General

Contingent Labor Is Having Its Moment – and It’s Not Going Away

Industry is evolving. And as the fundamental nature of business has changed in recent years, the makeup of the workforce has had to change, with more of an emphasis on contingent labor.

An economy once based on industrialization, mass production of goods and high-volume labor has transitioned into a data- and professional-services-based economy, one that is more reliant on specialized, project and temporary work. Naturally, an influx of freelancers, contractors and consultants into the workforce has followed. There’s no doubt contingent labor is currently having a moment – but it also appears to be here to stay.

The rising contingent labor trend grew into a full-blown movement during the pandemic, which drove many former “traditional perm” workers to seek alternative employment or convinced them it was time to finally give freelancing a try. Forty percent of the American workforce today is made up of contingent labor, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, and one estimate suggests that half of the working population in this country will be freelancing by 2027.

Yet how we arrived here isn’t as important as whether the new paradigm is working. The consensus: a resounding “yes,” on both sides. Employees who had grown weary of office life, the daily commute and grappling with child-care logistics have embraced contract work wholeheartedly. Others who were initially less certain of its merits have learned how the flexibility of freelancing has improved their work-life balance. A recent Upwork study found that 60 percent of freelancers said no amount of money would convince them to take a traditional job, even after the pandemic ends.

At the same time, more employers who previously had resisted contingent labor are discovering that it can be a sort of skeleton key to productivity, with lower associated cost and far higher flexibility than hiring a full-timer outright. It is, however, the best bridge to a staff position, offering employers the ability to gauge a contractor’s skills and cultural fit prior to assuming the additional risk of extending an offer for permanent employment.

The macro need for contract work isn’t cyclical, making it one of the most recession-proof areas of HR. Whether pre- or post-pandemic, no matter the ebbs and flows of the economy, contingent labor will be in demand. And with the stigma of freelance work having nearly evaporated, more employees are not only accepting – but will expect – contract opportunities from companies of all stripes. Even if contingent labor weren’t the most efficient means for generating margin from a workforce (though, to be clear, it is), gig work is being sought out by more employees than ever. A professional relationship that registers as a win for both management and labor will continue to have a lasting – and growing – presence across every industry.

Interested in using PeopleCaddie to source your next contingent need? Check out our jobs page where your company can feature an opportunity.

Talent Cloud Breathing Life Back Into References

Identifying the perfect on-paper candidate for any role is a critical step in the hiring process. Of course, it’s just the first one. The trickier maneuver for a hiring manager is often background verification. Why? Because that piece of paper describing a potential hire – the traditional resume – is designed to tell employers exactly what they want to hear. Candidates will always look for a leg up in the hiring race, so it makes sense that any employee-created profile would paint that candidate in the most favorable light. Sometimes even embellish. Occasionally, outright falsify. Vetting that profile, following up on a candidate’s job references and confirming resume claims is all part of the process for a hiring manager. But a talent cloud makes that process easier and more reliable.

PeopleCaddie is already a step ahead, having already developed that technology. A third-party talent cloud that manages candidate profiles, employment history and job references, PeopleCaddie doesn’t just take the heavy lifting off the shoulders of a human resources department – it also delivers more accurate and valuable information about job candidates in a fraction of the usual time.

Consider the usual slog through a pile of resumes. Even after exhaustively reviewing each profile and plucking the best candidates from the stack, there’s still the matter of confirming credentials, lining up phone calls and having conversations with other busy professionals – some of them even competitors – who aren’t necessarily ready to speak cogently and in thoughtful detail about an employee who is no longer with the company, if their company policy doesn’t prohibit them from saying anything at all.

A talent cloud cuts through this laborious ritual, soliciting employee ratings and reviews from a comprehensive list of past employers, completed on their time. The design is superior to previous job reference practices because it ensures a higher quality and quantity of information, along with a level of credibility – as information provided by the candidate can quickly be digitally cross-referenced –- that can’t be assured through a traditional resume.

