Is Your Talent Pool Agile Enough? Discover Virtual Bench!
Organisations today often struggle with accessing the right skills at the right time, especially when it comes to anticipating project needs and rapidly deploying talent. In 2023, about 1 in 5 global financial services firms met less than half of their project goals. A significant 40 percent of this underperformance was due to a lack of skilled talent, a problem that has become increasingly evident over the past three years.
To tackle this challenge, Outsized, a leading on-demand talent platform operating in the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Australia, has launched an innovative solution called Virtual Bench.
Traditionally, consulting firms maintain a "bench" of employees who are not currently assigned to client projects but are available for deployment as needed. However, this model can be costly and inflexible. Firms end up with high fixed costs from paying full-time salaries to employees who might not always be actively engaged in projects. This approach can also force project leaders to assemble teams based on who is available rather than who is best suited for the task, potentially compromising client results.
With the rise of hybrid workforces and the increasing number of highly skilled independent professionals, Virtual Bench aims to revolutionise talent management. It provides companies with always-on access to the specific skills they need without the fixed costs of maintaining a traditional bench of employees.
The Virtual Bench allows consulting firms and businesses to create, request, and share pools of pre-vetted, high-quality, independent talent. This means skills are matched with project needs more precisely, optimising hiring budgets and simplifying decision-making based on talent skills and experiences. It encourages bench members to continuously update their skills, ensuring a future-ready, competitive workforce that's in tune with evolving industry trends. This helps businesses stay flexible and responsive to changing market dynamics.
Azeem Zainulbhai, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Outsized, explained the concept well. He said that their solution came from understanding clients' needs. By creating an insights database, they identified recurring talent patterns and realised the potential of on-demand talent pools. This led to the creation of Virtual Bench, allowing clients to move from a fixed bench model to an agile one. They can quickly access fresh, pre-vetted independent talent with the necessary skills for each project. During the beta testing period of just three months, more than four pre-vetted benches were created for six different clients in four geographies, leading to eight projects using supplemental talent from these benches and reducing the time to project start by an average of two months per project.
The flexibility of the Virtual Bench model allows project leaders to fill capacity gaps with perfectly aligned capabilities, ensuring superior results and leading to more project extensions and work. This agile model supports strategic workforce planning in a dynamic business environment, effectively combining permanent workers and independent talent.
Virtual Bench isn't just for consulting firms; it's been successfully applied across various enterprises to meet fluctuating demands. This marks a significant shift from traditional staffing models, offering a solution that closely aligns with organisational needs. It provides curated, always-on capabilities with low fixed costs and strategic adaptability in a rapidly changing business landscape. Firms can build increasingly diverse and broader pools of talent and expand their bench as needed.
Outsized is leading the way in enabling the on-demand talent market to thrive, and Virtual Bench is set to become a cornerstone for forward-looking organisations looking to strategically manage their workforce.
