Employee Or Consultant? Bringing In The Expert
An article posted January 4, 2016 on the SHRM website — Tips For Retaining Experts And Specialists — lists 4 things you can do to keep people with important specialized skills on board.
These helpful tips focus on providing benefits to the new hires to make sure their work experience will be satisfying and fulfilling: Determine what motivates them. Help them expand their knowledge base. Create alternative career paths. Plan for succession.
What causes a situation to turn negative when experts are brought on board with high hopes and expectations on both sides?
It often starts when a manager has a project which requires a particular skill, and she convinces upper management to let her bring in a specialist — not an entry level person, or a career manager, or even someone with industry experience, but a person with certain technical skills. The person performs well and the project is brought to a successful conclusion. And then what?
Too often, that expert will remain in place on the team, working for the same manager who first hired him, and finds that he is suboptimally employed in subsequent projects where his expertise is not as critical or may not be needed at all. This may be hastened and magnified by organizational changes experienced by the company.
Sometimes there’s a happy ending: The expert will look around and see other places in the organization where he can make a contribution and, perhaps encouraged by others, becomes involved in another aspect of the business — maybe even becoming a manager himself.
But other times he will become disaffected, disengaged and leave the company.
Here are some steps you can include right in the hiring process to make it more likely there’s a good employment fit long after the completion of the original assignment:
- Make sure he knows about the real reason the company exists. Give him an exposure to the history, the products, the customers and their needs. Probe and verify in the hiring interviews that the expert has an interest in the business.
- Let him see other challenges other areas are dealing with. A real problem-solver will warm up to new challenges and is likely to engage naturally with some of them.
- Make sure the original hiring manager, as well as other managers in the company, understand up front that the expert is being hired for the company and not just for her team and her project, and that upon completion of the original assignment, would be considered available for redeployment for work in other areas.
When you have a pressing need for the skills of an expert, take a moment to review these steps. Unless you can foresee his becoming a continuing player in your organization, able to evolve and grow with the changing needs of the business, you — and he — may be better off bringing him on as a consultant rather than as an employee.
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