How to find flexible work – and why employers should give it to you

Many companies state that their main objection to flexible working is that ‘it may not work for the business’. But we believe that unless employers can be convinced otherwise, this is often an easy get-out.

It’s time to make finding flexible work mainstream – and by stating your case well as you ask for flexibility, employers will begin to see the benefits for themselves.

Find flexible work – start by making your case for it

Here’s what we say: state your case for flexible working and show the recruiter or HR Manager how you will make that work for the good of the business and the team around you.

There are countless ways to do this, certainly communication and the way you will communicate with your clients and team members is a big area to address. We covered this in a blog post about job shares – it’s the same principle. If you’re not in the office, you need to make sure everyone knows what’s expected of them – and how they can get in touch with you in an emergency.

Here are five areas to think about when looking to find flexible work:

You can offer skills that an employer might not be able to afford.

If you’d like to work part-time, how can you present the benefits of this to the employer? should an employer take you on for four days? Will the cost be 80% of what it would have been to hire someone five days a week? We see many small businesses invest in legal and HR staff that otherwise would not have been able to, simply by advertising part-time roles.

You can offer senior talent when a role is only paying a junior wage.

Seen your ideal role, but it’s only offering permanent full-time? Suggest to the recruiter or HR Manager in your covering letter that you can offer greater productivity and output than a less experienced candidate. State your business case and show how you can be a positive and cost-effective solution.

You can be the perfect answer to that hard-to-fill role.

Experience tells us that harder-to-fill roles are more likely to be open to flexibility. Yet the more workers ask for flexibility, the more likelihood there is that this will change. Perhaps the role is in an undesirable location or far from public transport, making it hard to get to.

If you’re lucky, you’re working in a sector where skills are in demand, but of course we can’t all be like that. Ask yourself (and your recruiter), is this likely to be a hard-to-fill role and if the answer is yes, go for it.

You can work the hours, but just in a different way.

Just because a job advert doesn’t quite tick all the boxes, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply. By suggesting a trial period, perhaps re-working the hours, you can make yourself the ideal candidate for the role. But again, state how you’d do this. For example, by letting everyone know when and how you can be contacted when not in the office.

You won’t know unless you ask.

You may be surprised to find a prospective boss is actually quite supportive of the idea of flexible working. They may have had a family also and be familiar of the pressures around working a five-day role.

Given the heavy reporting around the gender pay gap and a shift towards remote working thanks to the rise of technology, there is more being achieved to support flexible working than ever before.Plus employers are realising that it’s not the way their staff achieve results, but the fact that they get the job done that matters.

3 min read