One of our key FTSE100 clients has been speaking about achieving a 6% year on year reduction in contract numbers; as such 1st Executive assessed the current health of the interim Procurement, Supply Chain and Sustainability market through conversations with our key clients globally in September.

• 95% of clients are using Interim Resource in Procurement, Supply Chain and Sustainability.

• Contractor populations vary significantly from 2.5% - 50% of teams currently made up of interim contractors.

• 14% is the average % of interim contractors within a team.

Within Financial Services, FMCG and Pharma industry sectors in the UK, we identified a trend for engagement inside IR35, especially for indirect procurement notably in most cases utilising a blanket determination.  These industry sectors were also those dominated by MSP led solutions.

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​Interim Use In Europe and the UK:

- Europe: Assignments typically came to market with longer contract periods and were more willing to consider a limited number of days per week.

- The UK: The UK continue to request 5 days.

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Interim Use In the USA:

Following a 27% year on year rise in interim use across 2021 and 2022, we continue to see a noticeable trend in our US based clients. They are predicting further increase in their use of contract resource through 2024 with Supply Chain technology and Sustainability skill requirements playing a significant part.

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We identified a huge range of contract duration:

From 4 years at the outside, to short term 3 month engagements. Market average tenure has not seen a significant change over the last 8 years and remains consistent at 10 months.

The routes now being utilised for larger programme and transformation projects are:

- Statement of Work

- Consultancy frameworks (MCF3)

- Alternate consulting solutions

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Summary:

We have identified a small decrease in the use of traditional interim resource via the MSP led/inside IR35 markets. We have also identified that our clients are being proactive in seeking alternate vehicles to engage highly skilled niche contract resource.

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If you're in need of any specific MI or benchmarking in support of your Interim strategy, please don't hesitate to reach out to: richard.shelley@1st-executive.com or sally.davis@1st-executive.com