Drive Program Results

What’s the main driver of your contingent workforce program?

Every contingent workforce program is unique, especially in terms of program motivation.  Ten years ago, almost every program would cite spend savings as their hottest agenda item.  Everything else was secondary.  As programs have evolved, we’re seeing that top program drivers are varied.  Here are some common program drivers and how having the right VMS can help you:

1.     Spend savings: While spend savings is not always a top program motivator these days, who doesn’t want to save a bit of money when possible?

Beeline’s tool recommendations: Enhance our embedded guidance (“did you knows”) to meet your program needs and drive savings. Take advantage of early pay and volume discounts. Use our trueRATE functionality to set rate components for accuracy and compliance. Set up budget tracking to include notifications when a budget is nearing depletion and the appropriate approvals if it’s going to go over. Track project change orders which often go unnoticed and can be a big source of spend creep.

2.     Rate tracking: As programs grow and progress, and in an expanding economy like we have today, it’s important to allow for rate fluidity and job title/skill expansion at a more rapid pace than simply creating a static rate card/job description.  Rate cards tend to be stagnant and not allow the business to adapt to the times. Programs can’t expect to adjust their rate cards only once a year or stand by while positions remain open for extended periods of time in order to justify rate card changes.  It’s time to use the technology of a VMS to drive rate decisions.

Beeline’s tool recommendations: Turn on TDX through our partnership with Brightfield where you can receive instant rate data with no rate cards to maintain; track both pay and bill rates to give you a clear picture of markups.  On another note, having your SOW and contingent workers in the VMS will give you the data you need to compare job titles and roles, but you have to collect this information on your SOW projects to dig into the data.  We all know that SOW projects are often used to skirt headcount limits, which can really push prices up for the same work being done.

3.     Risk compliance: With a workforce comes risk and there are any number of items which fall into this catch-all bucket: co-employment and misclassification are just two of the most often cited risk factors.

Beeline’s tool recommendations: Use your VMS to track ICs and their IC qualification criteria; integrate with HireRight on your background checks; review your user access roles in your VMS so that everyone has the appropriate visibility and capability; set up our Certification and Compliance Management feature for workers that require this to be tracked.  Also, establish the right level of risk mitigation on co-employment for your program and utilize the VMS to track this data via our reporting capabilities.

4.     On/off-boarding: This has become a critical audit component.  If your audit team asks you who is still on contract and compares that to who still has access, and these are not aligned, then you’ve got a big audit failure on your hands

Beeline’s tool recommendations: I think the so-called “worker download” integration should be as standard as integrating your user file or cost codes or locations.  Having your internal onboarding process require a feed from your VMS to all badging and provisioning systems will mitigate the likelihood that workers have extended access when they shouldn’t have received it or should no longer have it.

5.     Quality of Talent:  Every program is motivated to provide their managers with talent quickly, but an even bigger requirement is to ensure that this talent is of the right quality to get the job done.  VMS technology can help you further home in on what quality looks like in your organization.

Beeline’s tool recommendations:  Our VMS provides standard and customized reporting on metrics to help you assess rehire eligibility, early termed assignments, number of workers converting to FTEs, and percentages of candidates screened, interviewed, and onboarded.  The data is in the tool, but it will only be valuable if you act on what the data is telling you.  Also, don’t forget how valuable it can be to require hiring managers to rate their experiences in the VMS tool. This can provide important insight to follow up on.

6.     Supplier optimization: Critical program members include all of your suppliers. A number of the program drivers listed here depend upon your supplier population and how you manage them (rate, risk, quality).  Establishing supplier measurement criteria and holding them accountable helps them service your program consistently and accountably, which will help deliver the success you desire.

Beeline’s tool recommendations: We’ve developed intuitive and visual supplier scorecarding to help you quickly assess your suppliers and provide them with actionable feedback on a frequent basis.  Along with this visual capability, we also have metrics to track things like time to receive candidates from receipt of request, time to fill (from request receipt to onboarding), ratio of submittals to onboards, and even worker conversions.

What Steps Should You Be Taking with Your VMS Right Now?

• Turn on Resource Tracking so that all of your contingent workforce headcount is being tracked.  If you’re doing this along with a worker download integration for on/off-boarding, you’ll have much greater program visibility and reduce a ton of auditable risk.
• If you are not using the Services Procurement components (bid, statement of work, project management) get that turned on and start collecting that reportable data.  This one ties in to rates, on/off-boarding, quality, risk, and supplier optimization.
• Take advantage of the robust reporting available in the VMS.  I would argue that 70 percent of the reporting required to run a really solid program is in the standard VMS reporting that’s available to you, if you use it.  Once you get that down, you can start to create additional reporting and analytics that will take your program to the next level.

Know Your Drivers

It’s up to every program to determine where their priorities sit, and you should really evaluate them every year to reprioritize.  Often programs become stagnant and rest on their laurels, but if you use each fiscal year end as a time to reset your goals and learn more about your program by focusing on these different drivers, you’ll come to understand your program needs more intimately. This understanding will give you the confidence and expertise you need to advance your program and your career.