Rise to the challenge of managing short-term IT staffing needs

January 28, 2020
Bob Hatfield

For today’s human resource professionals, recruiting for short-term specialists required to reach particular business goals is a crucial challenge. When an organization needs to upgrade existing technology or transition to a new solution, this staffing challenge becomes more complex.

When tasked with finding the right IT expert to carry out a short-term strategic initiative, HR staff members often devote the majority of their time toward filling that role. By diverting their attention, the management team disrupts standard HR workflows, taking away from the day-to-day functions necessary to keep the organization on target for high-priority business and personnel goals.

Short term specialty hires


For your IT department, the strategic initiatives you are recruiting for can range from customizing new technology like SD-WAN to improve cloud application performance, to accessing an expert programmer to build tailor-made interactive software. No matter the goal, challenges can arise when searching for the right IT expert, setting up the contract and benefits, onboarding and integrating them into the project, and extending or closing the project at the end of the term. 

To overcome these challenges, HR personnel will often meet with their internal IT team and other stakeholders to define the scope of the project and the required expertise to develop a plan. In the case of the SD-WAN implementation, for example, the IT team will report on the state of the current MPLS or hybrid WAN environment and desired outcomes for stakeholders, like a better cloud app experience at the branch level. From there, based on in-house expertise, the project leads can decide upon team size and skillsets needed to complete all tasks in the desired timeframe. They will also anticipate and document factors affecting the timeline, potential technical issues during implementation, and customizations required to work with and boost the performance of the existing infrastructure. 

With that input, the HR team and project leads can perform a workforce analysis, examining the details around the project team structure, task optimization, costs analysis, and any other factors that can affect outcomes.

Finding an IT staffing partner to help

With today’s streamlined workforces and often limited budgets to add personnel, project leads frequently find they don’t have the internal resources available for a deep-dive analysis to uncover the gaps. Moreover, many companies now outsource a majority of their HR functions to third-party providers; indeed, the transition of many enterprise workflows is well underway to more agile and digital models. Also, many organizations have partnered with IT companies that offer flexible staffing—for both day-to-day maintenance focused on efficiency and cost containment and for more strategic needs aimed at innovation and technologies to address future business goals. 

Under this bimodal IT staffing model, companies can shift their staffing levels with the technical demands of the business, mirroring the ways they can dynamically scale cloud services in real time. And for their strategic initiatives, the same IT partner can bring in the right skillsets from people with specific expertise within the desired timeframe and budget. In this manner, people responsible for an often time-consuming and expensive search for technical specialists can now direct their attention to meeting both core and strategic business goals.

Read: Companies turn to IT staffing services for digital transformation

Finding qualified IT candidates, however, is just the start of the process Today’s technology savvy enterprises often turn to outside staffing companies for a wide array of employee management tasks traditionally handled by managers and the HR team. Although not all of these functions will apply to specialized personnel, your IT staffing partner often assists with scheduling, payroll, retirement and benefits, training, and professional certifications, among others. The goal is to provide only the services your company needs to maintain quality staff for its everyday and project-oriented workload. 

In an era of intense competition and thin margins, it’s important to recognize when enterprise employees are stretched to their limits. By offloading non-core functions to providers with the ability to deliver higher quality at lower costs, employees can focus on the revenue-generating activities key to a company’s growth and success.

For companies starting or continuing on their digital transformation journey, the decision is easy. To discover how CBTS IT Staffing and Consulting Services can help, download the eBook today.

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