VMS and vendor neutrality
Note: This was originally posted Friday night but due to the amount of reader interest in this topic, I modified the timestamp so that it wouldn’t be buried under the weekend posts.
Back to the subject of VMS, one of the topics that were suggested to me was the topic of true vendor neutrality.
Why is this an issue?
One of the reasons companies cite when implementing a VMS program is their desire to be vendor neutral. But one of the issues staffing firms and other VMS companies raise is how vendor neutral can a provider be when it is owned or is a subsidiary of a staffing firm?
For example:
Workforce Logic is part of the Nelson Family of Companies
Procurestaff is a VMS offered by Volt
(please feel free to add more examples in comments…)
We spoke to a rep from Workforce Logic a while back on this very issue and he said that they ensure vendor neutrality by keeping the Nelson Staffing piece separate when responding to RFPs. By “separate,” he said Nelson Staffing does not bid on the same RFP unless the client requests.
There are some that feel it is deceptive to market vendor neutrality when the VMS company is owned by a staffing firm.
Then there’s also the argument that a staffing firm is not in the business developing software (much like software companies do not have the core competency of implementing staffing solutions).
Some client companies are addressing this issue through their RFPs, making sure to recognize that MSPs and VMS’s are two separate components of the program.
Recognizing that the two are separate, what are your thoughts on how proposals should be solicited? Is it wise to have two separate RFPs? One for the MSP component and another for the VMS? Or should the partnering be done outside and prior to the bidding process?
We started this discussion in the comments for a previous post. I say the two separate pieces not only ensure vendor neutrality but also provides maximum flexibility to the client company. I think it all depends on whether the client can evaluate each piece, and whether the agreement will give the client the ability to keep one piece and not the other, in case things don’t work out.
What are your thoughts on this? Please leave a comment.
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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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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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Staffing firms are more than just middlemen
I think I mentioned it here before but a while back I did a presentation to a group of jobseekers consisting of project managers, financial analysts and some engineers. The presentation was about “how to work with a staffing firm.”
I had a few slides prepared but didn’t really get to use them because my audience quickly took over with their questions before I was done with my first bullet point.
Judging from the questions my audience believed that staffing firms serves no other purpose than be the middleman.
I was just revising the presentation so here’s a quick rundown on what purpose staffing firms serve — from the job seeker perspective.
Advocate — As your recruiter is trying to place you, your recruiter is basically your advocate. A good recruiter has well-established relationships (read: “is trusted”) by the hiring managers he or she is working with, as well as with the candidates he or she is trying to place. By design, contingent staffing is set up (at least in my experience) to ensure that “pushing bodies” does not happen. How? Most contingent staffing programs are set to bill by the hour so the only way to be profitable is to keep each placement in billing capacity (ie working). Staffing firms cannot achieve profitability with high turnover rates, so it is NOT in the staffing firm’s interest to push a candidate that’s simply not a fit for one reason or another because that person will not last and therefore not bill. Just like any other industry, we gotta deliver great products to keep our consumers buying. Keep this in mind when talking to a recruiter who is trying to place you on contract. That recruiter wants to give you an assignment/contract that’s the perfect fit. Sounds cliche, I know. But really, that’s the way it is.
Employer — a lot of job seekers don’t realize this and fail to take this into consideration when accepting an assignment or a contract. It’s not just about who can find you that assignment, but more importantly, who would you want to work for? The staffing firm’s role does not stop at placement. They cut the check, provide benefits, and handle your issues if anything goes wrong (workplace injuries, conflicts, sexual harassment complaints, you name it). If you don’t think that’s a big deal, imagine someone who missed a paycheck because the staffing firm’s payroll messed up. Sure that happens anywhere, but how would the staffing firm handle it? How quickly do they resolve issues? It doesn’t seem like a trivial thing now, does it.
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Recruiting and social media
I went to the Lunch2.0 event yesterday at Netgear and was chatting a little bit with LinkedIn’s Community Evangelist Mario Sundar about social media and employment.
LinkedIn is becoming quite popular with recruiters these days because it allows them to tap into passive candidates who are not otherwise available on Monster or Dice. And as other social networking sites (MySpace, FaceBook, etc)become more mainstream with job seekers publishing more information in these sites, recruiters are also starting to tap into them not just as a resource for candidates, but also to research their candidates.
In addition to social networking sites, there are also new services popping up targeting the job seeker/recruiter market. A lot of them are designed to make the recruiting process more personable through the use of images, video and reference tools to allow the prospective employer to see the candidate beyond their skill set.
We already do this in recruiting. They are called in-person interviews. But social media allows recruiters/employers to see a more complete view of things that may not be mentioned in their resumes such as their personalities and communication skills before they even proceed to the interview, so in theory, shouldn’t social media be a valuable tool for recruiters?
In theory…yes. But in a litigious society, maybe not so.
Remember the old recruiting days when we used to toss out resumes that had pictures attached because employers didn’t want to be exposed to for racial, sex or age discrimination suits? Never mind that the photos were unsolicited? In the world of blogs, MySpace and FaceBook, pictures don’t have to be attached, they can be easily found via a simple Google search. If a candidate is not hired for some reason and a potential employer appears on that candidate’s site traffic report, can that person claim discrimination? “I applied for a job and employer A came to my blog, saw that I am Asian and decided not to hire me.” What about video resumes on YouTube or ResumeBook?
I mentioned this concern to Mario and he mentioned that this was actually one of the reasons LinkedIn members do not have the option to upload photos as part of their profiles — because the company recognizes that LinkedIn is used not just as a networking tool but also as a recruiting tool.
LinkedIn also has a recommendation tool that allows clients, partners, co-workers and bosses to comment about a person’s quality of work or credentials. I think this is a great tool because it allows recruiters to do a reference check before even possibly contacting a candidate. But as a former recruiter I seem to also remember widespread corporate policies prohibiting managers against giving references to former employees. Now…LinkedIn, despite it being a “professional” networking tool, is still a personal tool so I guess the point here is that social media definitely blurs the line between what is official and what is “personal.”
At the risk of being redundant, if recruiters/employers don’t find it on LinkedIn, it takes but two seconds to find it elsewhere.
I won’t offer any opinions here, other than to say that I am at a wait and see state. It would be interesting to see how the staffing and employment industry adapts to new trends in technology and social media.
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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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