If your company is hesitant to hire sole traders — or avoiding hiring them altogether — you’re not alone. Many companies in the UK have blanket policies around not working with them, because of compliance concerns. And considering the risks of misclassification, it’s good to be cautious around this. But with around 3.5 million sole traders in the UK, this eliminates a pretty considerable amount of talent from your hiring pool that could be really benefitting your company.
Fortunately, there is a way to work with sole traders, stay compliant, and make the relationship easier for all parties involved. Worksome Classify can help you remove the risk and frustrations around working with sole traders to enable your teams to work with the talent they need, without letting compliance suffer. There are a few different ways that we do this.
The frustrations that Worksome Classify can alleviate
Hire sole traders faster with Worksome Classify
If your organization does allow you to hire sole traders, you’re almost guaranteed to be bogged down by an extremely slow hiring process. For most companies, this can take days or even weeks. But with Worksome Classify you can hire in just a matter of hours. That’s because Worksome Classify automates the classification process and handles it within the platform.
Other systems tend to outsource the classification itself because they don’t want to take on liability in the event of misclassification cases. But when you outsource a task you need to communicate what needs to be done, wait for it to be completed, and verify that it has been completed correctly. This ends up adding a lot of time to the hiring process, delaying the talent your organization needs from getting started. And that’s not ideal for the hiring managers who can’t afford to wait for their contingent workers to get started.
Lower your operational costs for better ROI
If you’re outsourcing the classification itself for each worker, this isn’t just adding unnecessary amounts of time to your process. It’s also adding money. Each hour that your full-time workers spend handling the admin around worker classification and communicating all of the necessary information with your vendors is an hour that you’re paying them, and the costs for those hours of admin work can really add up.
A tool that handles the classification in-tool in minutes removes all of those operational costs by eliminating the third party and the time spent communicating with them simultaneously. This way your internal teams can focus their time on work that is better suited for their time, your contractors can get started quickly, and you can save time and money on your external workforce program. It’s a smoother system for everyone involved, and your teams won’t miss the unnecessary admin work.
Reduce engagement risk for access to a wider talent pool for your business
For the companies that mitigate risk by not allowing their teams to work with sole traders at all, their hiring managers are often feeling the pain of this limitation. It shrinks their talent pool considerably, which is frustrating at a time when hiring is particularly challenging and they may need a very specific skill set.
Worksome Classify can enable hiring managers to confidently classify sole traders as such and work with the talent they need. And our AI classification engine provides clear recommendations based on extensive industry knowledge around classification and best practices to help you understand how each worker should be classified and ensure your risk is minimized in the event of an audit. This means a lower risk for your business overall and access to a wider talent pool for your hiring managers.
Deliver a better working experience for all of your workers
If you’re currently outsourcing classification to a third-party vendor, chances are your current onboarding process is probably a little slow. This provides a bad experience for your sole traders and your hiring managers at the same time. At the end of the day, those hiring managers just want support from the talent they’re looking for and your sole traders just want to do the work they were hired to do.
Using Worksome Classify enables them to do this by creating an easy and seamless working relationship between the two and helping businesses engage with sole traders with confidence in compliance. This lets everyone do the work they want to focus on, instead of waiting on outsourced classifications to come back to them before they can get started.
Get started with Worksome Classify
Worker classification is an ongoing struggle for companies. With guidelines evolving, cases being decided, there’s still a lot of confusion around the subject. Worksome can take the confusion off your plate and help mitigate the risk so that you can focus on work that is better suited to your time.
If you’ve been having trouble working with sole traders — whether your company doesn’t allow you to or you’re not fully confident in terms of compliance — Worksome classify is the tool for you. Request a demo today to learn more about how we’ve helped our customers gain confidence in working with their sole traders, and how we can help you do the same.