Jul 23

That will be 25 cents please….

By Wendy Linden Contingent Workforce Management, Global Talent Acquisition, Managed Service Programs, Recruitment No Comments »

In early June, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) propose a fee, tariff and/or tax on every 800 number call place in the United States that is routed to a foreign country/off shored call center. Furthermore, his proposed law would require companies to alert the consumer that the call they have placed is being routed to another country and identify the country in which the call is being transferred.

“If we want to put a stop to the outsourcing of American jobs, then we need to provide incentives for American Companies to keep American jobs here,” Schumer was recently quoted in a recent AP article about the proposed transaction tax.

A lot of the buzz on this law is whether it is logical or not; how comprehensively it would be implemented; whether the intended effect of offshore call centers coming back onshore will actually occur or if the “fee” will just be passed on to consumers in the form of price increases. It seems opinion is divided across the political spectrum.

Regardless of one’s “red” or “blue” beliefs, this law may pass, or one similar down the road. Proactive planning needs to be considered with customers who offshore call/contact center/help desk business as to what action to take if/when a statute like this passes.

Clearly, there will be some increased level of staffing needed in the United States should this law pass; the labor arbitrage advantages and cost savings of off shoring will be diminished by the level of fee imposed and how companies have decided how to counter it. The effect may truly be the movement of offshore to onshore and recruitment and staffing efforts have to be prepare for that as quickly as a customer may want to flip that switch. Others have mentioned the use of a level 1 type contact center in the US, (live agent, internet chat or automation have all been mentioned) to resolve the call here first before they would move overseas to more skilled resources.

Dialogue is already happening within organizations that may be facing this call transaction fee. We have to make sure as a staffing provider and Managed Service Provider partner; we are part of those conversations and have solutions at the ready to what could be a fast changing landscape.

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Jul 23

SourceRight Solutions in the News…with SourcingEdge and SourceRight Advisor

By Rebecca Callahan Contingent Workforce Management, Global Talent Acquisition, Managed Service Programs, Recruitment, Recruitment Process Outsourcing No Comments »

As organizations are becoming more sophisticated in sourcing talent and demanding better results from their sourcing strategies, SourceRight Solutions is reinforcing their commitment to providing workforce management innovations by offering greater transparency on contingent workforce trends and providing an exclusive edge in a highly competitive environment. 

SourceRight, recently announced the launch of SourcingEdge, a proprietary candidate sourcing methodology that is designed to help talent acquisition outsourcing clients gain a competitive edge in identifying the best and brightest talent from active and passive candidate pools. The SourcingEdge Career Networking Hub provides clients with rich talent pools; gives candidate access to thousands of job opportunities; provides career resources to aid in career searches; among other advantages.

SourceRight has also launched SourceRight Advisor for talent acquisition programs, a workforce analytics and thought leadership solution that draws on the company’s experience, aggregate business information, knowledge and scale to help businesses develop better-informed strategies to optimize their services and workforce management spend.  SourceRight advisor will deliver specialized expertise and guidance including policy, compliance, change management, market intelligence and supplier relations.

The launch of SourcingEdge and SourceRight Advisor is the next phase of the company’s commitment to continuously revolutionizing recruitment strategies and services for today’s emerging workforce population.

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Jul 22

Think Big Picture….

By Wendy Linden Contingent Workforce Management, Managed Service Programs, Recruitment No Comments »

When looking at a Managed Service Program and its supplier base, the high importance level of a strong partnership between these two entities, as they support a common client, is both logical and critical.  So it is really critical to “Think Big Picture” beyond who is your MSP solution provider….you also have to understand the caliber of suppliers and the state of the actual supplier partnerships the MSP provider brings with them.

Many times, a supplier in one common client may be found in multiple client accounts of MSP providers. Occasionally, a top performing supplier with the ability to provide the quality talent a customer needs may only be found in one client.  MSP Supplier participation lists at customer locations typically have been “built” by absorbing the current supplier base already on the ground at a client. Unfortunately though, you can get some great suppliers included in a new MSP solution, you can also get some not so good. You can, and often do, get the good, the bad and the ugly.

