Hiring contract employees can take your business to the next level by allowing you to explore new opportunities. In my experience, contractors provide a level of flexibility that a stationary, full-time workforce can’t. If your business falls into any of these three categories, I’d highly recommend hiring third-party workers to improve efficiency.
Free template!
Download this free new employee onboarding template to standardize your process, especially if you are hiring for contract positions to ensure a smooth integration.
Remote or widespread operations
If your operations are spread around a large geographical area, hiring contract employees provides more staffing flexibility. This is a great option for many industries where worksites are remote or diverse. Examples include:
- Oil & Gas
- Mining
- Construction
- Energy production
The biggest benefit here is that you don’t have the travel expenses of sending full-time workers to these locations. Instead, you can build a workforce of transient contractors who will be available for geographically remote jobs, facilitating the hiring of contract staff.
Hiring contract employees to complete lots of projects
The everyday tasks involved in running a company can sometimes slow down innovation. Special projects get pushed aside in favor of essential business functions. But over time, projects that were once unessential become critical to the performance of the company. So, if you want to avoid long-term issues from these types of projects, it’s important to prioritize continuous improvement.
Bringing in contract employees can allow your facility to tackle multiple projects without impacting overall productivity, making the prospect of hiring temporary help worthwhile.
For example, imagine you work in a manufacturing facility and your maintenance team is too busy to work on broken equipment tickets. If left broken, departments will slowly begin to reorder brand new equipment so they can continue working. This creates unnecessary cost and ultimately waste (when the broken equipment gets thrown out rather than repaired).
In this scenario, outsourcing the equipment repairs to a contractor is a great solution. It allows your maintenance team to focus on core equipment instead, so the operation doesn’t shut down.
And of course, this is just one example. Contractors can help with all kinds of projects, from IT work to HR processes. If your company has a lot of unfinished improvements and other types of projects to complete, consider hiring third-party workers to help in your efforts to deploy contract staff effectively.
Complex, highly specialized processes
Businesses with highly specialized processes should seriously consider engaging contract workers. And that’s because limiting your workforce to just those people you can hire in-house may make operations more difficult to keep running smoothly.
Here are some examples of industries where hiring contract employees is common because the process is specialized or highly technical:
- Structural iron and steel work
- Biomedical engineering
- Medical research, testing, etc.
- Solar, wind, hydro energy production
It may be hard to find people with the qualifications to hire full-time. That’s where contract employees can broaden your potential pool of applicants. Perhaps you only need a specialized individual to install, approve, or review an element of your process. Rather than expending resources to find someone with those skills long-term, explore how hiring that role as a contract position could be more viable, with a finite start and end date. This can be particularly advantageous in industries with niche expertise.
If you’re planning to work with contractors, consider using a digital management system to verify and train them. Frontline CSM is a contractor safety management solution for verifying worker identities, uploading and managing documents, and assigning training requirements as well. Check out the video below to learn more about it and schedule a demo with our sales team to explore Frontline CSM for your business.
