Our top trend this month: Shorter term contracts, specifically in the Professional and IT space.

This trend has emerged because of clients’ cost control needs and requirements; which allows access to higher dollar talent over a shorter period of time, primarily focusing on critical projects with priority budget allocations. Since most contingent talent is still presently in great supply, it’s working. This short term contract engagement strategy provides important financial management flexibility to support any uneven economic business cycles in the near-term.

But as the market continues to turn and more budgets constraints are relaxed, demand will start to dictate whether this strategy remains a viable option. When the business environment turns more active/competitive, those organizations with longer term projects will always be able to capture more of the supply of available, high quality, talent.

Other important emerging trends:

• Social Media boom in the workplace, driven primarily by business organizations, is producing lots of project work for content and design development.
• Small/local staffing companies are aggressively vying to partner with big MSP players, who are becoming strategic “Channel Masters” of significant volumes of spend in the staffing industry
• Increases in industrial spend (SFN Group has seen a 26% increase recently in this space)
• H1-B restriction for companies who received TARP funds spurring growth in outsourcing suppliers