Gone are the days of a workplace made up of nine-to-fivers. Hiring staff to meet specific job demands when you need them is becoming more and more common—and expected. A flexible staffing strategy keys into the basic, tried-and-true concepts of contract work or seasonal staffing. While this is par for the course for some industries, it can be a completely new endeavor for others to consider as part of normal hiring.

There’s no need to worry about the erosion of work culture though: a flexible staffing strategy doesn’t have to mean a team of transient employees. It usually includes a mix of interim staff alongside core staff, who will grow their knowledge and expertise with your organization over time.

In retail, increased staffing correlates with the seasonal sales push. For other organizations, when a specific project arises, you may need to hire someone with expertise in a certain area to work with existing staff in order to successfully execute the project. It simply may not make sense to keep an expert on staff after the project’s completion. It is thus beneficial for both the employer and the hire to have a short-term employment agreement.

Nowhere is the need for flexibility clearer than in the current COVID crisis. Over the past few months, many organizations have had to re-invent how they perform and what services they can offer, and have had to train staff to engage new roles. Companies have had to take a hard look at which workers meet the definition of “essential” to keep their business running, while furloughs and layoffs have abounded. While no company wants to lay off employees, these past few months have made it clear that a flexible staffing strategy can allow companies to make changes when they really need it most.

The benefits of a flexible staffing strategy are clear: you can unburden full-time staff during times of heavy workload with contingent workers, engage top talent in their areas of expertise for project-specific work, and save money by operating at staffing levels that always match your business demands. Keeping a pool of contingent talent, as well as engaging a hiring strategy that can support a mix of talent, is key.

This is where a programmatic job ad platform can be beneficial in flexible staff management. If you don’t have a talent pipeline for contingent workers or if you are seeking highly skilled experts for a short-term project, you may not know where to look. Thus, talent acquisition teams may need to get more focused to figure out new sourcing strategies to support a flexible staffing strategy.

The clear place to look for sourcing help is a programmatic job ad platform. For example, pandoIQ engages a classification algorithm that can “read” your job ad description and classify it by type using natural language processing. Using historical job ad data, it can then find the best sources for top talent based on job type. The job ad finds the precise talent you seek through targeted advertising, locating your next hire where they are most likely to search on the internet. This platform makes it easy to source top talent quickly with a data-driven approach.

The other main way programmatic can support a flexible staffing strategy is through its streamlined processes and cost-saving measures. Whether it is 1 hire, 100 hires, or 1,000 hires, a programmatic job platform can meet a higher volume hiring demand with relative ease because the algorithms can process a lot of data at once. pandoIQ employs a budget allocation algorithm that can optimize your spending allotment across multiple job ad campaigns. So when you do need a hiring push, the platform can prioritize positions and maximize the efficiency of your job ad campaign dollars for each vacancy.

When you seek a flexible staffing strategy, your hiring needs will ebb and flow. It will be vastly easier for you and your team to go with the flow and hire top talent as needed if you have programmatic to support the continual flux of talent needs.