But what if a MSP provider already knows all about the bad and the ugly supplier characters out there in the marketplace?  Giving a new client the ability to avoid bad and ugly choices or changing those choices in a new MSP engagement? What if, through a stringent screening and qualification process, the supplier with the most competitive rates, the strongest ability in staffing capabilities and the best reach for a particular client geographic coverage areas walk in with the MSP provider?

A triangular benefit occurs: The MSP provider smoothly implementing a supplier program with companies familiar with its processes; suppliers gaining a new client to their portfolio they know they have the ability to support; and, a client that gets a seamless transition in supporting their contingent hiring!

Furthermore, a stronger and longer lasting partnership between MSP supplier and its supplier partners develops outside of just an individual client, with acknowledgement and reward tied together by a long-term partnership focused on the clients’ needs and requirements.  Leading Japanese business organizations have, for decades, managed successful long-term, high quality partnerships thru what is know as “keiretsu”.  Maybe a little of this long-term partnership philosophy needs to be the standard operating practice delivered by solutions in the MSP industry today.  And clients need to more deeply evaluate the “keiretsu” depth of the MSP’s supplier partnerships.

Think Big Picture…..The MSP solution is only as good as the partnership management capability of your MSP provider and the caliber of suppliers willing to do business with them, long-term.

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Jun 24

Don’t Forget the Importance of Supplier Satisfaction in a Successful MSP Engagement…

By Wendy Linden Contingent Workforce Management, Managed Service Programs, Recruitment No Comments »

Recently, Staffing Industry Analysts rolled out its 2010 VMS/MSP Buyer and Supplier Satisfaction Survey, seeking a brief “Net Promoter Score (NPS)” opinion and rating of VMS/MSP solution providers like SourceRight Solutions and its competitors. Now, many will automatically focus on what the buyers thought; who had the most customer responses; and, were buyer satisfaction levels a high or low rating on the quality of services provided. After all, the customer is the most critical satisfaction perspective in any business transaction, right?

What may be a more telling result from this industry satisfaction research however is the NPS satisfaction opinion of the staffing suppliers who participate and support MSP engagements. For any participating supplier, there is certainly an advantage of having access to a known volume of customer spend with managed competition. This is true regardless of the MSP models/engagements, though admittedly, some models can provided more attractive returns than others for a supplier.

For sure, the surveyed buyers will definitely be focusing on the overall quality of their MSP program/engagement, which would include supplier delivery performance to predefined service level agreements and other metrics. But when a supplier is rating the quality of a MSP engagement, what might be the business perspective of their opinion?

Opportunity. Fair Access. Participation Levels. Efficient, Managable Process. Profitability. And, equally important, a Collaborative Partnership.  An MSP program cannot succeed without the strength of some “highly satisfied” supplier partnerships that support a mutual MSP customer. Suppliers may be similar in staffing service offerings, but every organization is unique in its history, experience, capability, business operations and point of view. MSPs need to engage their staffing supplier community beyond the required SLAs and KPIs. Ideas for process and program refinement, improvement and optimization come from open lines of communication and a shared, common interest to provide the highest levels of quality services to exceed a client’s staffing needs and requirements.

So look for SIA’s announcement of their 2010 VMS MSP Buyer Satisfaction Survey results in the next month or so, but carefully review the accompanying Staffing Supplier satisfaction results to get the complete picture of industry leading MSP program/engagement performance.

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Jun 17

SourceRight Advisor Innovation Bulletin: Leveraging Alumni Portals to Access Reliable Quality Boomerangs

By Wendy Linden Managed Service Programs, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, SourceRight Advisor Bulletins No Comments »

Developing and leveraging client alumni portals cost-effectively produces reliable quality talent pools for business organizations and their MSP/RPO workforce service provider.  After decades of aggressive, successful implementations of disintermediation strategies, it makes perfect sense to access known talent pools now willing to engage in new, flexible employment arrangements.  Why only use traditional talent acquisition value chains when cost-effective and sometimes more reliable and flexible alternatives are available by leveraging an organization’s proven human network and business community.

