ITG’s offer for companies

Wage Portage, a solution that can be adapted to a wide range of needs

While Wage Portage is a convenient solution for individuals who wish to take on a specific type of assignment, the same cannot be said for companies. Companies have many needs and the scope of their activities often varies. The tendency for organizations to focus on their core business means that they are increasingly calling on external service providers to manage areas of expertise that they don’t wish to handle themselves.

As a leading wage portage company, we use our expert knowledge of French labor law to help international companies develop their business in the European and French markets with complete confidence. Our in-depth knowledge of current laws and regulations allows us to offer a secure environment for companies that choose to rely on our services, thereby enabling our customers to focus on developing their business with complete peace of mind.

From the search for expert resources to complete a project team to external mobility offers, Wage Portage can be used in a variety of ways, and this can even include all the freelancers the company calls on. ITG has also responded to the need to implement solutions to cope with the mass retirement of key experts, has set up in-house consultancy firms to handle various career and workload issues, has offered alternatives to permanent contracts to managers affected by redundancy plans, etc.

As part of this process of adaptation, Wage Portage, which is protected by recent legislation and regulations, has come at just the right time and has increased the freedom of organizations and, in so doing, has also increased their efficiency.

1. Solutions for matching resources to business activities

Choosing your Employer of Record (EOR)

The need to flexibly manage variations in workloads is an ongoing concern for companies. If these variations aren’t properly anticipated, they can severely impact a company’s profitability. While it is strategically important to have trained operational resources available at all times during peaks in activity, it is not always possible to guarantee that these jobs can be maintained when there is a sharp fall in demand. Under labor law, solutions for securing the availability and employability of temporary resources are limited. Some companies may agree to terminate their contracts with their employees and have them work as entrepreneurs instead, thereby exposing themselves to the legal risk of reclassification.

Wage portage is an additional, secure alternative to traditional contract solutions (permanent and temporary employment contracts) that makes temporary employees available in a secure environment and integrates seasonal activities into the management of the company’s workforce. Under the wage portage system, employees are trained by the EOR to work on assignments and to look for assignments, so they can continue working while maintaining their previous employed status.

The ITG Business Solutions advantage

Adjust your resources to your activities with wage portage

Founded in 1996, ITG’s mission is to provide organizations with an interface for managing qualified external resources, on either a portage or a freelance basis.

This solution offers the following economic and legal advantages:

• From a financial point of view, this involves handling cash flow for freelancers and occasional contractors. The customer is no longer required to bear the administrative costs of management and invoicing. The customer now has just one contact, instead of several hundred contacts.
• From a legal standpoint, the customer is protected from the risks of having their contracts reclassified as employment contracts for either self-employed contractors or semi-exclusive subcontractors. Similarly, the customer no longer has to deal with other forms of litigation, which are now handled by ITG.

Wage Portage applies to individuals who want to conduct and develop a professional activity as independent consultants to companies, under the status of an employee, in the areas of consulting and intellectual services.

ITG takes the concept of wage portage a step further and sets itself apart from the competition by anticipating changes in society and the job market:

• For individuals: for those who aspire to the challenges of professional autonomy and who want to create a business, we signed the Occupation and Skill Forecasting and Seniors agreements in 2009.
• For companies: we offer the outsourcing of workforce management, concentration of purchasing, changes in management methods and human resources management (project-based management, etc.)

With over 4,000 consultants throughout France, Groupe ITG is a recognized leader in all areas of consulting, research and training. Groupe ITG is active in the main regions of France through its 18 regional offices, where it encourages the development of consultant clubs and networks.

ITG has signed numerous partnerships with major accounts and French administrative departments, with the aim of:

• improving the quality of these services,
• benefiting from special relationships,
• setting up the regular monitoring of services provided by non-permanent staff employed by ITG

These goals are in line with current purchasing procedures and the contractual terms and conditions to which the company expects bidders to comply, in accordance with the company’s culture and environment, and in compliance with French laws governing the portage business.

