From my inbox
I would like to share a few e-mails that I have received in the last couple of days. Since they were sent to me via e-mail and not left as comments in my blog posts, I will NOT make attributions here.
Update: just got my permission, the following e-mail was sent by Bret Bass from Agile1.
I thought he was spot on, and thought I’d share with the rest of you.
I agree with much of what you’re saying here, and there are a couple of points I’d like to throw out for consideration. First, having come from a different industry (I’ve served in senior management levels at Tyco, GE, et al.) there’s certainly a case to be made for minimizing disruption and potential damage to any industry’s “interdependent ecosystem.” Acquiring the assets of a distressed company is a poor substitute for organic growth. When companies begin down the path of acquisitions to replace sales efforts, little good comes from it. This is also the lesson Axium should have learned itself. The purchase of Chimes was an $80 million mistake, designed to bolster a company that had not enjoyed the benefits of much organic growth. We used to call this “re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
My main point, however, is that companies slavering over the morsels left in the wake of Axium must remember that they are seeking to replace a product that often received high marks and much customer praise. Simply offering a replacement doesn’t mean that the new product will be as good, as cost effective, or as feature rich. In my experience, many companies will turn predatory quickly when such an opportunity arises. Desperate customers may find themselves saddled with a cumbersome, expensive, and poorly performing VMS because it was there. In such an instance, problems far worse than buyer’s remorse await an impetuous business owner.
Legal teams for companies who relied on the Chimes product are also advising their clients against using the applications for fear that accessing it would cause funds paid through the system to be claimed by the bankruptcy courts. Many of these companies are being urged to use manual processes in the meantime. What I’m taking this to mean is that there will be no quick and easy VMS replacement for Chimes. Without access to the data, everything will need to be entered into the new VMS by hand…a long and resource-laden process. VMS providers would be well advised to approach this undertaking not as a “transition” but as a new implementation. I’m not sure they will. It may be that we’ve not yet seen the darkness that they say precedes the dawn.
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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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Conversation with TiVo’s William Uranga, Part 1
TiVo
Contingent Workforce: 60-80 contractors
When I first met TiVo Director of Staffing William Uranga last year, he was reviewing his contingent workforce management options and was looking into VMS.
It’s been a little more than a year now and I briefly caught up with William to see what they’ve decided with and how it’s working for them.
(Note: the following is not a verbatim transcript of my conversation with William. Edited for flow and per William’s request, I took out the name of their former primary vendor).
Lisa: When we spoke last year, you were weighing your contingent workforce management options. I understand you had an MSP relationship with a vendor. What prompted you to look for alternatives?
William: There were expectations that were not being met and they were not going to be able to make changes.
Lisa: What sorts of problems were there? 
William: We weren’t getting the talent we needed and nobody was driving the solution to make changes. There was just a lack of ownership when there were problems. They could not meet our situation.
Lisa: So you decided to go for an RFP. How did VMS come into play there?
William: VMS was just a part of it. We were more concerned about the service but certainly there was the technology piece. We needed a portal to use for time and attendance, billing and so forth.
Lisa: How did you decide which vendors to solicit proposals from?
William: We gave the RFP to a couple of regional firms, some national, a variety of firms. We quickly narrowed it down to regional and reputations.
Lisa: Can you quickly describe the bidding process that you went through?
William: We had the formal bid, findings, response, initial presentations to me and the purchasing agent, contract reviews, initiation price and terms.
Lisa: What criteria were you using to evaluate the vendors?
William: We paid special attention to the ability to work with other vendors, whether they have done it elsewhere, pricing competitiveness, and the technology that they were going to use.
We ended up going with more with a regional vendor, hungrier, associate vendor relationship.
Lisa: Who were involved in the decision-making process?
William: Legal, Purchasing, a couple of client group users, Human Resources.
Lisa: And you went with…?
William: We went with West Valley.
Lisa: And for the VMS?
William : They have their own internal product.
Lisa: I wasn’t aware that West Valley had a software offering. It’s web-based?
William: Yes. It’s an internal product called Affinity.
Lisa: And the implementation? How did that go?
