Solving Attrition and Talent Shortage for Federal IT Operations and Cloud Computing

The Solution 

Our customer held this specific contract for a 15 year period, and during the last few years of the contract ran into attrition issues losing numbers of long term employees who were concerned about job security. This left them very short handed on a program that required 24x7 technical support. Complicating matters, the positions were in a part of the country that did not have a local talent pool of TS/SCI cleared professionals. Nearly all of the qualified candidates in the area who held TS/SCI access were already supporting this agency, and cannibalizing individuals from other programs within this agency would not sit well with the customer. Simply put – the individuals they needed to perform this work did not exist locally. Even when they were able to identify someone to join the program, they were losing resources who could not wait through the 8-10 week onboarding process.

We met with dozens of managers from the Midwest to Mid-Atlantic region, setup weekly position review meetings, and immediately tapped into our network of cleared consultants. After organizing the positions into functional categories (IT Operations, Development, and Data) we then engaged the Softworld recruiting teams, who specialize in each of these technical domains, in order to deliver qualified cleared talent capable of accomplishing the customer’s mission.

Due to our expertise in clearance processing, Softworld’s FSO was able to work with the client to decrease the onboarding time and manage the accuracy and validity of each consultant’s security credentials. Softworld was able to quickly maneuver through the clearance paperwork that needed to be submitted to the government. We shortened the average onboarding process to four weeks which dramatically increased the retention rate of candidates waiting to start, and managed the VAR process required to access the customer’s facility.