A vast amount of research indicates that the American workforce has changed resulting in a rise of independent, career-minded workers which is driving significant implications for the U.S. employer.  SFN Group’s Emerging Workforce Study took an in-depth look at employee motivations, expectations and their viewpoints on success and failure, and further explored the divergent aspects of the “emergent”, independent workforce compared to the traditional “job-security focused” worker.  This research has consistently found a growing segment of “emergent” independent workers who seek a new and different employment compact. (Info link: http://spherion.mediaroom.com/pressroom/index.php?s=41)

Concurrently, it’s no secret that we can’t keep all of our employees forever so the opportunity then becomes how we maintain a long-term affiliation with them.  Staying connected to former employees is a low cost, high value opportunity for a variety of reasons including:

  • Reengagement potential of known and proven alumni talent
  • Maintaining a competitive edge by tapping into flexible working arrangements for full time and/or “project” based needs and requirements
  • Direct “disintermediation” reduction in talent acquisition sourcing costs and time to a productive engagement
  • Further cost reductions with on-boarding, job-training, production start-up and other general assimilation costs when engaging alumni workers
  • Reduction in disengagement, off-boarding expenses
  • Tapping into and leveraging the alumni’s referral network
  • Corporate ambassadorship (spreading the goodwill, maintaining the corporate image/reputation)  

Alumni Resource Centers are a great way to optimize your relationship with your alumni talent. The deployment of a company branded Alumni Resource Center portal allows your SourceRight staffing service recruiters to mine a proven talent pool of high quality engaged “boomerangs” (returning alumni talent). The result is faster time to fill/hiring periods of high quality, proven, known talent with cost effective talent acquisition and engagement.

Incidentally, Alumni Portal/Resource Centers are being established by many business organizations with the outsourcing of the entire deployment and management of the Alumni Resource Center program…..from managing the program’s content relevance and the building of the talent pool, to managing job postings and matching the candidates to the actual jobs/projects, etc… This allows the organization to focus on running their own business with the right talent at the right time for the right costs.

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Jun 10

SourceRight Advisor MarketTrends Bulletin: Shorter Term Contracts Leveraged for Cost Control & Savings

By Wendy Linden Contingent Workforce Management, Managed Service Programs, Recruitment, SourceRight Advisor Bulletins No Comments »

Our top trend this month: Shorter term contracts, specifically in the Professional and IT space.

This trend has emerged because of clients’ cost control needs and requirements; which allows access to higher dollar talent over a shorter period of time, primarily focusing on critical projects with priority budget allocations. Since most contingent talent is still presently in great supply, it’s working. This short term contract engagement strategy provides important financial management flexibility to support any uneven economic business cycles in the near-term.

But as the market continues to turn and more budgets constraints are relaxed, demand will start to dictate whether this strategy remains a viable option. When the business environment turns more active/competitive, those organizations with longer term projects will always be able to capture more of the supply of available, high quality, talent.

Other important emerging trends:

  • Social Media boom in the workplace, driven primarily by business organizations, is producing lots of project work for content and design development.
  • Small/local staffing companies are aggressively vying to partner with big MSP players, who are becoming strategic “Channel Masters” of significant volumes of spend in the staffing industry
  • Increases in industrial spend (SFN Group has seen a 26% increase recently in this space)
  • H1-B restriction for companies who received TARP funds spurring growth in outsourcing suppliers
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Jun 09

SourceRight Advisor MSP Bulletin: Ugliest & Hottest Jobs in America

By Wendy Linden Contingent Workforce Management, Managed Service Programs, Recruitment, SourceRight Advisor Bulletins, Ugliest & Hottest Jobs No Comments »

Ugliest Job in America

Application Developers in the state of California.

