SOME PITFALLS OF MANAGING TALENT ON DEMAND: A CASE STUDY OF IT WORKERS

Growing interest in accessing talent on demands stems from the breakdown of long term employment relationships. As employers are no longer constrained to offer their workers employment stability, they can explore opportunities to better match their workforce to fluctuations in demand. In this paper, I argue that a disproportionate focus on changes in the way that employment relationships are governed can mask other constraints on employment flexibility. The need for firm specific and role specific knowledge was an important early driver of long term employment relationships. I argue that such specialized knowledge continues to favor long term relationships between firms and employees, even in the absence of explicit employment guarantees. Paying attention to how knowledge governs employment may explain why overall employment stability appears to have changed much less than the norms that govern employment relationship. I illustrate these arguments with a case study of IT workers in a large financial service institution. I show how inattention to constraints of knowledge undermined the organization's attempts to use contractors to access talent on demand.