FlexiTimes  

Flexitimers attended the Big Debate in City Hall last Wednesday and were fortunate to put a question to the panel. The panel, which was chaired by by respected broadcaster John Bowman, consisted of Jay Bourke (Cafe Bar Deli), Martin Murray (Interactive Return), Brian Carey (Sunday Times), Marc Coleman (Newstalk), Mark Fielding from ISME, Damian Young Head of Small Business, Bank of Ireland, Paula Fitzsimons, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor author and Pat Lynch, Chairperson of Dublin City Enterprise Board.

Q: Did the panel think that companies (under pressure to cut headcount) were more likely to outsource activities or use part-time, freelance and contract staff in order to remain competitive during these challenging times?

Summary: there was unanimous agreement that companies must outsource and use flexible staff to stay in business.

Quotes:
Marc Coleman - 'there is no doubt, no option that companies will have to outsource / use agency staff'

Pat Lynch 'your largest overheads walk in to your company on two feet....businesses must control these costs', 'It (outsourcing and using flexible staff) is a good business strategy'

Jay Bourke - If you're not letting people go, you'll go out of business, outsource right away'

Brian Carey 'It's a growing trend in Irish businesses'

This is good news for Flexitimers and particularly good news for freelancers, part timers and contractors out there who can now rest assured that more interesting projects and positions will be coming down the pipeline. Flexitimers offers part timers, freelancers and contractors access to skilled part time, contract and freelance positions and projects.

An article called 'Seeing the bigger picture' in the Independent made an interesting case for using career coaches to assist with dealing with change in the 21st century. We all know that the 'job for life' is largely a thing of the past and that's not just to do with the recession but it's more to do with our generation's career promiscuity. We prefer to shop around and indeed move around - upsizing our career prospects with strategic moves every couple of years. However, we're now seeing a very definite move towards outsourcing which will have a profound impact on the traditional employee. Maybe the next opportunity will be contract or freelance - something that exploits your skill set but to a very tight and specific brief.  Anyway the article is about using a career coach to identify what you want, why you want it and how to manage your career - worth a read. Times are changing and chance favours the prepared.

An article caught my eye in Friday's Irish Times about the CEO Forum that takes place this week in Dublin. CEOs from some of Ireland's largest companies are meeting to discuss how to operate in challenging times ahead.

A comment by Brian Long, chief executive of venture capital firm Atlantic Bridge struck me as relevant to Flexitimers "during periods of recession, opportunities tend to open up in the outsourcing space as large corporations pare back, reduce their workforce and then realise that they don't have the "bandwidth" to carry out certain activities such as the development of non-core products. This creates opportunities for smaller players to step in and offer their services". This is also the case for freelancers, contractors and anyone offering themselves 'flexibly' to companies. Food for thought indeed.

Just read an interesting post by Alexia about The Green Party's hopeful recruitment of a Machiavellian web hero to address their webdev, design, web2 and social networking needs in one tidy, one person contract over 9 months. Alexia's suggestion to "divide up the work and don't go for a yellow pack solution" and to literally contract out the specific tasks is exactly why we launched Flexitimers. We agree with you Alexia and Damien in that one size does not fit all and indeed one person does not have a complete skill set to carry off something as large as the web presence of a political party in power. I wrote a blog post specifically about this divide and conquer approach a few weeks ago.
PS, Damian from the Green Party, I appreciate your prompt and honest response and if you plan to take Alexia's advice, maybe you'll post all those choice freelance and contract tasks on Flexitimers.

A company with a display name 'Usercentred' uploaded a position this morning for a web designer. I know their real name and we've worked with them and although I've no idea what they'd be like to work for, I do know they're really nice people, really professional and would assume their work environment is spot on. So if you're a web designer with excellent CSS and are up to speed on AXURE, I recommend you apply and see what happens. Nice people. That's always a good start.

Back to work this week after been off for mid-term but quick round up of our media exposure in past two weeks.
The Sunday Business Post ran and article about us on Sunday 26th October singing our praises for the massive take up of candidates joining the site since our launch 4 weeks ago so thanks a million for that. Then Business & Finance magazine earmarked us as 'One to Watch' the same week. Women Mean Business magazine are supposed to be profiling us in the current issue but I can't confirm that until I buy a copy tomorrow when I'm in Dublin as it's not in stock down here in the South East.
So happy enough with that coverage and we're seeing the results in our traffic stats. Cheers.