Contingent Workforce Summit — discussions about contingent workforce but without contingent staffing suppliers
Staffing Industry Analysts, Inc is holding its annual Contingent Workforce Summit in October
Notice the “important note” on the bottom, in bold:
This conference pricing is available only to employees of organizations which are major buyers of contingent staffing and/or related services (e.g. Fortune 1000 companies). If you are a staffing/VMS/MSP (or related) vendor, supplier, analyst, or consultant, please contact Diana Gabriel (650-232-2376).
I did call to see what the terms were for those representing staffing suppliers. Dana Gabriel said staffing suppliers are “not qualified to attend” and may only participate as exhibitors. Someone please tell me I misunderstood, because that doesn’t make sense.
It’s like a publisher telling a person “you can’t purchase it at newsstand price, the only way to get it is if you advertise.”
I looked through the conference brochure to look at the session panelists. Fortune 100 companies were well represented, of course, that’s who it’s geared for. VMS providers and the large MSPs are also present in the panels. Then a few lawyers.
There’s one case study presentation moderated by a staffing supplier representative, Maria Goyer, Director of RPO and MSP Services, ASAP Staffing, LLC.
On the Attendee Discussion Tables portion, a few topics revolve around VMS and MSP including implementation and best practices, and there are some topics about suppliers. These discussion tables are limited to “buyers of staffing services.”
I understand nobody wants to be sold to, but contingent workforce programs (VMS or not) consist of so many different components: purchasing, human resources, end users (hiring managers), the VMS provider, the MSP (assuming they are separate), the staffing suppliers, and many more, depending on how many levels you want to drill down to.
Contingent workforce programs are ecosystems of interdependent participants. That said, does it really make sense to exclude staffing suppliers?
What are your thoughts? Please leave a comment.
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LinkedIn profile pics: you CAN turn it off
This has got to be the most useful feature from LinkedIn. Not only do you have the ability to set your photo’s visibility on LinkedIn, you can also choose not to view OTHERS’ profile pictures. It’s definitely a valuable tool for those of us who feel that the photo feature could compromise anti-discrimination hiring practices/expose corporations to possible discrimination suits (from the few sue-happy folks who will use just about any excuse to squeeze a buck).
The option is under your account settings and is the very last option under privacy. Or. You can just click here.
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LinkedIn users divided on pictures, recruiters don’t like it
(Note on all the self-linking: not trying to overly promote myself but I have written about this not just here but also on my other blog so much so just trying to avoid being redundant).
Check out the discussion on LinkedIn’s new feature: pic on profiles, question was posted by LinkedIn user, William Uranga. I posted my thoughts in this post.
Just as expected, recruiters are wary about the ability to view pictures. I had a casual discussion with LinkedIn’s Mario Sundar several months ago on this. That discussion happened just days after the Facebook Developer Platform was launched. Wasn’t a big deal quite yet…right before Silicon Valley fell into Facebook hypnosis. 
(Not exactly sure when this happened. But notice the post on the platform announcement simply said that Facebook was the “Anti-MySpace.” It’s hard to even put the two on the same boat now. You just can’t. ).
I know I started out this post by talking about photos on LinkedIn but I can’t help but be amazed at how little time has passed since that conversation with Mario about profile pictures (Chris Salazar just happened to be right there with a camera. How cool is that?) I can’t believe all the F8 craze is barely three months old.
So many things have happened since. Or little. Depending on how you look at it. LinkedIn has since hinted at opening up their developer platform, and even that is still at least another 4-6 months away (I’m basing it on their “within nine months” statement). LinkedIn Groups is now live (though I think it’s useless). And now photos.
Not sure where LinkedIn is going with all of this. I have mixed feelings about a LinkedIn platform. On one hand I’d like to see applications like Causes but on the other I’d hate to see apps like Zombies (both apps were, by the way, were from the same developer — met him at the Facebook Mixer a while back). And then sometimes, I just wish LinkedIn would just stay the way it is, but maybe with better messaging tools. Or maybe an RSS feed for LinkedIn answers.