Imagine hearing opinions from every previous manager of a contractor, not just the former employers a candidate has shared as contacts in their resume. As a hiring manager, you’re looking for the full scope of a candidate’s experiences – good, bad and in between. What are the common themes that can be found across multiple reviews? Which skills or characteristics are mentioned most often? In the same way a diner can use Yelp to learn about a restaurant’s food, customer service, prices and more, a hiring manager can get a quick read on a contractor or drill down for more granular information, gathered by invested reviewers.

And, yes – these reviewers are invested. Because a talent cloud like PeopleCaddie is a shared candidate pool, it’s in the best interests of employers to be considerate, honest and thorough in their reviews, with the expectation that others will be as well. Crowdfunded employer opinions offer a far wider range of feedback than the average resume, and the information they provide is often more incisive. Think about it: What could be more telling than an open-ended review from a former supervisor, with no agenda beyond contributing to the robustness of a shared talent cloud?

Hiring managers don’t always know the best questions to ask a former employer about a candidate, nor do they have much time during a quick phone call to probe for more revealing details. PeopleCaddie incentivizes employers to be purposeful in their reviews of former contractors, cutting directly to what they perceive to be key information. They can highlight pertinent strengths and weaknesses and include important project work. No awkward phone call, no on-the-spot conversation. Just the flexibility of time and benefit of the written word to ensure a mindful, complete review.

A talent cloud doesn’t make the hire – and that’s as it should be. Ultimately, you’re the best judge of a candidate for a role at your company. But by empowering a hiring manager with smarter, more comprehensive contractor information, a partner like PeopleCaddie can supercharge the quality and speed of your decision-making process while bringing you the peace of mind that you’re always connected to the best contractors available.

Interested in learning more about the PeopleCaddie talent cloud? Contact us!

Mitigating Co-Employment, Misclassification Risk for Independent Contractors

Hiring the right employee at the right time, a candidate who qualifies as the right fit for a role and within a company culture, is a challenge. Meeting that challenge again and again is a skill. As a hiring manager, though, it’s possible to identify and bring aboard the best independent contractors for your company and still miss one key final step.

The appropriate classification of newly hired independent contractors is a crucial action that sometimes gets taken for granted. Laws classifying employees with W-2 or 1099 designations are nuanced and highly-specific, and a failure to grasp those details could land a company in hot water. One of the best ways to mitigate that risk is for a company to enter into a co-employment relationship with a third-party contractor agency.

Consider that the IRS maintains a 20-point checklist providing guidelines on whether an independent contractor should be paid on a W-2 or a 1099, but it’s up to the employer to make the determination of how its new hires will be paid according to the tax code. A misclassified employee can file a complaint against their employer demanding to be compensated for paid time off (PTO), healthcare benefits, 401k contributions and other considerations.

The financial risks for a company that misclassifies a new hire as a 1099 employee include back-tax assessments and fines – even penalties amounting to as much as 100 percent of the back taxes due at both the federal and state levels. Those back taxes may include all federal income taxes, all social security taxes and all unemployment insurance taxes not withheld.

Those are no small considerations for a busy HR department responsible for maintaining a high-flow pipeline of contractor talent. Any company that relies on a regular influx of specialized or project labor should strongly consider the downside of a classification error – and the risk mitigation provided by working with a hiring agency or a talent cloud such as PeopleCaddie.

In a co-employment relationship where an employer hires independent contractors through a third-party employer, misclassification risks are dramatically reduced. Not only is the third party often better equipped to assess new hires under the classification laws, but as the employer of record, they are also responsible for ensuring compliance with all federal, state and local employment laws. A hiring department that uses a service such as PeopleCaddie can focus on the quality and fit of contractor candidates rather than the red tape typically involved in the hiring process.

A co-employment relationship with a third-party hiring agency not only offers numerous advantages in terms of finding and evaluating freelance talent – it has the added benefit of mitigating the risk of contractor misclassification. With the right co-employment partner, you can make the hiring process simpler, sidestep any confusion about W-2 and 1099 designations and avoid putting your company’s financials – and your own reputation – on the line.

Interest to learn more about how PeopleCaddie can help mitigate misclassification risk? Contact us!

