We’re at the beginning of a talent crunch that will surpass anything the world has ever seen. Over one quarter of America’s population, and well over one third of America’s workforce, is eligible, or will soon be eligible, for retirement. The vast majority do necessary jobs. Where are their replacements going to come from?

Many people retire because they are forced into it (because of organizational policies, especially in the public sector), because they don’t want to work full time anymore, or because they are unable to do the job they were doing, be it due to failing health or lack of education and training, and not because they want to sit on their porch and stare into space. Many of these people want to keep being productive, they just want to do it less, and maybe do it from home. And they’re great resources. Their valuable experience can be used to mentor junior employees, which helps them become better, more productive employees, faster; to improve processes, which will help the organization do more with less; and to guide management around pitfalls and traps that they know are there in the market, which can prevent the current generation from repeating the mistakes of its predecessors.

And with the high and steadily rising costs of education these days, as well as the desire to be part of the consumer economy, more and more high-school and college students are seeking part time work. Not only are they a great resource to help you with the escalating amounts of tactical work many business face in today’s economy, but utilizing them in positions that correspond to their course of study helps prepare them for full time work when they graduate.

We do this with an application that has fully customizable workflows that support the hiring manager, approvers, HR coordinators, suppliers, and workers in each step of the procure-engage-pay-offboard cycle, to whatever level of support and detail they need.

Our application simplifies the definition and setup of a requisition, which, when driven off of a pre-configured template, will automatically populate the job title, description, department, job site, travel requirements, full position description, desired skills, approved rates, default suppliers to issues the requisition to, job status, and any other detail that is relevant to the job posting. All a hiring manager has to do is define the desired start-and-end dates and, if she desires, modify default settings and requirements if the position requires some customization. Once the requisition is completed, pre-configured rules route it to the appropriate approvers, and once it is approved, it is delivered to the appropriate suppliers using multi-tiered supply based rules that can give preferred suppliers or minority suppliers of contingent labor the ability to bid first.

Once the supplier submit candidates, the hiring manager can then use the tool to shortlist candidates (or block them from consideration), select candidates for interviews, record the interview results, select a candidate for hire, send a work-order to a supplier, and then, when the supplier accepts the work-order, “hire” the candidate.

Let’s start with the last question. Theoretically, you could create your template job descriptions in Word and your rate-cards in Excel, store them on a Central File Server, and then, every time you need to fill a new job, create a copy, send it out through e-mail, and store the specific instance somewhere else on a file server. And maybe if you’re a small company who only hires a few contingent workers a year, and you were very methodical, you could make that work for you. But what if you hire 100 contingent workers a year in 20 different positions. How easy do you think it would be to keep track of all the different paperwork? Let me ask it this way, you used to do Contract Management right?

Now, the reason it helps procurement is that it stores all of the information, including rate information, billed hours, and budgetary information in one place. This allows procurement to get up to date information at any time as to how many contingent workers in each category are hired each year, on average, and how much is being paid, on average, for each position. Procurement can use this information to initiate fact-based negotiations with contingent labor-suppliers to get better rates. Then, procurement can turn around and compare invoices versus approved rates, hours, and expenses and make sure that each worker is being paid at agreed upon rates, and no more, and that unapproved expenses are never paid. Furthermore, they can configure rules that will prevent managers from approving payments that are outside of approved rate or expense bands or that would cause a budget to be exceeded. It gives them the insight into contingent workfoce spend that they’ve never had before without this type of tool.

Our tool, which supports over 80 Fortune 2000 Global Multi-nationals, was built to be a global tool. That means that we’ve localized it for over 30 countries …

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a workforce management platform to improve. Good day.