The decision on whether to hire on retainer into your organisation really depends on two things:

1. What you want, and;
2. What you need.

This sounds pretty simplistic, so let’s dive a bit deeper on it.

What is a retainer model, and how does it work?

Retainer models are not new. electro: is not the first firm to offer services on retainer and will not be the last. It’s been growing in popularity for at least the past decade, particularly in professional services. While different firms operate differently and have bespoke models, there’s plenty of options across industries like law, recruitment, accounting, marketing, cybersecurity, HR et al. We can’t speak for all of them, because again their value to your organisation is subjective. What we can do is help you to understand the retainer model on a general basis, the future of work and business and ways in which a retainer may fit into your workforce strategy to give you more scale.

Broadly, a retainer model is where you engage a firm to deliver a scope of work for you for a monthly fee. It is a business to business engagement. That firm will resource your retainer, and look after all the costs and compliance of resourcing required to fulfil your scope of work.

Retainer models are different to subscriptions, which are generally low cost, low value, high volume transactions. They’re also different to engaging individual contractors or getting temporary staff from recruitment agencies.

Depending on how they are set up, they may be called a managed service model.

For example, say you are a large organisation with high volume recruitment needs. You may hire a recruitment agency on retainer to deliver this on your behalf as if they are part of your company. They might work on or off site, but you pay them a monthly agreed fee for this service and for them to exclusively fill this function for you.

They are solely responsible for managing this team, as well as all the cost and compliance associated with them. If you want them onsite, you’ll obviously need to supply the desks. The fee you pay becomes a tax deduction for this team. On top of this, you don’t have to pay high hourly billing rates which means you should (if the retainer is done well) receive more value for your spend.

On top of that, you pay one fee for highly skilled, talented professionals who specialise in what they do, instead of having to hire a whole team (which could cost you circa $1mill, depending on who you are hiring).

Notwithstanding the fact that it’s important to understand why you have high volume recruitment needs and whether there are other challenges or opportunities to make talent acquisition work smarter for you, this talent injection could make sense.

Changing workforce models

Once upon a time, the employment model reigned supreme. Sure, you may have had consultants come in to do an audit every now and again, but the 5 day week, and the loyal until retirement model was set, and a bit forgotten. With the evolution of technology and the scalability of businesses, organisations and work has been undergoing a bit of a disruption as preferences change about what people truly want out of their lives.

So, too, has the cost and risk of starting, operating and scaling an organisation, especially in a complex legislative environment like Australia.

We’re not saying that investing in a team is not money well spent (the future is ethical and accessible), but it’s money that can be spent more strategically with the right workforce design behind you.

The truth is the future of business does not require as many employees as it once did, especially as technology begins to automate technical tasks for us, and more people turn to self-employment for the work/life balance they are looking for.

The future is scalable

Without understanding your business in detail, we can’t give you specific advice around what your workforce model could look like, however we’re always happy to help!

Sometimes its valuable to have an ongoing retainer with a provider (Eg. Cybersecurity) and other times you might bring a talent injection into your team on retainer for a specific project, change, transformation or period of time.

Reasons why you might hire electro: on retainer include:

• Having us lead and facilitate change and transformation projects, like organisation redesign, implementing technology into a business, or turning an internal product into a commercial one.
• Preparing the business for investors and designing it as the go-to brand in its industry from the inside out.
• Helping you to go through a merger and acquisition, and designing integration plans.
• Working with you to transform your brand after you’ve gone through an evolution or bought a new business.
• Assisting you with transforming your culture.
• Being your innovation office, and bringing all your key practitioners together.
• Acting as your chief of staff to facilitate your executives delivering on your strategic objectives.
• Working with business partners to help them find synergy and have meaningful impact to take their business to the next level.
• A key role in your business that fits our expertise, like a Head of HR, goes on parental leave and you need a wingsquad to cover.
• If you have a number of suppliers on retainer already, we can manage these suppliers for you and ensure they are all aligned and working towards a shared vision.

As you can see, the options are endless.

If you have any questions about retainer models, feel free to ask us!