Hiring Efficiency Improved By Digitized Credentials

Communicating and collecting work histories, qualifications and achievements is a critical component to hiring efficiency. The delivery method for those details – a paper printout handed to an interviewer or a static electronic file emailed to a human resources department – went virtually unchanged for decades. Recently, however, a new mechanism has emerged.

The resume is dead. Long live the resume.

The concept of the employee CV isn’t going anywhere, of course. But in order to keep up with modernization, and with the aim of improving hiring efficiency and organization on both sides of the worker-employer relationship, it has had to change. Digitization has supercharged the ability of hiring departments to identify, vet and bring aboard new employees, while providing candidates with a dynamic platform to communicate their value to employers.

Consider the limitations of the traditional resume. Its shelf life is short and its flexibility nil, diminishing its usefulness. Particularly in the contractor economy, it’s an enormous hassle for employees to update a paper copy of their work history every time they work with a new client or add a competency to their skill set. The old ways also assured employers that they’d wind up spending inordinate amounts of time filing away and later combing through reams of outdated CVs. Digitization allows for changes to be made easily and instantly, and shared universally.

Resumes of the past, frankly, were also easy to fudge. Candidates would occasionally embellish and, every so often, outright falsify information. The burden of proof lay on hiring managers, who would be stuck verifying which details of a candidate’s resume were true, false or possibly just outdated – all with the clock ticking.

LinkedIn, for one, attempted to address some of these problems. A web platform that allowed users to quickly update their profile, and which linked to the pages of previous employers and affiliated organizations, offered more flexibility and a format that could help employers improve hiring efficiency. But even this model was open to misrepresentations and, for the most part, provided only the nuts and bolts of users’ work experiences and qualifications.

The next step in the evolution of the resume has been a quantum leap: PeopleCaddie. Company-focused and built on a dynamic closed-loop model that incentivizes both employee and employer to operate within its network, PeopleCaddie acts as a comparative and verifiable database of contractor candidates, removing the hiring guesswork for employers. As a third-party talent cloud that helps connect contractors with new gigs and rewards them for good work, while directing employers to the right workers for their projects, everyone is motivated to work together. That closed loop allows PeopleCaddie to confirm and maintain accurate employee records, while leveraging feedback from previous employers to help other network clients make their own smart hiring decisions.

Think of how other companies have used digitization to dust off and soup up an old model: Uber made standing in the rain to wait and hail a cab a thing of the past. Amazon allows you to shop from your bathtub and enjoy direct-to-door delivery. Recent shelter-at-home restrictions opened the door – or in this case a window – for Zoom to reimagine the traditional office meeting.

By harnessing the powers of digitization, it’s already been proven possible to bring similar innovation to the hiring process. With an elegant platform featuring a deep pool of contractors with updated and accurate work histories, comprehensive ratings and detailed reviews, a talent cloud like PeopleCaddie saves time, instills confidence and puts the right candidates at the fingertips of hiring managers.

Are you in need of contingent labor? Reach out to our team and get your job posted.

Contractor Ratings Integral to Gig Economy

Shopping today is easier than it has ever been. No matter the product or service, it’s likely available for instant perusal and purchase through a website or app. Order groceries with a few clicks, swing by the store and have them loaded into your trunk. Browse home insurance policies online, apply and get same-day approval. Virtually window-shop for books, restaurants or landscaping services, comparing prices and customer ratings and reviews. That’s the sort of resource that would be invaluable to a human resources department – a sort of CarFax for the gig economy. Think of it: an online repository of qualified contractors, searchable by rates and ratings, with reviews from past employers, all at the fingertips of hiring managers. In fact, that’s exactly what PeopleCaddie provides – contractor ratings.

By now, the pain points for HR are well established: When a business requires a contract or freelance worker, it often needs that resource now – if not yesterday. The hiring manager can’t afford to waste time surfing through candidates the company can’t afford. Yet cost isn’t the only consideration. Only prospects with the requisite skills and experience will do. Culture fit? Of course. But who has time to line up and conduct interviews after spending hours whittling down a list of candidates that fit the proper profile?

