Overcoming Post-Pandemic Hiring Challenges with BPO and BPM
- October 11, 2021
- Category: Business process management
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Scroll through the internet and you will find countless surveys indicating how finding talent is the biggest challenge for employers in 2021 and how it may be for years to come. Today, there are more open jobs and fewer people in the labor force. According to the Manpower® Talent Shortage Survey (2021), global talent shortages are at a 15-year high. More than one in three employers in the US are reporting difficulty filling jobs.
While thought leaders across the US are discussing the challenge at length, very few seem to have found a quick solution to deal with current talent shortages. Provana’s CEO, Sandeep Bhargava, in his latest column for Entrepreneur, encouraged small-business owners to find creative solutions to what many experts are describing to be a worsening talent crisis. He writes, “Rather than resenting government policies or sulking about the frivolity of the young, we must find a solution. It’s what entrepreneurs do. And perhaps this crisis presents an opportunity to rethink labor completely.”
Amid the pressure on minimum wage and the pandemic-stimulus-triggered wage inflation, the most obvious solutions to labor shortage may seem to raise salaries or finding candidates who can opt for part-time work. But choosing these solutions can introduce many complications of their own, including increased cost-per-hire and retention challenges induced by a lucrative labor market. Here, the alternative of sourcing, i.e., outsourcing, can offer small to midsize businesses (SMBs) a permanent low-cost solution.
Conventionally a mainstay of the large enterprise, outsourcing has taken many shapes and forms these days. In a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) arrangement, you go to a service provider and hire workers offshore. A resource manager, designated by the service provider, finds the talent you need. However, the outsourcing model puts you in charge of finding and training a replacement that too in a remote environment if a hired worker decides to leave. Working with a Business Process Management (BPM) provider, on the other hand, gives you an option to designate the service provider to deliver the full business process along with hiring, training, and management of the staff – a boon from the cost-optimization standpoint.
The pandemic has changed the employment landscape forever. As a result, small-to-medium businesses that want to close the talent gap and crunch big numbers need to evolve with the times too. The time has come to make the most of matured outsourcing models such as BPM to figure out the use of resources in low-cost locations, to overcome prevailing labor shortages.