William: It went well. Reception overall of the new vendor, back end and legal, they were breathing a lot easier because everything was consolidated through the primary vendor. We had much more visibility and spend. Plus it really helped having someone onsite.
Lisa: It wasn’t before? I was under the impression you had a VOP.
William: That was the contract that was signed between TiVo and the former vendor, but for some reason it didn’t happen. It may not be completely their fault but it was also before I got here. They were supposed to be the primary vendor but they didn’t have anyone onsite and there were all these vendor relationships everywhere. Nothing was consolidated.
Lisa: And when you tried to change it, they didn’t make it happen.
William: It wasn’t pursued.
Lisa: I’m quite surprised that they will just let a brand name client to go just like that without putting much effort into resolving the issue.
William: Nevermind that we’re TiVo. That goes for any client. It’s so much tougher to get new clients and a lot easier to take care of your current ones.
Lisa: Going back to your new program, did you encounter any issues as you tried to implement?
William: There were some issues with the former primary vendor working as an associate vendor status. Issues with access.
There some sour grapes on their side. They claimed there were compliance issues and credit issues.
Next: Challenges, communication policies, recommendations.
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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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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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How the staffing industry lost perspective
I was reading Steve Ranson’s blog today about how complicated the staffing industry has become. So complex that the industry has lost perspective, when really, it’s all about coming up with the best candidate for the best price. He questions the need or the effectiveness of having different staffing firms for each specialized need and argues that while it is nice to have a specialized service for a specialized need, it is definitely costly.
As a gym rat who owns a pair of cleated shoes for cycling, a pair of running shoes, a pair of walking shoes (indoor, outdoor, mud, etc), yoga shoes (not exactly for yoga itself which you do barefoot anyway but just for walking to yoga class), not to mention a variety of dress shoes (which is still considerably less than what other women own) I gotta say that I love the sports shoes analogy.
I have so many thoughts that I can’t come up with a cohesive comment on Steve’s blog so I’m responding here.
Contingent staffing/staffing/recruiting services, whichever term we choose to use, IS a positive solution. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a market big enough for all 9,000 firms (and counting). I also have to add here that the growth of specialized and niche-oriented staffing firms is just a result of the industry evolving with the markets it serves. Using Steve’s analogy, yes, a shoe is a shoe and it really doesn’t make much difference because you can use running shoes to walk and cycle, but as someone who uses cleated cycling shoes I’d have to say that there is definitely an advantage to using them. Just like there is an advantage to using specialized staffing firms. I work for a staffing firm that specializes in serving technology clients but even the term technology itself has evolved.
But as Steve says, [contingent] staffing is a solution. It is such a great solution to a really important need on the part of our clients, that the use of contingent staffing has grown at such a rapid pace. In an ideal world without lawyers and sue happy individuals it should be simple, right?
However there are other factors involved, such as employment and taxation laws and regulations, that didn’t quite evolve with the rapid growth of the staffing industry. And now we have compliance issues, which probably should be the subject of a separate post, but I’ll go on to say on this post that the staffing industry and our clients are trying to comply with laws that were not written to address the industry. Lobbying for new laws and regulations to protect staffing firms as well as set ground rules for staffing firms, we have instead chosen to make the old laws and regulations fit and created a whole new industry just to address compliance, one of them being Vendor Managment Systems, which, depending on who you ask, creates more problems than it actually solves, is inefficient, and doesn’t really benefit the client nor the supporting vendors.
But at the end of the day, it’s really all about compliance. Our clients feel that they need to keep track of their contingent workforce because of this inherent fear of misclassification.
I can’t pretend to know what the solution is. Should we start lobbying for new laws and regulations to set ground rules for and protect the industry from ambiguous interpretation of obsolete laws? I don’t know. Whatever the solution is (or maybe there is none), there should at least be a conversation about it, address it, acknowledge that it’s there. Once we get our behinds covered, know the specific ground rules (instead of guessing and dancing around obsolete ones) designed specifically for us…maybe then we’d have the peace of mind to go back to what the staffing industry is all about. Providing the best candidates for the best price.
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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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