PeopleCaddie, in a manner of speaking, takes care of the whittling for you. With a proprietary platform that allows for matching based upon rates, contractor ratings, skills, and availability, PeopleCaddie allows an HR professional to transform the hiring experience – from casting a commercial fisherman’s net into a sea of talent to shooting fish in a barrel.

You can make the entire hiring process more efficient, while achieving better results. Be assured of a comprehensive and detailed job history from a service that includes ratings from its candidates’ previous employers. Get a read on a contractor’s previous performance and key competencies without the need for contacting previous managers. PeopleCaddie helps quantify qualitative decisions, making an initial search far simpler, but it actually turns up more and better information when employers are ready to drill down for details.

Consider: You probably don’t make a purchase from Amazon without at least glancing at a product’s rating, and possibly scrolling through a handful of reviews. Undoubtedly, you’ve never opened your Yelp app to find a nice Thai place nearby and settled on a 2.5-star restaurant. In that same sense, PeopleCaddie helps focus your employee search, while providing the tools and aggregated, crowd-sourced data to learn more about the candidates who rise to the top.

It’s a service that benefits contractors as well. Ever felt lost in the never-ending cycle of recruiting services calling and emailing with job openings you aren’t interested in, giving lukewarm, uninformed accounts of your work to employers that aren’t really a fit anyway? Or, worse, maybe you aren’t even in the sights of headhunters at all. PeopleCaddie removes the go-between, capturing and displaying first-hand recognition for your jobs well done, putting your contractor ratings in front of the right hiring managers and making direct connections to the job leads you want.

For hiring managers, finding quality skilled contractors in a growing gig economy, when it should be harder, is actually getting easier. A talent cloud that intelligently and instantly narrows your search, providing accurate and detailed information you can’t get anywhere else – including comprehensive employment history, ratings and reviews – suddenly makes shopping around the job market a less daunting task.

Interested in hiring using PeopleCaddie’s talent cloud? Contact us!

Contingent Labor: The Benefits and Utility

In every sense, the face of the modern American workforce is changing. For one, that face looks increasingly less, well … American. And that has been a good thing for the growth of innovation and commerce: the evolution of professional labor into a global marketplace has been a boon for a wide variety of industries. That evolution includes an increase in the reliance on contingent labor.

Now more than ever, that workforce is also, quite literally, changing. Whereas American industry once conjured up images of a Ford factory line bustling with lifers fiercely loyal to the company, the modern embodiment of professional labor looks more like an open-concept office space with a mixture of staffers, consultants, freelancers and temporary employees.

This, too, should be considered an exciting development. As employer needs have grown more specialized and provisional in recent years, contingent labor has risen to meet demand. At the same time, the emergence of key technologies has led to the proliferation of digital talent marketplaces that are capable of connecting companies with the right employees – and vice versa.

If you aren’t currently using contractors or gig workers, it’s worth considering the potential benefits of contingent labor to your business.

Staff augmentation. Every company is seeking the optimal full-time equivalent (FTE) workforce to meet their production requirements. But those needs can ebb and flow (especially for seasonal businesses), complicating staffing. Contingent labor helps companies hire quickly, seamlessly maintain efficiency and rapidly downsize when the additional labor is no longer needed.

Acquire specialized skill sets. Many companies have business-critical needs that nevertheless fail to justify the creation of a full-time or staff role. (Think of a small business that relies on an on-call IT specialist or web developer who works on a per-project basis.) The contingent labor pool allows as-needed access to those specialized competencies.

Business expansion. Contract workers offer the option of growing a capability or introducing a new expertise to a company without committing to a full-time staffer, or perhaps a team of them. It’s possible to pursue new business opportunities (contracts, engagements, projects, etc.) without having to assume the risk of staffing up before you even know whether or not you’ve won the business. Contingent labor helps make it happen.

Try before you buy. The old consumer adage now can be applied to the labor market: One advantage of embracing contingent labor is the ability to ensure technical expertise and a cultural fit while minimizing the cost when a mismatch occurs. Transitioning a contractor to a staff employee once they prove they check all the boxes is a simpler and lower-risk proposition than hiring a full-timer off the street.