I wish there wasn’t so much pressure for LinkedIn to catch up with Facebook. There’s room for both in my book. But how do you say that to LinkedIn, when their position as the leader in business [social] networking is at stake?
Tough choices.
More coverage of LinkedIn Photos:
LinkedIn Photos: Good or Bad Idea? ZDNet
LinkedIn Photos Allows Photos After Resisting - CNN
Job References You Can’t Control - WSJ
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LinkedIn now has pictures
I noticed something new in my LinkedIn profile today. It now has the option to add an 80×80 photo.
The Boston Globe’s Business Blog was wondering why it took this long. Did it not make it to their to-do list?
I doubt that’s the reason.
LinkedIn is used heavily by recruiters. This is because unlike Facebook and MySpace, a person’s LinkedIn profile is almost equivalent to a resume. (I suppose LinkedIn using the hresume microformat is based on what members use the site for.) Any seasoned recruiter or staffing professional will tell you that resumes and photos don’t belong together.
Discrimination suits aren’t fun. Or cheap. Sure, you can argue that discrimination can occur in other stages of the recruiting process, but recruiters will tell you it’s better to play it safe and throw out that photo attachment.
It’ll be interesting how this new development with LinkedIn changes things, if it changes anything.
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A word on my blog
I’ve received a few comments and quite a bit of e-mails about the VMS series. Quite a few readers have pointed out that I have wrong or misleading information and a few have said I shouldn’t be writing about it because I really don’t know what I’m talking about.
I’m not writing as an expert but as someone who want to facilitate a discussion, which is clearly happening, based on the amount of e-mails and phone calls I’ve received about my VMS posts.
- So a few housekeeping notes here about my blog.
- This is my personal blog. I work for a staffing firm, but as it says on my sidebar, what I say here is my personal opinion and not that of my employer. I am writing from the point of view of someone who has about 10 years of experience in the contingent staffing industry. That experience pales in comparison to those with 20-30 years of experience. I have a lot to learn and I’m using my blog to give people a platform in which they can converse with me, and in effect, educate me. My blog is my listening tool.
- Now that I’ve explained the “personal” label…yes. Of course. It benefits my employer, albeit indirectly. But this is not my employer’s propaganda outlet. None of the stuff I say here is pre-approved by anyone. This blog is not even hosted on any of our servers. So how does it benefit my employer? I’m in marketing. To do my job effectively, I have to continuously educate myself. I have to listen to conversations. I have to keep tabs on the industry. I have to know what the industry is doing. This is my listening tool. Please see #1. Some of us go to conferences, some read trade publications, some attend webinars. Me? I blog.
- Also, I just happen to love blogging. I have another blog where I write about almost anything, and I started this as my career blog. What’s a career blog? Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester, talks about it here, and I wrote a post about it here. Someone commented to me over e-mail that this blog could very well benefit my employer. I’d like to think so, because I do aspire to be a value to my organization. I write knowing that my personal brand affects my employer’s brand. But other than that, this is NOT part of my employer’s marketing arsenal.
- In addition to my blog being my listening tool, this is also my public notebook. I’m a big believer in the power of collaboration. It’s the Web2.0 way. I post my thoughts and people weigh in. I ask questions and people respond with their opinions or sometimes they will point me to a certain direction. Sometimes they will point out certain things I haven’t really thought about. It’s just like going to the library. I’m not going to try to read all the books they have available on a subject, but I will ask for help. I will ask for the librarian’s help, I will ask other people in the aisle which books they recommend. Those recommendations mean more to me than the database search results. So in addition to my blog as a listening tool, my blog is also my research tool.
- And a few housekeeping notes about the VMS series:
- I work for a contingent staffing supplier and my experience with VMS comes from that perspective. I’ve recruited for VMS accounts in the past. Some were great experiences. Some were horror stories. My intent is to highlight what made the first group great experiences, and highlight the reasons why the second group were horror stories. The end result, hopefully, would be that we’d work with more with accounts from the first group, and hopefully those who stumble upon my horror stories will avoid those mistakes.