California employers are being forced to confront an interesting workforce anomaly when trying to hire application development talent contingently:  Unemployment pay is a better deal.  Pay rates have dropped everywhere in response to the recent recession. They have not yet trended upwards; Hence, unemployed application development talent in the state are not being lured back to work. The current contingent pay is lower, the contract lengths are shorter, and they would have to give up their unemployment pay and benefits….not an attractive deal for application development talent.

Runner-ups this month:

  • Welders
  • Material handlers
  • Producers/Animation Motion Graphic Artists
  • Websphere Portal Architects

Hottest Jobs in America

Contingent worker titles with the highest demand, based on employer feedback.

  • Engineering Designer and Drafters
  • Buyers in Procurement departments
  • Credit and Collections talent
  • Recruiters
  • Senior JAVA Developers

Full time worker titles, based on job postings from Wanted.com

  • RNs
  • Retail Sales Managers/Supervisors
  • Retail Salespersons
  • Systems Analyst (IT)
  • Customer Service Representative

 

Data Source: An aggregation of SourceRight Solutions MSP client engagement activity

Definition: “Ugliest Job” category is defined as the most difficult to fill position with the “Hottest Jobs” category being positions with the highest demand.  A job position can be defined as both simultaneously.

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Jun 07

SourceRight Solutions in the Global News…

By Rebecca Callahan Contingent Workforce Management, Global Talent Acquisition, Managed Service Programs, Recruitment Process Outsourcing No Comments »

Increasing globalization is driving the need for RPO and MSP providers to broaden their geographic reach, while maintaining consistent delivery of high quality services.  In response to this growing business requirement, in March, Hays plc and SourceRight Solutions announced a strategic alliance to provide global outsourced workforce management services.  Now, Hays and SourceRight have taken the next step of broadening our combined reach by introducing WorldSource Talent Acquisition Outsourcing Solutions.

WorldSource is designed to manage and integrate worldwide Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) programs, while improving the global recruiting and resourcing experience for all stakeholders.  WorldSource has the capabilities to leverage strategic talent acquisition teams of more than 4,500 recruiters across 900 offices in 29 countries to attract and hire the world’s top talent.

Also, SourceRight is announcing the expansion of its MSP offerings to help the world’s top organizations maximize the value of their contingent workforces. See “SourceRight Expands MSP Offerings and Leadership Team” at link: http://bit.ly/cTRGLa

SourceRight’s enhanced talent acquisition capabilities takes our MSP solutions to the next level – a scalable outsourcing model that provides flexible configuration options, global program management oversight, optimized supplier management and client decision support analytics.

Our enhanced MSP solutions are designed to control costs and minimize compliance risks through streamlined processes and infrastructure, access to a global preferred supplier network, and improved supplier performance and client spend with timely insight to strategic market trends data.

As current pressures from the challenging economic climate force businesses to adopt recruitment strategies that adapt quickly to fast changing market conditions, these recent announcements provide further evidence of our commitment to our value proposition of helping large, global organizations maximize the value of their blended workforces.

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May 27

SourceRight Solutions to Attend The VMS Professionals Sixth Annual Conference – June 3-4 at McDonald’s Hamburger University, Oakbrook, IL

By Wendy Linden Managed Service Programs No Comments »

On Thursday June 3rd and Friday, June 4th, SourceRight Solutions’ Vice President of Professional Contingent Workforce Services, Karen Turner and Stas Wolk, Vice President of the Business Solutions Development will join VMS Professionals, a national association comprised of end user companies, to network and discuss best practices in the acquisition and management of contingent labor.  In the past, leading industry experts from business organizations such as Kraft Foods, Altria, Abbott Laboratories, Baxter Healthcare, BMC Software, Discover Financial, McDonalds and Cisco have participated in this premier VMS/MSP professionals’ industry event.

