A business needs 50 people for a new programme. Twenty roles require expertise the company expects to need for years. Another 15 are tied to an 18-month implementation. The remaining work could potentially be handled by people elsewhere in the organisation.
Calling all 50 permanent vacancies would be a mistake. So would sending all 50 requirements to contingent workforce suppliers.
The first question is not who to hire. It is what work needs to be done, for how long, and where the capability should come from.
That is the thinking behind total workforce planning.
What are total workforce solutions?
Total Workforce Solutions bring permanent hiring, contingent workforce management and skills development together so organisations can plan around the work they need rather than manage each source of talent separately.
AMS describes its Total Workforce Solutions around these connected areas of workforce strategy.
In practice, the approach gives an enterprise a wider set of choices. A capability gap might require a permanent hire. A six-month spike in demand might be better suited to contingent talent. Another requirement might be met by moving or developing someone already in the organisation.
The value is in being able to make that decision before a requisition determines the answer.
What is total workforce planning?
Total workforce planning looks at future business demand and asks what people, skills and capacity will be required to meet it.
It should give leaders a view of:
- the work coming into the organisation
- the skills required to deliver it
- current workforce capacity
- where shortages are likely to occur
- how long those shortages are expected to last
- the available ways to fill them
- the cost and implications of each option
This is particularly important in large enterprises because the people doing the work do not necessarily sit within one workforce category.
Permanent employees may work alongside contractors, consultants, temporary workers and project specialists. Looking at only permanent headcount can therefore leave part of the workforce outside the planning conversation.
Why is it difficult to plan permanent and contingent workforces together?
Often because they are not managed from the same starting point.
HR may own permanent recruitment. Procurement may oversee suppliers and contingent labour. Finance tracks budgets. Hiring managers raise individual requirements. Different technology platforms hold different parts of the workforce record.
None of that is unusual. It becomes a problem when nobody can easily see the whole requirement.
Consider an organisation recruiting data specialists permanently while another business unit is extending contractors with similar skills. Those may both be sensible decisions. But without shared visibility, it is difficult to know whether the company is responding to two different needs or repeatedly buying the same capability through different channels.
Permanent and contingent workforce integration starts with visibility: what skills the organisation has, where they sit, how they are currently engaged and what demand is coming next.
The processes used to hire an employee and engage a contractor can remain different. The workforce decision should happen before those processes split.
How should enterprises identify workforce gaps?
A request for a contractor is not yet a workforce gap. It is a proposed solution.
Suppose a manager asks for ten contractors because a project is behind schedule. Before sourcing begins, workforce planning should establish what is actually missing.
Is there simply not enough capacity? Is a specialist skill unavailable? Is the requirement temporary? Could people elsewhere in the organisation do some of the work? Is the shortage being caused by permanent vacancies that have remained open?
A workforce gap analysis compares what the business will need with the skills and capacity it already has.
AMS’s guidance on contingent workforce gap analysis considers areas including workforce visibility, talent availability, costs, analytics and compliance when assessing current contingent workforce arrangements.
For planning purposes, the useful output is not simply “we need ten people.” It is closer to: “we need this capability, at this level, for this amount of time, starting on this date.”
Now the business can decide how to fill it.
Why is contingent workforce demand hard to forecast?
Because the requirement often becomes visible late.
A project slips by three months and contractors need extending. A permanent vacancy takes longer to fill than expected. A product launch suddenly needs specialist expertise. Seasonal demand is higher than forecast.
By the time those events become requisitions, there may be little room to consider alternatives.
Better demand forecasting starts before the requisition. Project pipelines, expected vacancies, historical contractor usage, assignment end dates and recurring skills shortages can all provide an earlier indication of where additional capacity may be needed.
Forecasting will never remove uncertainty from contingent demand. That is partly why flexible talent exists.
What it can do is distinguish genuinely unexpected demand from patterns the organisation has seen repeatedly.
If the same function requires the same specialist contractors every year, that deserves a different conversation from a one-off three-month project.
Why do global enterprises struggle to control contingent workforce costs?
