Have you heard about the latest workplace trend? It’s called ‘Loud Quitting’ and is the action of employees talking openly about looking elsewhere for work and using the prospect of leaving as a negotiation tactic to increase their pay and / or benefits. Some of these employees are actively searching for roles and undertaking interviews yet many have no intention of accepting these job offers.
According to the Office for National Statistics 13.3% of businesses reported a shortage of workers in 2022 with construction services (including those who provide building repairs) ranking among the highest(1). In August 2022 the Federation of Small Businesses found that 80% of small firms (such as motor repair shops) faced difficulties recruiting applicants with suitable skills in the previous 12 months(2). Given the many skilled labour shortages organisations are currently facing in the UK, organisations are choosing to pay their employees more to retain them and avoid the high costs of recruitment and onboarding.
To address the shortages, many companies, sectors and indeed the UK government are creating campaigns to bring skilled talent back into the national workforce. From attempting to lure the over 50s back from their early retirement to creating apprenticeships, much is planned but these campaigns are expensive and take considerable time to implement.
So, in this current market when insurers are desperate for skilled workers but are facing high inflation and costs of recruitment what can you do? Turn to outsourcing, it’s more effective than you may think.
What does this mean for insurance and procurement?
In 2021 Gartner released data from a survey which indicated that 24% of procurement and supply chain professionals were actively looking for a new job(3). In the same survey only 50% of respondents under 40 show strong intent to remain in their current job role.
While some think loud quitting is yet another bit of recruitment workplace jargon, the procurement and insurance sectors are feeling its impact with several of our clients telling us that after lengthy recruitment processes, those chosen for the role are turning them down at the very last minute – in one case three days before they were due to start – in favour of staying at their existing company. It’s a cycle of expensive recruitment challenges in the middle of which is a lot of important work not being done whilst the vacancy remains.
In our previous articles we’ve also shared information about labour shortages that are impacting the insurance claims market. This is due to a variety of factors such as experienced loss adjusters choosing to retire and a shortage of new entrants into the industry. In the construction and motor sectors, both of which play an important part in insurance claims, many workers have chosen to move to new jobs that are less stressful, provide greater flexibility and pay more.
In current times when the C-suite are no doubt asking you to monitor every bit of spending the cost for recruitment and resourcing could be expensive. A LinkedIn survey indicates that it can take up to four months to recruit for a role and that doesn’t include the onboarding experience where a new employee gets up to full speed in their new role. This is also assuming that your chosen employee isn’t a loud quitter.
So, what option do you have to bring on skilled people in a cost-effective way at the time when you need them most?
Why it makes sense to have an outsource option.
Budgets are under immense pressure in the insurance sector, so it’s more important than ever to be able to draw on the best procurement expertise to:
· Secure better deals
· Manage every penny of spend
· Ensure supplier contracts are robust and watertight
· Maintain supplier resilience and focus
· Ensure that you have the influence to be at the front of the queue with your suppliers.
Outsourcing can help you to leverage the expertise of skilled procurement professionals in the insurance sector and has many other benefits:
· Giving access to quality talent and flexible resources which can support your organisation at short notice without adding head count and long-term costs.
· Hiring quickly when needed can fill any gaps in your teams – a request Procurato often see at the time of surge events such as flooding or as in the case of 2022 subsidence.
· Having flexibility to pull on resources as and when they’re needed as well as being able to stand them down.
Related reading
Outsourcing procurement resource addresses an immediate capacity problem, but for organisations thinking beyond the short term, the parallel question is how to build a procurement team with the right capability, traits and digital skills to perform consistently in a market where talent is genuinely scarce. Attracting, developing and retaining strong procurement professionals requires a different approach than it did five years ago. How to build a winning procurement team in a tight labour market sets out what that approach looks like in practice, and is a useful companion for any organisation thinking about both the immediate resource gap and the longer-term capability question.
How Procurato can help
For organisations that need skilled procurement resource quickly, whether to cover a vacancy, manage a surge event, or run a specific programme, Procurato’s Procurement Outsourcing service provides the flexible, specialist capability to get started within 48 hours. Our teams work across both insurance and procurement, can be scaled up or down as the workload changes, and bring the sector knowledge and delivery experience to make an immediate contribution without the overhead of permanent headcount. If you are facing a resource gap now, we would welcome a conversation.
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References
1 https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0001/
2 https://www.fsb.org.uk/resource-report/scaling-up-skills.html
