Free agents seeking for career support: exploring the expectations of skilled contingent workers vis-à-vis labour market intermediaries

Abstract

PurposeRecent studies on contingent workers highlight their boundaryless and protean nature, and depict them as free agents who reject organisational forms of career support. Going beyond such current view, this paper aims to shed light on the career support provided by labour market intermediaries (LMIs) to skilled contingent workers (SCWs), the latter known as freelancers and consulting firms' employees.Design/methodology/approachUsing a qualitative stance and an inductive approach, the authors draw on 33 interviews to grasp SCWs' discourses on the career support offered by LMIs, and their account managers. The thematic analysis reveals two main themes: the career support delivered by LMIs to SCWs, and the expectations of SCWs regarding potential additional forms of career support from LMIs.FindingsThe authors show that SCWs are supported by LMIs in their career via a number of career management practices and operational support, and account managers a likely to play a key role in the careers of SCWs by providing transactional and relational career support. Moreover, the authors stress that SCWs are free agents, yet seeking for forms of support from LMIs.Originality/valueThe present paper addresses the roles of LMIs regarding non-standard population of workers through the lens of SCWs, what has barely been undertaken in recent research. This paper also enriches current debates on the organisational support SCWs are willing to accept and benefit from, despite the idiosyncratic nature of their careers.

Shaping the future of work: how labour market intermediaries (LMIs) use institutional work to transition to triadic, project-based employment relationships

“…Labour market intermediaries (LMIs) are generally defined as "stand[ing] between the individual worker and the organization that needs work done" (Bonet et al, 2013, p. 341). Research on LMIs in Human Resource Management has focused on their HR practices (Koene and Pichault, 2021;Bonet et al, 2013), their impact on workers' careers in project work (Sulbout and Pichault, 2023;Koene and Pichault, 2021;Ruiner et al, 2020;Lorquet et al, 2018) and, recently, on their emerging role in the field of platform work (Keegan and Meijerink, 2023;Meijerink and Keegan, 2019). While client organizations tend to neglect SCWs' career development (Sulbout et al, 2022), LMIs engage in HR practices that support it, by offering talent development (Sulbout and Pichault, 2023), career counsellingincluding salary/fee negotiation (Ruiner et al, 2020) and by creating innovative ways of providing social security benefits (Koene and Pichault, 2021;Lorquet et al, 2018).…”

“…Research on LMIs in Human Resource Management has focused on their HR practices (Koene and Pichault, 2021;Bonet et al, 2013), their impact on workers' careers in project work (Sulbout and Pichault, 2023;Koene and Pichault, 2021;Ruiner et al, 2020;Lorquet et al, 2018) and, recently, on their emerging role in the field of platform work (Keegan and Meijerink, 2023;Meijerink and Keegan, 2019). While client organizations tend to neglect SCWs' career development (Sulbout et al, 2022), LMIs engage in HR practices that support it, by offering talent development (Sulbout and Pichault, 2023), career counsellingincluding salary/fee negotiation (Ruiner et al, 2020) and by creating innovative ways of providing social security benefits (Koene and Pichault, 2021;Lorquet et al, 2018). Research shows that LMIs gradually take over HR practices that organizations had previously performed, from recruiting to selection and promotion and even training and performance monitoring (Bonet et al, 2013).…”

“…In sum, a focus on the relationship between LMIs and (their) workers in prior HR research has left us with little research on LMIs themselves, including how they operate and how those operations establish and expand their business to form the triadic employment relationships that eventually affect SCWs' development and careers (Sulbout and Pichault, 2023;Lorquet et al, 2018). In a world of work in which employment relationships are being transformed (Delbridge and Sallaz, 2015), we still have little explanation of why or how such a transformation is taking place.…”

“…Researchers have recognized that understanding more about the role of LMIs in the projectification of work is important, and their findings in this emerging field of research have provided valuable insight into how LMIs impact skilled contingent workers' (SCWs') careers, such as by providing these workers with training and support, negotiating their working conditions and facilitating different work arrangements (Sulbout and Pichault, 2023;Ruiner et al, 2020;Koene and Pichault, 2021;Lorquet et al, 2018). While the focus on SCWs in this research has helped us understand the effects LMIs have for them, an important question remains largely unanswered; namely, how LMIs operate and how, exactly, they bring about these shifts in employment relationships (Kunda et al, 2002).…”

“…Researchers have recognized that understanding more about the role of LMIs in the projectification of work is important, and their findings in this emerging field of research have provided valuable insight into how LMIs impact skilled contingent workers’ (SCWs’) careers, such as by providing these workers with training and support, negotiating their working conditions and facilitating different work arrangements (Sulbout and Pichault, 2023; Ruiner et al. , 2020; Koene and Pichault, 2021; Lorquet et al.…”