While the use of contingent talent and/or independent contractors isn’t a new workforce provisioning strategy; the impact of the recession has accelerated the practice.  And as more employers are looking to reduce costs and maximize flexibility, using contingent talent/independent contractors will help them tap into specialized talent quickly and efficiently without adding long-term obligations. Continuing economic pressures will likely drive this “on-demand” workforce trend to never before seen levels over the next few years. The conference attendees will discuss the best practices and solutions for enhancing the management of contingent workforce programs and strategies.

If you are planning to attend this year’s VMS Professionals Conference and would be interested in meeting with SourceRight to discuss the effective management and leverage of a contingent “on-demand” workforce and how to ensure that your organization is compliant with all the emerging engagement regulation associated with this workforce, contact Peter Simandl at PeterSimandl@Sourceright.com or call Tel. # 1-630-919-2784.

*** VMS Professionals is a national association comprised of end user companies networking to discuss best practices in the acquisition and management of contingent labor.  The VMS Professional Association’s mission is to network and educate with the highest professional integrity for the purpose of growing VMS Best Practices and contributing to the industry as a whole.  To contact the VMS Professional Association go to link:                              ( http://www.vmsprofessionals.com/AboutUs.aspx )

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May 17

Component Pricing of Contingent Labor Programs and MSPs: The Pros and Cons

By Cathy Clauss Managed Service Programs No Comments »

Managing the cost of labor is the No. 1 focus for human resource professionals in 2010. Procurement officers are under similar stress to deliver cost savings across all of their sourcing channels, including contingent labor. Add in significant increases in state unemployment taxes (SUTA) and other federally mandated taxes and you have the perfect storm, driving many companies to urgently look more closely at their contingent labor programs.

They are turning to their contingent labor suppliers and MSPs to help them address these issues. Specifically, they are looking for increased transparency regarding incremental costs. One extreme is pricing engagements that break out each component to the granular level, locking the supplier down to a cost plus price. Examples include MSP pricing for training and communication plans, staff and travel, help desk and technology fees. The staffing costs are also broken out with state by state mandatory taxes, return on SUTA caps, worker compensation rates, cost of sourcing and staffing companies’ profit margins.

What are the advantages and disadvantages to component pricing?

The Pro’s:
1. Companies can set cost savings goals on areas that are not mandatory or don’t involve fixed costs. There are strict rules on what is considered “cost savings” for contingent labor so it’s best to focus on the variable costs, as well as work with suppliers to add value and reduce costs overall.

2. Ideally, all parties can remain whole in terms of cost and profit goals. Suppliers have cost and profit goals just like customers. Build a sourcing plan that can be managed more effectively to meet profit goals on both sides of the relationship.

The Con’s:
1. MSPs and staffing companies may be limited in their ability to scale up and down to meet the changing needs of the customer engagement. While MSPs will often do their best to meet clients’ component pricing requirements, their services are typically comprehensive and it could be difficult to break them down too finely. They may deliver their value based on their ability to bundle and combine related services from shared service resources.

2. More meaningful savings opportunities, such as pay-rate management, may be overlooked. Considering that 70 to 80 percent of cost is labor, clients who seek savings across the board may not be taking advantage of the areas, such as labor pay rates, that can yield the greatest savings.

At the end of the day, the visibility garnered by deconstructing contingent labor and MSP pricing can potentially lead to some better understanding and cost-effective management of these solutions for the clients and providers involved. But the real value management opportunity lies in managing the effective usage rate levels of contingent labor itself.

Advising and assisting clients with their engagement rate levels of contingent workers will bring much bigger benefits then just fine tuning the MSP fee or auditing what is included in contingent labor rates. The starting point is more effective access to contingent labor program data and analysis that enhances the visibility of a client’s contingent labor usage trends, spend and organizational tendencies.

Providing expertise and guidance in the effective usage of contingent labor is the true and next most meaningful holy grail of cost-effective, contingent labor spend management.

Then the next step will be to enhance labor resource choices and decisions with a singular comprehensive view of an organization’s workforce options, from contingent to interns to project contractors to full-time employment solutions, etc., which will truly allow an organization to quickly enhance the cost-effective acquisition of its overall labor usage rates.

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