Outsized launches Talent Pool feature in the MENA region
Talent-on-demand platform, Outsized, has announced the launch of Talent Pool. This new product feature helps enterprises visualize and have access to an “always-on” talent pool via a dashboard to quickly be able to deploy skilled, pre-vetted, resources. Through its Talent Pool, their clients can have experts join or lead projects in days, not months.
Outsized’s Talent Pool enables its customer’s strategy to be more effective and efficient by encouraging organisations to shift from hiring ‘talent on demand’ to hiring ‘talent ahead of demand’. According to the company. organisations often struggle with chronic skills shortages, not least in the MENA region. In fact, nearly 2 in 3 consulting firms are short-staffed, sometimes delaying revenue (i.e., delaying projects) by up to 20 percent after winning a contract because of a lack of skilled internal talent with adequate experience at the time they need them.
According to McKinsey & Company, 87 percent of businesses report that they are either currently experiencing skills gaps or expect to within the next two to five years. Talent Pool assists business stakeholders in building their capabilities roadmap to service current and future demand for skilled talent. The feature solves the challenge of finding the right talent, within the right time frame, at the right place and with the right experience. As revealed in its 2022 Talent on Demand report, Outsized’s clients’ top desired skill sets in the MENA region include digital transformation, cards/payments, data governance, analytics, agile methodologies and project and program management.
Azeem Zainulbhai, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Outsized, said, “There is a noticeable shift in hiring practices in consulting and financial services firms in the region that want to move from the current <5 percent usage of flexible talent to more than 30 percent in the next five years. Specialists who are brought in to deliver specific results, give firms the flexibility to scale depending on project demands. This (new) model is more cost-effective for businesses over the long run vs. adding a full-time, permanent workforce.”
Talent Pool benefits both enterprises and talent by proactively promoting talent to the relevant clients. By having access to pre-vetted talent, especially aligned to their needs, organisations save time and have an improved experience as they don’t need to spend time sifting through hundreds of irrelevant options and reduce the risk of turnover through pre-qualification of talent.
With the Talent Pool feature, Outsized clients have seen a reduction in time to deployment from an average of 1 month to 1 week. The platform has already enabled over US$6m of pay-outs to independent consultants in 2022 alone, of which, 25 percent comes from talent pools and the remaining from bespoke requests (though still within core Talent Pool skill sets).