Incorporating contingent labor in a business can present its share of challenges, but talent-cloud services help address many of those concerns. For instance, many companies with temporary needs don’t have the time or resources to train new contract workers or wait for them to become familiar with the business or their role. But PeopleCaddie’s deep talent pool and interconnected platform ensure that contractors are plugged quickly and seamlessly into new positions.

Contingent labor won’t solve every business problem. But this growing workforce provides companies with the flexibility and peace of mind to meet production while managing FTE – a valuable resource for meeting today’s unique, and often unpredictable, business demands.

Have a question as to how your company can benefit? Reach out to us!

Contractor Rates: When Should They Increase?

Every freelancer knows that being a successful contract worker requires wearing numerous hats: project manager, marketer, C-suite executive. For many freelancers, the most awkward fit among them is that of a human resources professional and, especially, determining when to increase contractor rates.

That’s because the HR gig comes with a task for which most freelancers are woefully untrained: raising their rates. Determining your pay scale can be difficult enough – “Have I accounted for cost of living?” “Am I selling myself short? Asking too much?” – but deciding when (and sometimes for whom) to recalibrate that scale feels like a bridge too far for many contract workers.

In the end, the freelance world is a marketplace dictated by supply, demand, region and industry. Generally speaking, there are no hard-and-fast rules for when or where to set contractor rates, no matter your field. But here are a few tips that may help:

Ask around. Many of your colleagues and peers are willing to share their rates. Even if it’s too much to ask when they got a bump, you can compare roles, experience and expertise to help land on a scale that suits your own profile.

Check the web. A quick browser search can lead you down a rabbit hole of recommendations that likely will offer some ideas about what a person at your level (entry, intermediate, senior) and in your field should be making. This blog, too, offers contractors best practices on how to grow their professional profile and advance their careers, all of which should add up to earning more money.

Be aggressive. Generally speaking, we’re all prone to self-doubt and concerns about pestering the wrong people. “Am I worth as much as I think?” “Is it too soon to ask for a raise?” But it isn’t unreasonable to ask for an adjustment to contractor rates once every year or two. Most companies expect it, and the old adage holds true: the worst they can do is say no.

Beyond those broad recommendations, freelancers have other options – namely, a talent cloud. It’s beneficial for contract workers to be part of a larger ecosystem that not only connects you with employers but helps prove your worth to them, with none of the uncomfortable self-promotional conversations required.

Joining a talent cloud such as PeopleCaddie makes it easy for employers to find you, rate your performance and help you build a profile that will attract future employers. In the gig economy, a contractor needs to be part of the developing marketplace for talent. A talent cloud puts you firmly in the mix.

And because they relieve key pain points for hiring managers, being part of a talent cloud will likely only become more important over time. Rather than having to post a job ad, fumble through a pile of resumes, interview candidates and call multiple references for each, a talent cloud is a plug-and-play option that companies can trust to connect them with the right contract worker. Maybe even you.

Once a freelancer has established a body of work, the employers they’ve contracted with can rate them to help burnish your reputation. Companies will know your worth – and you will, too. Your credibility, as well as your experience, will grow over time, putting you in high demand on the platform. With employers lining up for your services, you’ll be less inclined to shy away from asking for a higher rate. You may just ask yourself why you didn’t ask for a larger raise sooner!

Want to get a sense of the contractor market? Check out PeopleCaddie’s jobs page.

Job Hopping: Has Employer Perception Changed?

Corporate America long ago left behind the era of the gold watch. Once proud to work entire careers with a single company, employees are no longer incentivized or motivated to stay in one place in most of the ways they were in generations past. One remnant of that time, however, seemed to persist longer than others: wariness over worker “job hopping.”

The tendency for workers to change employment every year or two has indeed become a more widespread phenomenon across the job market. But the nature of the employer-worker relationship has changed dramatically over the years, and of course not all employee movement can be attributed to wanderlust or ladder climbing. Has this influenced current views? Are so-called job hoppers, once red-flagged by employers, regarded differently today?