- There are those that said since I work for a staffing supplier, that I must be anti-VMS and that my ultimate goal is to discourage prospects from using VMS. I recognize that VMS will be around. There are a myriad of reasons why companies implement VMS. Theoretically a product or service will not exist in a free market if there was no real value for it. But any solution is only as good as the way it is implemented. A few have pointed that out that it’s quite a lofty goal to aspire for some sort of VMS best practices that will benefit all parties – clients, MSP, VMS, suppliers, HR, purchasing, hiring managers and contingent staff – and a few have said it’s not going to happen. That may be true, that it’s too much to aspire for, but the conversations that result from the postings whether they be on my comments section or via e-mail, are priceless.
- A few have pointed that out that someone’s gotta be paying for my blog to come so high up on Google’s search results. I’d like to take that as a compliment to my SEO skills, but the real reason behind it is that there isn’t much information about VMS on the Internet. There are plenty of whitepapers and there are plenty of corporate sites that talk about it, but it isn’t addressed much in the Blogosphere and Google’s algorithms tend to have a preference for blogs due to their high trust ranking. But no, there is no advertising at all to drive traffic to this blog.
To summarize all of the above, this blog is my conversation tool. I’m glad you’ve found my blog and I’m grateful to those who have weighed in and pointed things out to me and to those of you who have taken the time to e-mail and call me. That right there, is this blog’s main goal.
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VMS: Let’s Collaborate
When I started posting on the VMS series I meant to write, in bits and pieces, about VMS best practices. But as I posted a list of VMS companies I’m getting input from readers not just through the comments but more so e-mail conversations. With the exception of MSPs and human resources it seems I’ve heard from representatives from various parts of the VMS equation. I’ve heard from quite a few staffing suppliers, from a couple of VMS providers, from the purchasing side and also a couple of hiring managers.
Based on these conversations there seems to be a lot of interest not just on VMS best practices, but on several other things:
The procurement perspective.
What’s there on the client side?
The business of VMS, who’s merging with which company, who owns who now.
The recruiting perspective.
True vendor neutrality and VMS’s that are subsidiaries of MSPs.
The client side.
I’m happy that I have my work cut out for me in terms of coming up with content for my blog, but also thought it’s unfortunate that there’s very little recent information on these topics on the Internet. Most are outdated and some of the newer ones are available for purchase, which doesn’t do much good for the average person who just wants to read up on it.
I’d like to think of myself as an expert on the subject however a huge topic such as VMS where there are so many sides to consider I believe collaboration would work best so I invite anyone who might be interested to contribute to the VMS series by commenting here or by e-mailing me, lisaamorao at gmail dot com. If you decide to post on your own blog please trackback to this post (or e-mail me your link) so that I can keep a running list of posts on the subject.
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Reading…
I’m trying to build up my blogroll but for now I’d like to share some of the links that I’ve tagged in the last several weeks. I’m going to try to post reading links at least once a week and since this is the first, I apologize if some are a little dated.
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List of Vendor Management Solution (VMS) Providers
As part of the VMS Series I’m compiling a list of VMS providers currently in the market.
What is VMS? Click here for a quick introduction. Gale Winters also wrote a great summary on VMS. I hope she resumes blogging.
Though there are predictions out there that the market can only support four or five key players, the list of providers is still way more than that prediction.
I’ve started the list of providers, I’m familiar with the more popular ones as we’ve worked with them, like Chimes, Workforce Logic, BeeLine, Comensura and Fieldglass. The VMS series won’t be talking about the software but more about how they are implemented – what’s working, what’s not working, again, hoping to come up with a list of best practices that will make VMS programs beneficial to all stakeholders – procurement, end users, human resources, contingent workers and the staffing firms that supply them.
This is a working list. I just started it and it is nowhere near complete. My blog is my public notebook. Please feel free to add to it by leaving a comment or by adding me on del.icio.us.
