Are your staff reluctant to agree to any more overtime? Perhaps recruitment is fast becoming your full-time job? It might be the right time to take a step back from your HR responsibilities and look at an alternative path.
That alternative is outsourcing. In a connected, global economy, there has never been a better time to tap into the advantages on offer from outsourcing some of your business roles.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through twelve fantastic outsourcing advantages that will make you see outsourcing in a whole new light.
1. It Provides More Flexibility
If you have peaks and dips in your annual revenue, hiring staff all year round to fulfill your order book might prove costly.
Outsourcing gives a business much-needed flexibility, allowing you to adapt quickly to market conditions and increase your workforce when needed.
Consider a situation where new customer orders are slow, and you want to reduce your staff costs.
In that case, you can lower your outsourced staff without paying for expensive redundancy packages that you’d incur by laying off full-time, permanent staff.
That flexibility is valuable even for a small business.
Perhaps you have a small but critical departmental team. Suppose all those team members call in sick with a viral bug. In that case, that scenario can have a catastrophic effect on your business operations.
By outsourcing, you can keep your business ticking over even during a crisis.
2. It Can Help You Meet a Deadline
Projects don’t always go to plan, as many businesses can attest. A looming project deadline can send a team into a frenzy if the resource plan doesn’t match up to the number of milestones left to complete.
Outsourcing is always a wise option to consider when you are struggling to meet a deadline.
By getting more people onto a tricky task, you’ll not only give you an additional resource but there are other advantages.
You might find yourself with a problem solver who can tackle a puzzle that’s holding up your project. Or perhaps an innovative brain who figures out a way to get the task done faster and at less cost to the business.
So don’t rule out the decision to outsource if you want your project to go according to plan.
3. You’ll Get the Specialist Skills You Need
Outsourcing isn’t just about expanding your team. It’s also about developing skills and knowledge.
One of the biggest drivers for businesses when outsourcing is to get staff with the specialist skills that they just don’t have internally. Good examples include HR, legal, accountancy, and professional janitorial services.
It makes sense for businesses to hire people with the experience and knowledge they need rather than reinventing the wheel.
Training in-house staff in specialist skills, particularly areas that aren’t core competencies for your business, isn’t a wise use of time or money.
That is particularly true when there are outsourcing companies are ready and available to fill that gap.
4. It’s More Cost-Effective
Many businesses assume outsourcing is too expensive.
While, on paper, day rates might be higher than what you pay permanent staff, that’s not the complete picture when it comes to costs. Outsourcing, when done right, can be incredibly cost-effective for a business.
Hiring staff locally means paying competitive rates. But if you can oversee the job remotely, which is true for most service-based roles nowadays, why not seek staff globally instead?
Global recruitment opens up far more options to help you reduce your staff costs. Many countries with a low cost of living and low day rate have a wealth of expertise available to support your business.
That means you can source staff at a day rate that’s far lower than you might expect to pay if you hire locally.
5. Optimizes Your In-House Expertise
You hire staff for their skills and experience. So it makes sense to get your team to spend the vast majority of their time on those skills, not on areas of the business where they don’t add value.
Take admin work, for example. If you have highly paid professional staff, doesn’t it make sense to hire someone to provide administrative support, either as a PA or virtual assistant?
By doing so, you can help your staff focus on the job at hand, and you might even have a happier workforce when they don’t have to do the extra jobs they neither enjoy nor can boast of the right skills.
6. It Can Help You Win a Contract
Do you run a professional services business and often pitch for a new customer contract? If so, you’ll find that you frequently have to outline your resource capability in the proposal.
Suppose you have a ready source of extra staff to meet the needs of a project. In that case, whether that’s the size of the team or a specific type of specialist skill, that could tip things in your favor and win you the contract.
Consider how this could put you ahead of your competition. Having access to outsourcing teams gives you the chance to punch above your weight when it comes to getting big, high-profile customers.
7. Reduced HR Overhead
Recruiting full-time staff isn’t cheap. There are plenty of overheads to consider before hiring a permanent employee.
That will include HR time, recruitment, legal issues (such as signing the contract) and might also include training costs to get new team members up to speed on a skill.
Using frequent outsourcing is a helpful strategy if you want to keep your HR overheads low.
Small businesses, in particular, will see the benefit of this when they don’t have an extensive HR department and don’t have the time, money, or resources to establish one.
8. Opportunity to Grow Rapidly
Quickly scaling a business means being able to adapt. Adapting means being able to scale your team promptly, at the perfect time. But that isn’t always easy when you are hiring permanent staff.
Take office space, for example. If your business doubled in size in the next six months, would you have the office space to house a fast-growing team? The answer is probably not.
By using outsourcing in conjunction with remote working policies, you can create a robust business strategy that will help boost your business growth.
9. It Improves Your Customer Service
Excellent customer service means having lots of qualified and experienced front-facing staff. That’s still true, even when we live in the age of customer service bots and automated email notifications.
Keeping customers happy is about having a human on the end of the phone who can answer questions and handle complaints professionally and swiftly.
So if you are considering outsourcing, an outsourced team that handles your first or second-line customer support might be a sensible place to start.
Good customer service isn’t a nice-to-have for any business. It’s what will help you stand out from your competitors and help you generate solid testimonials and reviews.
10. It Can Help You Expand Globally
Do you intend to launch your business into new markets overseas?
The internet might have made that option more technically straightforward than ever, but understanding the intricacies of a foreign market can often trip up even the most accomplished businesses.
If you want to expand to a new country, why not use an outsourced team in that country to manage the rollout of your product or service? It’s one of the biggest but underutilized benefits of outsourcing.
That outsourced team will have local knowledge to help you market and sell and ensure the operational side of your business runs to plan.
11. Technology Advantages
You’ve probably discovered that as your business has grown, so has your investment in technology. Tools, software, and processes that optimize your business operations are a vital part of competing in today’s business world.
But what about the costs that come with all that investment? Some tools might be central to your operations. But there will be other tools that you only use in the peripheries of your business (finance and HR, to name two examples).
It might be more prudent to hire an outsourced team that already uses the best tools and software for the job so that you don’t have to make those investments yourself.
12. It Gives You Extra Time for Training
Suppose you frequently hire people in entry-level roles (maybe recent graduates, for example). In that case, you may find a steep learning curve before that person is ready to do the job on their own.
Perhaps you’ve even tried to implement sophisticated in-house training programs to help get recruits up to speed in a job.
If you find yourself in this type of situation, you can use outsourcing to fill the gap. Outsourcing will offer a bridge between recruiting a new staff member and fully training them to do the job.
Maybe your company involves highly specialist roles, perhaps operating complex machinery.
If so, having highly experienced outsourced team members will ensure you can keep your business running to your high standards.
In parallel, you can continue your recruitment and training efforts as a longer-term strategy.
Twelve Compelling Outsourcing Advantages for Your Business
With so many obvious outsourcing advantages on offer to a business, the real question might be why some companies don’t even consider it as a recruitment strategy.
With the right outsourcing plan, you can give your business the chance to scale and compete in a cost-effective, intelligent manner.
Before you go, browse our latest trending articles in our business section for more guidance on pushing your company forward in 2021.