In years past, a job hopper was believed to be a flight risk – a person who lacked company loyalty, who chased salary, whose performance issues led to frequent moves, or perhaps all of the above. Even an attractive candidate with a history of frequent job moves could give a hiring manager pause: Would this candidate jump at the first better, or more lucrative, offer that comes their way? Would they be too focused on determining their next landing spot to give their best effort in the position being offered? Would the investment in screening, onboarding and training this employee be wasted if they aren’t motivated to stick around for the long term?

These were all valid concerns for employers – and, to some extent, remain so. But with the rise of the gig economy, more businesses find themselves in need of contract, temporary or seasonal workers, and over time the workforce has responded by becoming more flexible, more nimble in order to find suitable employment. When considering the modern incidence of “job hopping,” it’s important to note that those doing the hiring have strayed from the old corporate conventions as much, and perhaps more than, those being hired.

And that’s just fine, so long as both sides are benefitting – a case of all boats being lifted by a rising tide. We’ve witnessed an example of this in real time: Most businesses were put out by the COVID-19 shutdown, leading to halts in operations, guarded consumer spending and depressed markets. The effects, devastating as they were, could have been worse. But the moment forced many companies to rethink traditional mindsets and explore new career models and employment arrangements. Not only did “work from home” become an acceptable option in spaces where it once was considered unthinkable, but also more businesses realized the need to build a flexible workforce. Companies got back to business. More workers went back to earning – and sooner.

More than ever, companies are beginning to view employment opportunities on a reduced time-to-value scale. The long-term, unpredictable nature of the pandemic has prompted many businesses to pursue more time-boxed employment arrangements that they can directly correlate to increased revenue, cost savings and improved risk mitigations.

Workers will require a similarly deft approach: In order to market themselves, employees should look over their slate of experience and, for each position, lead with value and closely trail with risk avoidance. Be prepared to highlight tangible value contributed to past employers, while subtly and tactfully addressing any concerns an employer may raise around their departure from a given company. (Example: “As my final contribution, I groomed a successor who seamlessly transitioned into my role and made an immediate impact.”)

With these developments, the stigma around job fluidity is gradually dissipating. As the uptick in shorter-tenure job arrangements continues through the pandemic, the re-balancing of short- versus long-term job profiles can be expected to bring about a lasting transformation. Increasingly, employee movement will be viewed as the literal cost of doing business. It will be up to both workers and employers to find the benefits of a new era that is dictating a different demand curve – one that not only accepts job hopping, but caters to it.

Interested in contract work? Check out PeopleCaddie’s job openings.

Talent Cloud Advantageous for Seasonal, Project Work

Hiring is hard. Managers, human resources professionals and business leaders of all stripes understand the tedious nature of identifying, onboarding and retaining quality talent. For companies whose workforce needs ebb and flow along with the fluctuations of market demand, that challenge becomes doubly difficult. But there’s an emerging technology that is a boon to these businesses: the talent cloud is advantageous for seasonal and project-based work.

To reduce expenses or to enable them to pursue additional revenue, more businesses are employing independent contractors to meet their seasonal and project-based needs, and the workforce continues to gradually warm to the gig economy. But this doesn’t make hiring any easier. In fact, the sheer number of candidates makes tracking and matching talent complicated, slow and prohibitively expensive for most HR departments.

Modern problems require cutting-edge solutions, which is why many businesses are turning to talent clouds to fill their staffing needs. Particularly for companies seeking candidates for seasonal, temporary and hard-to-fill positions, working with a talent cloud may be the most efficient, affordable and hassle-free way to hire.

Here’s why:

Match expenses to revenue. Every company should have at least one clear goal: optimize investment in a workforce to fit with the needs of the business. But in many industries, the work isn’t steady. Take tax accounting. Business heats up in January, when tax documents begin pouring in, and then peaks in April, when the deadline arrives for everyone to file with the IRS. But the demand for CPAs wanes from there, forcing accounting firms to make a choice: pay employees the same amount for less work or adjust the size of the workforce to align with the workload. When skilled contractors are available on demand through a talent cloud, that choice becomes a no-brainer.

