ere’s a radical concept: Let the HR department do the organization’s contingent hiring directly. It knows how to hire. It understands how to use job boards. It probably has an applicant-tracking system for permanent hires. It can save money.

    So says Gene Zaino, CEO of Contractors Resources, a company that provides administrative and business-management services for independent contractors and acts as the third-party employer of record for the companies that engage them.

    "The HR department has the talent to recruit these people, or even just source them and send them to the chief information officer [who often does IT hiring] or the line managers," Zaino says. "We’re saying, Wake up! Give HR a shot at filling the job in three days or so. Let them present three or four people on a contract basis, rather than going to a staffing company."

    Granted, Zaino is not a disinterested party. Companies that hire Contractors Resources as the third-party employer of record pay it 1.2 percent of the contractor’s gross hourly wage. The idea, Zaino says, is that companies can save 20 percent or more by using his service, which focuses on consultant employment services, and not on recruiting contractor talent.

    Zaino says that one client, a major financial brokerage firm that has had as many as 2,200 IT independent consultants and now has 1,400, saved $40 million in 2000 by sourcing its own contractors, while Contractors Resources handled the employer-of-record duties.

    A small consultant management group in the company is the central point for the requisitions, Zaino says. Instead of managing vendors, the group started finding contractors on its own. "They’re seeing there’s a tremendous amount of dollars they can save."

    Would that approach work in any company? Zaino thinks so. "It might take an HR executive with a little bit of leadership to bring this forward," he says. "The mind-set with HR that needs to be adjusted is this: the contingent workforce is a valuable part of the workforce. They need to start learning about it, embracing it, and adding value to it."

Workforce, March 2002, p. 52 -- Subscribe Now!