is plugging in a start date for his/her Statement of Work, the procurement team can have a pop-up that reads “Heads Up! It takes our team about 7 days to negotiate and initiate a new Statement of Work. Please keep this in mind while entering a start date.” Alternatively, a hiring manager selecting the location they want to hire from could see a pop up that says “Did you know we now allow for flexible hiring? Simply select the location called ‘Remote Location’ if you want to flexibly source this role and do not care where the worker will be located.” In summary, this feature allows our customers to set expectations and ensure they are retrieving the correct information from their Hiring Managers.
So, while we all continue to navigate these new, unchartered waters in our post-pandemic life, SAP Fieldglass wants to make this a little bit simpler for our customers’ external workforce. Whether your organization is requiring everyone to be back in person, completely remote, or somewhere in between, there are easy steps you can take to make this transition a bit more seamless for your Hiring Managers, your suppliers, and your external workforce.