Reliability. As previously mentioned, finding capable contractors is an enormous challenge. The antiquated practice of posting a job ad, identifying quality candidates, vetting, interviewing and hiring is as slow-moving and labor-intensive as it sounds. Over the years, it’s also been proven to be a hit-or-miss enterprise. At PeopleCaddie, for instance, our technology platform features a repository of proven, highly-skilled contract workers, matching them with specific client needs based on ideal fit, onboarding, payrolling, then keeping them connected going forward to minimize the friction associated with using a contractor again. A talent cloud helps a business find the right contractor and avoid any lag in production or workflow.

Ease. Any technological advent is designed to simplify a task, reduce labor or build in convenience. A talent cloud can do exactly that for most professional businesses. PeopleCaddie creates a turnkey relationship, identifying the best contractors for its clients, maintaining that customized labor pool on a digital platform and empowering employers to instantly add proven talent at the push of a button. A talent cloud handles both the front-end sourcing, vetting and the back-end processing of contractors, removing the guesswork for an HR manager and reducing tax and accounting paperwork. At PeopleCaddie, we also provide candidate reviews and ratings from previous employers and allow clients to stay connected to preferred contractors when they click with a company or bring unique talents to certain projects.

With talent clouds like PeopleCaddie, companies have no need to hunt for talent, no haggling over pay, no mountains of paperwork and no surprises. Clients get the contractors they need, for only the amount of time they need them, with none of the hoops-jumping or uncertainty that was once part and parcel to the hiring process.

If you believe that your company could benefit from PeopleCaddie’s talent cloud, please go to peoplecaddie.com to learn more or contact us.

COVID and Women in the Workforce – How the Pandemic has Affected Women

While new and continuing jobless claims have been declining, it’s apparent that the pandemic is affecting some demographic groups more than others. In a previous post I wrote about the resiliency we’ve seen in certain sectors like IT and Healthcare that have historically outperformed during economic downturns. Now, I’m taking a look at the impact of COVID on women workers in the U.S.

The U.S. Department of Labor reported over 700,000 jobs were eliminated in the first wave of pandemic layoffs in late March; nearly 60% of those jobs were held by women. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review reported that women’s jobs are 1.8x more vulnerable to this crisis than those of men. The hospitality industry, along with other high-contact places of business, employ more women than men – with many of these businesses still completely shuttered. At a global level, the workforce is made up of 39% women, but they accounted for 54% of overall pandemic related job losses as of May 2020. For a population that already experiences salary disparities relative to their male counterparts, this is yet another challenging blow.

After a steady decline following the last recession, women’s labor force participation started climbing around 2015. This growth, along with rising wages, helped boost overall household income according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some economists believe the pandemic will have a lasting impact –well past 2021 –as more women may leave the workforce permanently. One of the drivers of this trend is that women are often expected to bear the brunt of household duties and family care both domestically and abroad. These responsibilities have been magnified during the pandemic, as schools continue to operate remotely and many daycares have failed to reopen.

At PeopleCaddie, we’ve been fortunate to help several amazing women who were adversely impacted by the pandemic. In one case, a mother needed a more flexible work situation and felt that contract employment would allow her to still maintain her skills and contribute financially on her terms.

In another situation, we had the opportunity to help a worker return to her previous employer following a layoff. The company was forced to trim their workforce in the spring, but started to see demand increase over the summer. They didn’t have full-time headcount approval yet for this fiscal year but needed the specific expertise that she possessed. We were able to bring her back as a contractor while helping the client meet their demand.

It’s my hope that as increased attention is brought to the unique challenges often faced by women in the workforce more employers will take notice and develop targeted programs to assist them. At PeopleCaddie, we are committed to doing so and becoming even stronger advocates.

Sources:

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/08/829141182/women-are-losing-more-jobs-in-coronavirus-shutdowns

https://hbr.org/2020/09/dont-let-the-pandemic-set-back-gender-equality

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/united-states-female-employment-covid19/