The VMS Workgroup
Working here to get the group established.
I am well aware of the HIC’s work on developing the industry standards and guidelines for VMS and MSPs. This is great, however is not to replace or duplicate what the HIC has already done, but to create more of a dialog to create an evolving set of guidelines and standards.
The keyword here is EVOLVING. Case in point: what was true this time last week, isn’t anymore. Things that made sense last week don’t anymore.
There’s a ton of work involved in organizing this, so please bear with me. You can still leave a comment and email me if you’d like to get an invitation to take part in the VMS Workgroup.
In the meantime, what do YOU have in mind? What are your expectations of such a group?
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Post your VMS questions
I have a confirmed interview on Friday with the Director of Staffing of a Silicon Valley-based consumer electronics company who implemented a VMS about a year ago.
I have a list of questions that I would like to ask him that focuses more on what the driving forces were in the decision to implement a VMS, how they selected their vendors and what sorts of best practices he’d like to share, a year after his organization implemented the solution.
If you are thinking about implementing a VMS and have questions you want me to ask him, please post your question here or e-mail me.
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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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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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How do you use your social network for recruiting?
Recruiters are quick to flock to social networking sites and why shouldn’t they? Social networking sites are filled with possible candidates you won’t otherwise find on Monster or Dice. Plus they are free.
Unfortunately though recruiters aren’t always welcome. I’ve had a few contacts who have given me quite a bit of drama before finally adding me. A handful of them have told me that they have personal policies not to add recruiters to their networks because they end up getting spammed. One sent me a long e-mail with his complete contact information. He just didn’t want me on his LinkedIn list fearing that my second and third degree recruiting contacts would spam him.
I get that occasionally too, even in offline networking events. There was this woman one time who, upon looking at the business card that I handed to her, just told me “oh we already have vendors.”
She joined in on the conversation I was having with a group of other folks and before I left she asked for my card. How that could be construed as ME selling her something, I’m really not sure. I went from a person she was eager to talk to, to a person she really didn’t want to hear from. Yet I couldn’t blame her. Poor gal is probably a hiring manager and gets a ton of phone calls from staffing sales people and has been conditioned to associate “staffing” and “recruiting” with the never ending cold calls she gets throughout the day.
Social networking sites are great for recruiting but the bad recruiting practices such as spamming of the relatively few could easily turn these sites into hostile territory for recruiters and ruin it for the rest of us.
What are some recruiting best practices that you follow when it comes to social networking sites?
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Hiring in a hurry
The cost of hiring entails more than just the person’s hourly rate. These costs start to incur before before the employee works his/her first hour and may continue on even after the employment is over.
When you are hiring in a hurry and in volume, these costs and risks get magnified. This is an area where contingent staffing could provide a cost-effective solution.
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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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I hate the word “temp”
I’ve always hated the word “temp.” Not sure exactly when it happened but the term carries such a negative connotation now. Maybe I’ve been reading too many Dilbert cartoons or watching too many episodes of The Office that I think of Ryan The Temp. Or maybe it’s the hundreds of conversations I’ve had back in my recruiting days when people turned me down because it was a “temp” job and not “permanent.” Never mind that the project was going to last a year, and never mind that there is no such thing as “permanent,” at least in The Valley.
So over the years I’ve been promoting the terms “contractors,” “consultants” to describe the placements, and “engagements,” “contracts” and “projects” in place of the term “assignment.”
We place contractors/consultants to do project-based work. I feel that these terms are more accurate to describe our services.
An administrative assistant who is placed in a 3-month contract is there to fulfill the projects of the direct employee who is out on maternity leave.
A software engineer is placed on a 6-month contract is there to do work for a specific phase of a project.
One might argue that terms are just terms and euphemisms and what not, but I believe they carry a lot of value. If it makes the difference in terms of employee satisfaction — the contractor performs better because he realizes the importance of his role instead of the temp who is doing a mediocre job because he is just a “temp” filling in — I’d say that small change in industry terminology could prove invaluable.
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The value of the right hire
I went swimming today and the thing about it is that when you’re swimming, there’s no one to talk to, there’s no iPod to listen to. It’s just you and the water. Plenty of thinking time.
So on this morning’s workout I was reminded again of Steve’s post on how complicated the staffing industry has been. Why can’t we just go back to basics? Why can’t it just be about the best candidate for the best price?
I agree with Steve, it should be as basic as that. But the thing is, the industry feels that just providing the candidate for the best price doesn’t present much value to it. Heck, even I, as a college student working my first agency job, thought it was gonna be a piece of cake. Find this person for this job. Match ‘em up. How hard would that be? So we add on things that, as Steve’s post demonstrates, complicates things.
But anyone in the industry knows it isn’t that easy to match up a candidate with a job. We all look for things. We all have our individual recruiting practices. We all recruit based on our individual criteria. And we all know why we go to such lengths to screen candidates — it’s because we know what’s riding on our placements.
Which is, I think, all that needs to be the main message communicated to our clients. It’s not this reporting feature or that online invoicing feature that we offer. Those are just tools for convenience.
What’s riding on our placements?
No matter what we recruit for, whether it is a front desk receptionist, a PCB assembler, or a software engineer, they are individually crucial to a company’s success. The critical roles they play in a company should be value enough for a staffing service.
The receptionist you place will represent your client and will be the very first person that greets their clients when they walk through the door. Pick the wrong one and it could just break your client’s image.
The assembler you place will be holding a hot soldering iron on that costly printed circuit board. Pick the wrong one and it could cost your client thousands of dollars in damaged components.
The software engineer you place will be writing the code to what could be your client’s next cutting edge application. Ask the client how much damage a bad code can cost and see if that cost is worth the penny-pinching in hiring a mediocre staffing firm based on price.
That’s where the value of a staffing firm lies. The value of the right hire.
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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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