Team Force: SmartStaffing

Smartstaffing (Smart - "smart" + English Staff - "staff") is a management technology that allows organizations to provide and attract temporarily available personnel with the necessary qualifications on a schedule or on demand in order to most effectively manage the availability of specialized personnel resources.

2012: Technology Description

According to the smartstaffing algorithm, the employer - the owner of the resource provides to the open labor market (specialized information and trading Internet platforms, etc.) information about the professional competence of its full-time employee available for a certain period of time and about the readiness to offer it to the consumer at a certain market price (indicated cost of man-hour, consult-day, etc.)

The employer - consumer of competence confirms its interest in the consumption of this competence and reserves it with subsequent purchase as a service available on a pre-established schedule or one-time request.

As part of smartstaffing, employers - legal entities, each of which experiences a project need for personnel and at the same time is actually forced to pay for downtime and underutilization of their employees, participate in the formation of an "exchange" b2b-market for contract labor services. At different points in time, they can act either in one of two roles (competency owner/consumer) or in both roles at the same time.

Smartstaffing as a form of temporary recruitment

Some experts consider smartstaffing to be a specialized project form of temporary staffing - the provision of personnel for short-term projects. The services of "contractors" - temporary workers attracted for a period of several hours to a month, are paid strictly by hours, in contrast to leasing, which involves a longer employment relationship - from a month or more - and payment at a monthly rate.

According to the marketing agency MarketLab, today in Europe and the United States temporary employees - "contractors" make up 30% of the total number of jobs, in Japan - up to 80%. In Russia, this widespread form of attracting personnel in the West is not yet taking root too actively. However, according to Ventra Employment (Mirantis IT holding), the growth of the temporary staffing market in the IT direction of the Russian economy from 2002 to 2011 amounted to 720%.

Smartstaffing as a personnel strategy

The high level of competition and the constant increase in the requirements for the number and qualifications of personnel today force design-oriented organizations to look for effective strategies for the prompt involvement of the required number of employees with an applied set of competencies in new projects.

So, many geographically distributed companies - especially in the field of high technologies - are in continuous need to provide additional expertise for their regional projects. However, as a rule, these organizations do not have the opportunity to accept as many specialists of the necessary qualifications as necessary for the reliable functioning of all open projects for an acceptable amount of money in a limited time.

Smartstaffing technology is able to offer business more flexible and operational, in contrast to traditional recruiting and leasing, solutions for project involvement of specialists. The main selection criterion is the availability for a certain period of time of professionals with a certain set of skills and knowledge.

For the HR planning system of organizations, the option of preliminary "reservation" of temporarily free professional competencies provided in smartstaffing is of great importance.

According to experts, smartstaffing opens up new opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses in organizing accounting and efficient use of their labor resources, in particular, minimizing its downtime, utilization of resources during the planned or unscheduled end of the project.

In the course of simultaneous execution of a large number of projects in companies, it often becomes necessary to revise priorities, change plans, solve project tasks in parallel, urgently transfer specialists to other areas, projects. This greatly complicates the management of remote resources, and as a result, reduces the efficiency of the business of design-oriented organizations.

Smartstaffing allows you to establish project portfolio management using the optimal and dynamic distribution of labor resources - not only between individual projects of one enterprise in a "multi-project," but also between projects of different enterprises operating in the same industry paradigm.

Smartstaffing services involve not only the use by the provider of its own information base of labor resources, but also its close integration with project management systems and customer labor resources. In this regard, the personnel strategy of smartstaffing is an adequate response to the challenges of the modern market, offering users integration management solutions.

Smartstaffing Prospects

Experts believe that the fastest pace of smartstaffing, as a technology for project involvement of specialists with complex and/or unique expertise for "intelligent" organizations, will develop in the most advanced sectors of the IT sphere, such as:

• system integration of ERP and CRM systems, including working with specialists certified in key technologies, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Epicor, etc.;
• Design and support service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud solutions
• application development, including flexible development methodology Agile ();
• Program Management and Project Management;
• Implementation and support of ECM systems (Enterprise Content Management), primarily Documentum and FileNet
• Database Management - building database warehouses (DataWarehouse) and developing application software;
• development of business applications on Java,.NET, and SharePoint platforms.

