Why Rapid On-boarding Is Crucial for Temporary Staff
When it comes to the gig economy, Uber and Airbnb tend to suck up most of the journalistic oxygen, but in reality, these platforms make up only a fraction of the independent contractor workforce. Instead, analysts say that traditional employment sectors are generating most of the momentum for hiring 1099 workers, and software and technology industries are at the forefront of that wave.
While developers have embraced the flexibility of an increased reliance on independent contractors, many are struggling to adapt traditional onboarding methods to this new dynamic. Here’s what you need to know about the 1099 revolution and what it means for your engineering workforce management.
Software and the Booming Gig Economy
Hard statistics for the explosion in 1099 workers are notoriously hard to come by, mostly because the federal government stopped tracking “contingent workers” in 2005 after failing to find good methods for identifying their numbers. Though the Bureau of Labor Statistics plans to restart its contingent worker research this year, it’ll be some time before reliable numbers are gathered.
In the meantime, a variety of analysts have used tax data and other sources to provide estimates for the gig economy gold rush, and their research consistently confirms that the revolution is well underway. The Freelancers Union estimates that nearly 55 million Americans are currently working as independent contractors, and a study by Intuit predicts that 40 percent of the workforce will consist of freelancers and independent contractors by 2020. Other experts foresee that more than half the workforce will fall into that category by 2030.
Crucially, tech has consistently been the largest industry hiring freelancers, with computer and IT positions in the top spot and software development usually coming in fifth.
As a result, you’ve likely grown familiar with rotating through a continuously refreshing roster of temporary workers, but what does this new dynamic mean for onboarding?
The Challenges of Never-ending Onboarding
The benefits of hiring temporary talent when and where you need it are significant, but an increasingly temporary workforce also makes training seem endless. Indeed, as the freelance industry optimizes and speeds up with aid from a growing number of employer-matching platforms and websites, the length of individual gigs gets shorter and shorter. Under that dynamic, you may feel like more than 50 percent of every new project entails simply onboarding the temporary workers involved with it.
Spending so much time familiarizing your temporary developers with the work environment means you’re in danger of losing all the productivity gains that you hired them for to begin with, marking a clear need for change. While some of that change requires adjusting your internal policies for training and evaluating software teams, you’ll struggle to match the speed of the gig economy without an update to your onboarding technology.
One of the biggest challenges for quick-turnaround projects is initiating workers into the systems used to do the actual work. Manual login assignments and credentialing are common culprits, along with an inability to quickly pass on the documentation necessary for engineers to get up to speed.
Instead of struggling to manually initiate individuals, you’re better served by a platform that can be configured to automatically bring new hires into the fold, smoothing over the most common pain points that lead to on-boarding delays. To get started, learn how SODO onboards engineers and gets them shipping on day one.
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