Boardroom signals: What Beeline’s clients are talking about now
Beeline’s Client Advisory Board (BCAB) of contingent workforce professionals represents industries as diverse as banking and financial services, energy, healthcare, high technology, retailing, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences. At meetings and teleconferences throughout the year, the BCAB delves into crucial contingent workforce topics and plays a pivotal role in shaping Beeline's future vision and direction. This blog series reflects insights from this group of Beeline’s most knowledgeable clients and partners.
From tactical to strategic: Elevate your contingent workforce program
By Craig Coe
Contingent workers used to provide quick fixes for short-term gaps. Today, they are central to building an agile, high-performing workforce. Whether they are specialist contractors or SOW-based teams performing complex projects, external talent is reshaping the way your company works.
But here’s the catch: if your contingent workforce program is stuck in “tactical mode” (focused only on cost savings and compliance), you’re leaving long-term value on the table.
Skills shortages and the pressure to stay lean are driving a new mix of employee and contingent talent. Macro trends that support this shift – like AI, skills-based planning, and ecosystem complexity – are driving managers to get more strategic and demand more from technologies like their vendor management systems (VMS). This shift is exactly what our BCAB is talking about.
“Tactical mode” will only take you so far
Most contingent workforce programs start in “tactical mode.” You get cost savings, basic visibility, and compliance. That’s important — but it’s only the beginning.
To unlock real value, organizations need to look beyond short-term fixes and align workforce programs with broader business goals. While a tactical program is a good foundation, it doesn’t drive long-term growth or innovation. Your program needs to evolve.
The strategic shift: smarter questions, bigger wins
Strategic programs ask:
When you shift gears like this, your program stops being just about cost-control and becomes a business driver.
What you gain when you think bigger
Organizations that move beyond tactical management see:
Free up time: let automation do the heavy lifting
It’s hard to see the big picture when you’re buried in manual tasks. Fortunately, new VMS automation features are cutting that workload dramatically. Imagine making resumé review and candidate shortlisting 67% faster. Or cutting 90% of the time it takes to create a job request. It’s possible with AI-powered resumé visualization, skills proximity scoring, and job taxonomy tools.
Workflows with built-in process automation, supplier consolidation and optimization tools, and API-based integrations that eliminate “sneakernet” and “swivel chair” data transfers all free up hours in your day for other, more productive activities.
Minimize fraud and compliance risks
Of course, strategy takes a back seat when a contingent workforce program is faced with immediate risks like candidate fraud and regulatory compliance. No business wants to make the news either by hiring workers with fraudulent credentials or by misclassifying employees as independent contractors.
To protect against increasingly sophisticated candidate fraud techniques, new tech is helping companies spot and stop bad actors with:
To mitigate compliance risks, contingent workforce owners and their technology partners are establishing processes and automated controls that can’t be ignored or circumvented. These include:
Managing the extended workforce ecosystem
Today’s workforce isn’t just employees plus temps. It’s a broad ecosystem of people, partners, and services all working toward common goals. Managing this extended workforce strategically requires internal alignment between HR, Procurement, Finance, and other functional groups. Managing it efficiently also requires alignment of a growing ecosystem of external technologies and services that support each available external labor category.
Tactically, it makes as little sense for contingent workforce programs to manage these ecosystem entities individually as it does to manage staffing suppliers individually. And strategically, it makes the most sense to integrate and automate these ecosystem services into the overall external talent acquisition and management workflow to ensure consistency, auditability, and policy compliance. The right VMS technology makes a difference.
Earning a seat at the strategic table
Managing external talent is no longer just about filling roles and managing time and deliverables. It is about finding the most efficient ways to integrate external talent into the organization’s total workforce. In uncertain economic times, this includes ensuring flexibility to scale up or down – or shift laterally – as business needs require.
Workforce leaders who drive this shift prove their value by ensuring the organization has the right resources to meet its goals. That’s how they earn their seat at the strategic table.
Professionals who are changing the game
Every year, Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) honors a few leaders who are leading the transition to strategic programs as “Contingent Workforce (CW) Program Game Changers.” We’re proud that 17 of this year’s honorees are Beeline clients – including two current BCAB members:
Their innovation and leadership are shaping the future of contingent work.
Want to get more strategic? Start by using your data.
Contingent workforce program owners, procurement professionals, and talent leaders who want to build a more agile workforce strategy have many options. One way is to start with something you already have – your contingent workforce data. Hear Colleen Tiner and Manfred Vogels describe how to harness the power of your VMS data to make smarter, faster, more cost-effective decisions. Watch our webinar today.
Craig Coe is Beeline’s senior vice president of global customer success and executive sponsor of the Beeline Client Advisory Board.