It is most appropriate to use smartstaffing technologies in cases where the company's business is largely dependent on the qualifications of key specialists and the effectiveness of applying their basic competencies, for example, in such sectors of the economy as:

• comprehensive audit and consulting;
• analysis and forecasting of market conditions;
• standardization, metrology and certification;
• integrated marketing communications, etc.

Highly specialized design-oriented companies are interested in the resource attraction of the competencies of unique specialists using smartstaffing:

• design bureaus,
• large advertising and PR agencies,
• large recruiting and T&D agencies, etc.

Benefits of smartstaffing

Benefits of smartstaffing for employers

• Improving key business performance indicators through more rational and complete use of labor resources;
• Minimizing costs due to the ability to maintain the optimal number of specialists in the staff and timely project involvement of personnel with any necessary, including a unique set of competencies;
• Flexibility of personnel loading, increasing the speed of search for specialists with the necessary design qualifications;
• Acceleration, intensification of development without significant expenditure of monetary and temporary resources required for training and professional development of available personnel.

Benefits of smartstaffing for workers

Increase employee motivation, both in terms of advanced training and in terms of additional income;

The ability to use automated time management systems and online calculations, which are convenient solutions for both a contract employee and a freelance specialist.

Legal basis of smartstaffing

In many respects, the development of this area in Russia will be facilitated by the development of a legal framework for the provision of smartstaffing services.

Relationship between the Service Operator and the employee (specialist)

The smartstaffing compliance with the labor legislation is ensured by the direct employer - the Service Operator. In practice, this means formalizing labor relations with employees in accordance with the current labor legislation and providing all rights and guarantees provided for by law.

During the provision of the service, the employee is withdrawn from the staff of the customer company (consumer of competence) and registered with the staff of the provider company, while he continues to work in the same place and fulfill his previous duties, but the employer's duties towards him are already performed by the provider company.

Relationship between Service Operator and Resource Owner

The Resource Owner enters into an outstaffing civil law contract with the Provider (Operator) - that is, the Operator temporarily takes over the functions of the agency for the provision of personnel.

Relationship between the Service Operator and the Competence Buyer

The competency consumer enters into a framework contract with the provider (Operator) for the provision of smartstaffing services - that is, the provision of personnel with the necessary competencies on a schedule or on demand (smartstaffing logic: from involving personnel in the provision of competencies).

At the same time, the Provider (Operator) does not act as a party to the contractual relationship between the consumer and the seller of labor resources and is not responsible for the information provided by them.

Thanks to the priority use of Internet communication and cloud computing tools (see: Smartstaffing and cloud technologies), smartstaffing creates favorable conditions for the emergence of new production and service relations both between employers and employees, and between employers themselves.

Smartstaffing and Cloud

In the context of the intellectualization of production and management, the possibility of creating an integrated system for managing remote labor resources based on "cloud technologies" is becoming more and more attractive. However, only recently, the idea of ​ ​ a "virtual cloud" as a way to manage the availability of personnel in certain market segments began to find its practical implementation in the smartstaffing IT project to create an information-analytical and trading b2b portal.

Unlike personnel leasing technology, the personnel, information about which is provided to the consumer of smartstaffing services, is initially located not in the staff of the supplier company, but in the "competence cloud" - the combination of virtual information resources and employer databases. The task of the service provider is to provide temporarily available competencies from the cloud in real time on the basis of a one-time transaction or according to a pre-set schedule that suits both the owner and the consumer of resources.

The "virtual labor exchange" dispensed by the smartstaffer allows employers to easily and quickly navigate various offers for temporarily available labor resources and select the optimal time/price/quality ratio for themselves, based on their financial capabilities, complexity and scale of tasks.

(data current as of April 2012)