- The Bartech Group
- Beeline
- Click Commerce/Elance
- Comensura
- ECG
- Fieldglass
- iCIMS
- IQNavigator
- Peopleclick
- PROUnlimited
- ProcureStaff
- Taleo
- TalentHire.com - focuses on direct hire vendor management.
- Visilent
- VTAS
- Workforce Logic
- XRM Solutions
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A quick introduction to VMS
If you’re looking to get educated on Vendor Management Software as it relates to staffing, the Internet may not offer much help as the results you might get would be from providers. It may be helpful to get to know the providers later as you explore your options, but it probably won’t help you understand VMS, what it would do for your organization, or whether your organization needs it in the first place.Vendor Management Systems/Solutions/Software/Services (what the S stands for tends to vary) as it relates to the staffing industry, pretty much came about as the result of a growing contingent labor workforce. The “temp” workforce is no longer limited to the 1-day file clerk who’s filling in for someone who’s ill. The contingent workforce today in corporations nationwide is a sizable percentage of their headcount and contingent staffing spend go into the millions.
What is VMS?
VMS, in a nutshell, is a software tool that is used to manage the staffing supply chain.
How VMS came into play
Increased reliance on contingent staffing paved the way for VMS – There are organizations that bring in hundreds of contractors or temps (I hate that word) for almost every role imaginable from the assembly line worker to administrative assistants to engineering staff. Unlike goods like office supplies or hardware components, contractors do not come at a fixed price; their rates vary. VMS offers a solution to help companies keep track of these varied rates.
Lack of internal processes within corporations paved the way for VMS – Because there were no established internal processes within organizations in terms of contingent staffing use, some have ended up with dozens of suppliers, making it harder for corporations to track expenses related to contingent staffing. VMS offers to centralize these processes. In addition, VMS providers promise millions of dollars in savings in contingent staffing spend by consolidating preferred vendor lists, picking vendors with the most favorable rates.
The Microsoft Permatemps Case The case of Vizcaino v. Microsoft has proven that misclassification of employees can cost corporations millions and millions of dollars, and made the tracking of contingent staff, including independent contractors, all the more critical.
In summary, VMS attempts to address the issues that came with an increased contingent workforce. It promises to deliver efficiencies and deliver cost savings. However, VMS clients aren’t satisfied much, rating the solutions they’ve deployed as “poor.” (The report is outdated. If anyone has a more recent report please send me the link.)
As part of the VMS series we will explore the issues that may be contributing to this poor rating and how, if you really must deploy a VMS solution, you can make it work for your organization.
In the meantime, please feel free to look through my VMS resources, bookmarks that I have collected around the web regarding VMS issues. I just recently started tagging the bookmarks so please feel free to add me to your network.
Note: I see this VMS series as a living industry whitepaper. I welcome your contributions and corrections or any criticisms you may have of my posts. Please leave them in my comments section or if you prefer, please email me at lisaamorao at gmail dot com.
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Prologue to the VMS Series
I have several posts in my drafts labeled “VMS” which I can’t seem to finish because I’ve stalled in an explanation somewhere or I felt like the post has gone all over the place and it just wasn’t cohesive anymore. Other times I felt like it wasn’t a balanced post.
So I decided to do them in little installments, discussing the different aspects of VMS.
Why am I putting so much work and thought into VMS?
Because while VMS is one of the fastest growing areas of the staffing industry, it is still widely misunderstood.
Despite the benefits that corporations employ VMS for, VMS tend to result in ineffective, adversarial relationships between the managed services provider and staffing vendors.
As I start posting my VMS series, I’d like to point out that I see this as a living whitepaper, and as such, I welcome your comments and the discussions that may follow, as well as any items that you feel must be addressed.
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About This Blog
Lisa Amorao is currently the Marketing Programs Manager for ATR International, a Silicon Valley-based contingent staffing firm.
Lisa has held roles in recruiting and sales before moving on to her current role in Marketing.
The opinions expressed here are her personal opinions and does not reflect those of her employer or any of its clients.
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