Onboard Consultants

Five Things To Remember About Onboarding a Software Consultant in 2018 and more about MindSource®

The SF Bay Area talent market has changed significantly in the past year. Here are some highlights that affect clients who are onboarding consultants.

1. Increased Competition

The media is replete with stories of low unemployment, rising salaries, and difficulty in hiring great local talent. MindSource has tracked an increase from 2-3 offers for a consulting engagement to four offers. Attracting candidates is more difficult than ever.

Candidate interviews suggest that salary is less important than other factors such as commute, team dynamics, and the type of product or technology used. Job attrition is slightly lower with employees more ready to change jobs when an opportunity appears.

In this hot market, onboarding a consultant to balance the team is often a suitable strategy.

2. Contractor or RFT?

Most companies prefer to keep their core functions covered with regular full time employees (RFT) while balancing their talent portfolio with consultants where needed. Using consultants for software development teams has advantages.

  • Turn around time for hire – regular full time employment hiring process is lengthly, often lasting many months. Consultants can be onboarded in a matter of weeks.
  • Try before you by. Some consultants prefer to work onsite for a few months and then convert to regular-full-time-employment. This is the best of both worlds: rapid onboarding with the advantage of proving the consultant in the workplace.
  • Hiring a RFT is often a commitment of 6-9 months of employment with reviews as mandated by human resources.
  • Cost accounting. Occassionally organizations prefer Capex to Opex.
  • Benefits and Taxes. Onboarding a consultant is more like buying a box of paper than RTF – the agency takes care of employment taxes, health insurance.
  • Limited duration engagments for special projects

MindSource provides both contingency and consultant modes for engaging talent to meet your needs.

3. Industry Experts and Strategic Planning

Consultants with years of experience in a particular area can provide strategic planning and industry insights to ensure that particular initiatives stay on track. Many senior consultants prefer a series of short-term engagements to regular full time employment. Examples of this are architecture, workflow analysis, business intelligence, site analysis, and user experience experts.

MindSource consultants are committed to customer satisfaction and reliability.

4. Finding Great Talent

In todays competitive market, the best way to find a consultant is through your own network. But where can one look when the well runs dry? Good consultants typically also leverage their own network to line up engagements and avoid job boards.

MindSource has an expert base consisting of tens of thousands of qualified resources stemming from our previous engagements – who we call our mindsource alumni, our immediate network, and our extended partners.

5. High-touch Searches

For software developers in the SF Bay Area, job boards are passe. Engineers are networked, and they know each other. There is no greater turn-off than a faceless online application where their resume will be keyword scanned using stagnant algorithms.

Consultants want engagements working with cool technology and interesting teams and if the entry point to the job is an HR obstacle they will be less inclined to pursue.

MindSource has the secret sauce, built from decades of successfully onboarding talent. It’s part chemistry, part brute-force, and it’s largely our own network built from filling over 3000 orders.

 

For more information please do not hesitate to contact us or visit our website www.mindsource.com.