Ericsson 2 Year rule for contractors

[gables]

I worked at Revenue Scotland where a 23 month rule applied, I was told the reason was that if a contractor was needed for longer then the role should be permie.

[northernladuk]

I worked at Revenue Scotland where a 23 month rule applied, I was told the reason was that if a contractor was needed for longer then the role should be permie.

Was told the same. Guess what they did, got another contractor in after.

[edison]

Was told the same. Guess what they did, got another contractor in after.

I worked at one medium size client where I brought in a rule that all contractor roles would be reviewed quarterly by the IT leadership team as a whole. Initially all contractors who had been there for at least two years were reviewed and several roles were made permanent. Existing contractors were offered to go perm and a few declined and left. Some accepted and years later are still there as perms.

The two year period was chosen fairly arbitrarily by the CIO but what was more useful was the longer term process of reviewing the contractors on a case by case basis and then being quite ruthless in binning those who were deemed to have served their purpose rather than getting sucked into BAU 'stuff'.

Conversely I know one client that has this rule but doesn't necessarily enforce it well. In the infrastructure team, they had contractors doing the same role for five years or more and justified it by making some vague claims about carrying out 'market testing' and reporting that they couldn't attract the right skills for perms.

[NotAllThere]

For some companies, permanent roles are head count, contractors are not. Head count freezes are good news for contractors.

[Snooky]

As mentioned elsewhere, there's no "official" 2 year rule, different clients will have different policies. The whole thing came about as a result of IR35 where, if you were found to be an employee for tax purposes, some companies were concerned that you might have a valid claim for backdated employee rights. 2 years service is a kind of trigger point for enhanced employee rights, particularly in terms of redundancy so, AIUI, that's where the 2 year policy came from. Other organisations then seem to have fairly blindly adopted the practice.

[TheDude]

Still it's their loss so onwards and uplwards

A lot of contractors feel that way but we are all dispensable.

[Smartie]

A lot of contractors feel that way but we are all dispensable.

Except it often is their loss. They lose skills and knowledge that won't be replicated by a new contractor and will rarely pay sufficient to get a perm resource of the same quality.
Faced with this dilemma and the loss of the majority of their resources within a short time period, my current client handed the roles off to a resourcing company who hired everyone (who wanted to) as perm on the same income as their contract rates delivered.