2. Opening up to the European market

• By calling on consultants authorized to work in France, international companies can gain a foothold in the European market, while choosing to remain fluid.
• These consultants are employees of the EOR, which handles all the administrative tasks. This also reduces the risk of reclassification, because the EOR and the consultants are bound by the employment contract. By opting for ITG’s expertise in French law and regulations, international corporate clients can safely entrust their assignments to our consultants.
• In addition to our managing all the administrative tasks and our expertise in securing the assignment, ITG employees benefit from social protection including medical coverage, contributions to pension plans and entitlements to unemployment benefits.

Everything you need to know about social protection under the wage portage system

3. Solutions for early retirees

Senior work

Anticipating the retirement of employees can be a genuine guarantee of the continuity of production and profitability for both parties (the employee and the company) if it is integrated into employment management. This is frequently the case for companies that are leaders in cutting-edge technologies and expertise, whose senior experts are the company’s memory and its core expertise. But even if the retirement of these experts has been planned, passing on their knowledge requires training and, sometimes, the ability to make sure that early retirees will continue to work with the company in the future.

Is your company currently looking for solutions to secure and organize the process of employing active early retirees in the future? Are you aware of the various opportunities for new forms of employment that combine work and retirement, and can you identify the advantages and disadvantages of each status according to the plans of future retirees?

The ITG Business Solutions advantage

Work on assignments with your early retirees on a wage portage basis

When entrusting assignments to early retirees, companies have often resorted to unsuitable or even risky formulas (such as having a foreign subsidiary pay for these assignments or self-employment) in the absence of an existing ad hoc reference framework. Today, many company managers, and especially HR directors, are wondering what best practices can be developed to organize assignments entrusted to former employees who have retired.

In these situations, there are a number of possible statuses for these workers:

• employment contracts: either temporary or permanent, depending on the length of the assignment,
• temporary work,
• wage portage,
• self-employed status: auto-entrepreneurs, self-employed professionals, company formation.

Of the above, wage portage appears to be the best solution, and is very different from hiring auto-entrepreneurs or self-employed workers.

In addition to avoiding the very high risk of reclassification, wage portage also offers numerous advantages compared to these solutions. For companies that centralize their purchasing, the EOR acts as an ordinary supplier. The same framework contract can cover a number of situations:

• assignments entrusted to the group’s early retirees,
• calling on IT developers and engineers,
• searching for experts to complete project teams,
• calling on trainers to develop customized business modules,
• assistance and consulting.

If early retirees have any teaching skills, these skills can be further developed by portage companies who have a training program. These new employees of the portage company can then provide training courses under the portage company’s trainer number. This system offers the following advantages:

• workers are accepted into the company and have a thorough understanding of the business and its context; they can return to work on a different assignment than the one they were originally entrusted with, and can pass on their expertise and experience as part of a transfer of skills, for example, or help onboard new recruits.
• their training or tutoring services can be paid for as part of ongoing training.

Early retirees may also be given priority to work on other important in-house assignments, such as:

• monitoring standardization files,
• implementing quality procedures, etc.

4. Find the expert you’re looking for

Which professional profiles are most sought-after by recruiters?

Today, the search for new skills, especially when these skills are rare or in demand, is a real headache for HR departments and recruitment/purchasing departments, so much so that some companies outsource these skills. ITG, a partner to 1,400 major national and international accounts, has been meeting the needs of its customers for several years now, and has been providing companies with access to a CV library of the best subject-matter experts, from among 8,000 biographies published and commented on by Groupe ITG consultants.

The ITG Business Solutions advantage

Find the additional resources you need with ITG consultants

There are two ways for companies to find additional wage portage resources through ITG:

Push mode:

Send us your request for resources or skills. ITG will publish your request on its collaborative ITG consultant platform. The consultants who are interested in your request will reply directly to you, and both parties will agree on the terms of the contract. All you have to do is send us an advertisement, using a predefined template provided by ITG, which we will send to you on request. A separate advertisement must be made for each search.

