A contingent workforce solution is a business, software, or service which helps employers with onboarding, managing, paying contingent workers – seasonal workers, freelancers, contractors, consultants.
Organizations generally use contingent workforce solutions to manage external employees at scale.
The Importance and Need for a Contingent Workforce Solution
- Contingent workers are often called seasonal workers or external workers for a reason. Businesses hire contractors and freelancers to supplement the existing workforce with specialist skills. They usually come into the picture to complete specific tasks and projects in a short period.
This hire and fire nature of employment is one reason why you need a contingent workforce solution. Partnering with a contractor staffing company can help you hire and terminate contractors with no compliance or legal repercussions.
- Secondly, managing contingent employees requires a separate share of time and focus. You need to frame dedicated engagement programs, payment solutions, and insurance policies. Your managers need some extra effort and time to manage freelancers and contractors.
Contingent workforce services help companies streamline all managerial and payroll duties involving contingent workers. With a SaaS-based solution, a global contractor workforce, like Multiplier, helps you generate employment contracts, invoices, payslips and maintain them in one place.
- Thirdly, roping in contingent workers brings in the risk of employee misclassification. Each country has different rules when it comes to classifying employees.
For example, the US IRS and Department of Labor state that contingent workers cannot qualify for benefits and bonuses. The agencies also regulate companies from imposing work times for contractors and freelancers. If otherwise, the company has to classify the workers as full-time employees.
- Finally, hiring and setting up separate HR specialists to manage contingent workers is an expensive task. Instead, companies can take advantage of modern-day contingent workforce solutions such as Multiplier.
Pay freelancers and contractors without barriers across 170+ countries in seconds with our point and click payroll solution.
Various Services Offered by a Contingent Workforce Solution
Here are some of the most common reasons businesses choose to partner with a contingent workforce solution:
Onboarding: When hiring contractors worldwide, onboarding becomes a crucial task that needs careful attention. Onboarding begins when you hire a contractor and prepare to send them all the details necessary to employ them in your company. It involves a series of activities such as sending employment contracts, verifying payment details, background checks, offering insurance, and so much more. Contingent workforce platforms pack the needful to seamlessly onboard employees anywhere around the world.
Preparing contracts: Compliance is a buzzword in international hiring. Activities such as preparing employment or freelance contracts for your contract staff require some planning. You need to stay mindful of local hiring, employment, and payroll laws. In countries with sharp distinctions between the federal and central governments, you need to stay abreast of laws and regulations varying at two levels of government. With their watchdog legal and HR experts, contingent workforce solutions can help you here. As you quickly hire employees, we offer you compliant employment contracts to employ them without any legal repercussions.
Timesheets: A holistic contingent workforce solution would also offer features to manage the work done by your employees. An in-built timesheet feature would be useful here. While hiring contractors, you may strategize to hire around the globe. A single space to manage all your workers from around the world can help you monitor the tasks done by your independent contracts without asking them to email their login and log-out times. After all, there is something called too many emails.
International Payroll: A global team should be well-kept and well-paid. With a contingent workforce solution, you can pay employees in an instant. Payrolling is one of the most sought-after reasons to partner with contingent workforce solutions. Most tech-based solutions offer payment gateway integrations to pay your contractors from within the platform seamlessly.
Taxes: Contractors and freelancers manage their taxes on their own. You do need to withhold taxes for them. A
Benefits: Although several countries do not regulate employers to offer employee benefits for their countries, employers can still offer insurance programs. These programs can target worker safety and a minimum level of coverage.
However, to partner with the right insurance vendor, you will need to do due diligence of your local market.
Partnering with a contingent workforce solution can help you offer targeted insurance programs. By doing so, you become a more attractive employer for your contractor.
Compliance: Compliance is key when building successful global teams. Contingent workforce solutions help you manage and pay teams with compliance.
Benefits of Contingent Workforce Solutions:
Scale your contingent workforce faster: For example, with Multiplier, users onboard an unlimited number of employees in a matter of minutes. Partnering with a contingent workforce solution can help you be agile with expanding your team.
Get 24×7 support: Managing your global workforce of contractors requires a heightened sense of awareness. You need dedicated professionals to manage their needs, respond to work and pay-related queries. Contractors leave employees if there are issues in particular with payments.
A contingent workforce solution provides you with a league of experts who work around the clock to take care of your employees. Experts in local employment laws and compliance can offer a new dimension to the employee experience.
Avoid permanent establishment risk: Contingent workforce solutions also have an Employer of Record wing. You can take advantage of these organizations to employ foreign workers with no local entity. By doing so, you escape the risks of permanent establishment risks.
Avoid the risk of misclassification: By employing contractors through the right employment contracts and offering compliant benefits, you can subsume the risk of misclassification.
Tech-based solutions like Multiplier automate most parts of employing contractors. You can compliantly employ and pay workers in a few clicks.
Country-specific employment contracts: With their experts and partners create, employment contracts that encompass country-specific:
- Taxation laws
- Payroll laws
- Social security laws
- Discrimination laws
- Duration
- Responsibilities
With Multiplier’s point and click employment platform, you can generate multi-lingual contracts. These contracts are fully compliant with ruling regulations enabling you to scale from zero to fully stacked tech and sales team in a few days.
Pay Workers Internationally Hassle-free: Businesses sometimes use contingent workforce solutions purely to transfer payments to their globally distributed teams. Often, employers fail to take into account currency conversion charges while paying freelancers.
Moreover, your payroll teams may need to maintain hundreds of spreadsheets and invoices to track payments.
Solutions like Multiplier can help you pay contractors and freelancers in over 170+ currencies. All you need to do is point and click and stay worry-free about your payments racing employees on time.
Payments are automated and consolidated. You receive one monthly invoice instead of hundreds. This saves your internal teams time and effort.
Effortless end-to-end project management:. You can collaborate with freelancers, manage deliverables with ease, and keep an eye on costs through real-time insights and budget burndown data.
How to Choose a Contingent Workforce Solution
With all of the technological options available, companies may find it difficult to select a solution right for them. Businesses should look for solutions that allow them to scale while maintaining a high level of organization and internal management easily. It’s essential for contractors and freelancers to use the platform to upload all relevant information with minimal training and direction. Furthermore, when managing such a large group, companies should look for a solution that offers analytical features about their contingent workforce.
As companies become more reliant on the contingent workforce, organizing this group will become more complex, which is why it’s essential to invest in a contingent workforce solution now that can support these efforts.