The rate paid for a contractor is visible. The reason the cost exists can be harder to see.
A six-month assignment may be extended several times. Similar skills may be sourced through different suppliers at different rates. Hiring outside the agreed programme can reduce visibility. A supposedly temporary requirement may continue for years.
None of those situations automatically means the organisation is overspending. They do mean someone should be asking whether the original workforce decision still makes sense.
Take assignment extensions. Extending a specialist can be entirely reasonable when a project runs longer than expected. Repeated extensions become more interesting when the work itself is no longer temporary.
At that point, contingent labor cost control is not simply a procurement exercise. HR, finance and the business need to reconsider the underlying requirement.
Is the capability now permanent? Could it be developed internally? Does the organisation still need the same level of expertise? Is the current engagement model appropriate?
That conversation is difficult when contingent spend is reviewed separately from workforce demand.
How does contingent workforce management improve talent analytics?
It adds a part of the workforce that can otherwise be missing from the picture.
Permanent workforce data can tell HR a great deal about headcount, attrition, skills and mobility. But an enterprise may also have significant expertise sitting within its contractor population.
Bringing contingent information into workforce analytics can reveal patterns that permanent workforce data alone cannot show.
For example, leaders can examine which skills are repeatedly sourced externally, where contractor assignments keep being extended, which functions rely most heavily on flexible capacity and where similar talent is being bought at materially different rates.
One finding might be that a specialist capability has been sourced externally for three consecutive years.
That does not automatically mean the company should replace contractors with permanent employees. It does tell workforce planners that the demand is no longer obviously short-term.
That is a useful piece of information for the next planning cycle.
How should enterprises choose between permanent hiring and contingent talent?
Duration is one consideration, but it should not be the only one.
A business should also consider how strategically important the capability is, how quickly it is needed, whether demand is predictable and whether the skill exists internally.
A permanent hire may make sense when the capability is expected to remain important and demand is sustained.
Contingent talent may be appropriate for project work, short-term capacity increases, specialist expertise or requirements where future demand remains uncertain.
There is also a third option that gets missed when hiring channels are planned separately: someone already working for the organisation.
An employee with adjacent skills may be able to move into the work or develop the missing capability. Whether that is realistic depends on the complexity of the skill, the time available and what happens to the employee’s existing responsibilities.
Total workforce planning keeps all three possibilities visible long enough to make the choice.
What should enterprises measure?
More data is not necessarily better workforce planning.
The useful measures are the ones that explain whether supply is matching demand and where the organisation keeps encountering the same problems.
Depending on the workforce, those might include permanent and contingent labour spend, forecast versus actual demand, assignment duration, extensions, internal movement, recurring skills shortages, supplier performance and time required to access critical capabilities.
Look at those measures together.
An increase in contingent spend, for example, means very little on its own. If the company has deliberately brought in specialist contractors for a 12-month transformation, higher spend may be exactly what the plan anticipated.
If spending is increasing because hundreds of supposedly temporary assignments keep being extended, the same number tells a different story.
The number is the starting point. The workforce decision behind it is what needs investigating.
What does good total workforce planning look like?
It should make one question easier to answer:
Given the work ahead of us, where should the capability come from?
The organisation understands upcoming demand. It knows enough about its existing workforce to identify what is already available. It can see where genuine gaps remain and decide whether those gaps call for permanent recruitment, contingent talent, internal movement, skills development or a combination.
The individual programmes still matter. Permanent recruitment needs its own expertise. Contingent workforce management needs appropriate sourcing, supplier management, governance and compliance. Internal development has different requirements again.
Total workforce planning does not erase those differences.
It makes sure the organisation has made the workforce decision before each team starts solving its part of it.
See your workforce as one strategy
Work may be delivered by permanent employees, contingent specialists or people developing new capabilities internally. Planning each population separately makes it harder to see where the organisation already has capacity and where it genuinely needs something new.
Explore AMS Total Workforce Solutions to see how AMS connects permanent hiring, contingent workforce management and skills development.