Pull mode:

As with traditional job board searches on professional networks, the company searches for skills according to specific criteria, using a CV library where ITG consultants regularly list their biographies and experience. Upon request, ITG gives the company access to publications by the best subject-matter experts, from among 8,000 biographies published and commented on by Groupe ITG consultants.

With over 4,000 active consultants, Groupe ITG offers a wide range of experts with whom decision-makers have direct, ongoing contact.

5. Ad hoc support for major projects

Managing my assignments in project mode

In most national organizations, purchasing is centralized, including purchasing for consulting, research and technical expertise. It’s hard to find a single consulting firm that can cover all these areas, especially if you’re relying on people steeped in the culture of the different contexts in which your organization operates. For purchasing departments, this means creating a new opportunity to formalize and build a sustainable purchasing procedure that provides access to professional profiles in a number of areas of activity, particularly when searching for coaches and/or mediators in crisis management situations, change management experts/trainers, project managers for tender development, technical and IT experts, trainers, etc.

The ITG Business Solutions advantage

Find a team of experts for your major one-off projects

The necessary agility that companies need in order to be competitive can be implemented with highly relevant solutions for providing resources and redeploying professionals through assignment-based work.

This experience, which has led to the reclassification of 6,800 professionals in 12 years, is what Groupe ITG offers to managers, who can then make their companies more competitive. Organizations that manage professional staff regularly call on Groupe ITG’s experience.

The Groupe ITG « Approach » offer can be applied from several angles:

• support for reflection before setting up a dedicated process: training project teams or providing a project manager to support in-house resources and to guarantee commitments to defined resources;
• project management or assistance in setting up the initial systems;
• advice and monitoring for deployment and the transfer of skills to in-house teams

The most common process for implementing this offer consists of five steps:

1.  drawing up specifications;
2. access to a panel of experts on request;
3. defining intervention protocols;
4. negotiating and approving reference fees by all parties involved;
5. quality and control procedures.

With over 4,000 active consultants, Groupe ITG offers a wide range of experts with whom decision-makers have direct, ongoing contact.

6. Continuity and transmission of expertise

Searching for new training offers to enhance the proposals made to employees as part of a multi-year training plan or the company’s occupation and skill forecasting is a daily headache for managers and HR directors. And yet, while there are many change management programs being offered, they don’t always deliver the expected results in terms of on-the-job transfers.

To promote the employability of company employees, the main goal is to enable people who are entering training to identify their expertise and associated skills, with a view to making the most of their professional experience, in their immediate work situation or in their future career plans. For these training courses to be transferable, participants need the support of a consultant/coach who will enable them to take practical action based on these courses and encourage them to get moving.

The ITG Business Solutions advantage

Take advantage of the ITG consultant training modules

ITG’s training courses have been redesigned in line with the Occupation and Skill Forecasting agreement that the group signed in 2009 and in response to various requests from organizations who are eager to ensure that their workforce continues to be employable, especially in the second half of their careers. Designed to encourage professional autonomy, multi-activity management and project-based work, these training courses are aimed at helping people who are committed to the path of professional autonomy to maximize their opportunities for professional success and personal fulfillment.

Throughout this process, employees will work with a mentor who will monitor their progress and act as a bridge between the various support sessions being offered and the start of their job search.

ITG’s initial training program includes at least three training modules:

• Introduction to consultancy marketing (one day)
• Putting your expertise into action (four days)
• Preparing and managing proposals (three days)

Needless to say, because needs are constantly changing, these different scenarios are likely to evolve and be updated, and we must rely on both your imagination and ours to continue building effective solutions. However, our goal is to respect the spirit of the legislation, the best practices to which we have made a major contribution, and the social dialogue which, far from being difficult, is an essential condition for our success.