Workforce planning has never been this complex. With increasing pressure to keep HR costs down, evolving career paths and expectations, and uncertainty around how AI will affect our workplaces—it’s a challenge for HR leaders to know what next week will look like, let alone next year.  

Mercer emphasized unpredictability as a key factor in trends affecting HR in 2024. They share how this volatility is affecting their People strategy “to intentionally build more sustainable, more inspiring, less exhausting work models.”

And that’s just what we’re seeing at Inspire. Leading companies have learned that relying on a reactive, headcount-based staffing approach is stymieing them in this environment. So they are shifting to a more strategic, modern model that blends permanent employees with flexible, on-demand talent for overflow or specialized work.  

We often see CHROs planning for about 80% of roles to be permanent hires and 20% to be composed of fractional talent and contract workers. This gives leaders the ability to match resources to demands with a precision that protects their budget, their workforce, and their own sleep at night. 

Including fractional talent within workforce planning enables HR leaders to achieve their goals, even in this complex environment, particularly in the following ways.   

Address growing cost pressures

Companies are looking to their heads of HR to control costs following four years of increasing investment in DEIB and employee engagement amidst the growth of remote and hybrid working. According to HR data company Brightmine, only 35% of companies planned to increase their HR budget in 2024, compared to 49% in 2023. 

Yet, the demands on HR keep growing. 

Spending less to get more is a conundrum facing all HR leaders. Plus, following 18 months of painful layoffs across industries, HR leaders, CEOs, and CFOs are naturally hesitant to increase headcount even as HR faces pressure to do more. 

With fractional talent, companies don’t have to make tradeoffs between getting the work done and keeping costs in check. Fractional talent is a workforce model that can help you control costs without sacrificing strategic focus.

Fractional talent gives businesses access to the human capital and expertise they need now, without committing to recurring costs, fringe benefits, and additional overhead. 

Balance workloads and costs associated with increasing turnover

No matter how robust your retention and engagement strategies are, it’s impossible to avoid the uptick in employee turnover that is likely to continue for decades—at least. 

Just half of millennials strongly agree that they will be working at the same company one year from now, according to Gallup’s latest workforce report. And 60% of millennials are open to new job opportunities, compared to 45% of older workers. 

The career ladder is a thing of the past. It’s been replaced by a career jungle gym. 

While you may not have a resignation letter on your desk today, that doesn’t mean you won’t tomorrow.

With the old, traditional staffing model that relies fully on permanent employees, employers must expect to spend more time and money on hiring and understand their remaining workers will be saddled with excess work until the position is filled and the new person is fully up to speed (which can take about six months).

With fractional talent, it’s a different picture. Fractional experts fill the gap for only as long as you need them, shielding your workforce (including the 42% of desk workers already feeling burnout) from taking on a job and a half and shielding you from growing your overhead.

Fill gaps as more people take a career break or extended leave

Employee turnover isn’t the only challenge to managing workloads. The growing trend of employees taking extended career breaks for family reasons, travel, or simply a reset is leaving additional gaps for team members to fill. In fact, from 2018 to 2022 the number of sabbaticals tripled, causing Fast Company to declare “The great resignation has morphed into the great sabbatical.”

“The pandemic, and the seismic shifts it wrought on how we live and work, has precipitated a wave of workers questioning the accepted orthodoxy that you need to wait for retirement to pursue extended leisure,” James Hudson says in Forbes. 

Plus, U.S. employers are beginning to respond to calls for greater family leave benefits. In 2024, 20% of employers plan to increase their current parental leave programs, including offering more than the typical 6 to 8 weeks. 

One of our clients, an HRBP in the entertainment industry, recently discovered two members of a small team would be out on family leave around the same time. They knew productivity would plummet if they let the gap persist for three months, but they had not budgeted for additional resources in their annual budget. 

“I’m kicking myself for not planning for talent needs that were bound to pop up. I wish I had given myself more options from the start.”

You can’t predict who will take leave when, but you can assume it’s going to happen. And when you weave fractional talent into your workforce planning, you can be ready to cover the gap and help ease the returning team members back into their roles for a smooth transition.

Build a bench of on-demand talent as AI presents the ultimate uncertainty

The rapid evolution of AI capabilities makes it hard to know just what skills a company will need in the future. As technology changes, the demand for certain roles will decrease, while new roles will emerge. And leaders and employees alike will face a learning curve in discovering the best way to augment skills.

Fractional talent allows companies to tap into a flexible pool of skilled experts and quickly access the expertise they need without committing to permanent hires. This allows them to rapidly scale their workforce up or down as demands shift, reducing costs and risks associated with over or under-staffing.

The pace of change isn’t likely to slow down. Persisting global conflicts and a highly politicized U.S. election on the horizon pile onto the trends above. By building a bench of on-demand experts and weaving fractional talent into their workforce planning strategies, organizations can more effectively navigate the uncertainty and access needed skills and expertise as conditions evolve.