Finding. Evaluating. Onboarding. Engaging. Communicating. Maintaining records. Building and sustaining long-term relationships. All this and much more in between; that’s what vendor management entails.
Does it feel like the sheer volume and these intricacies of managing contingent labor and staffing suppliers overwhelm your daily schedule?
Then a Vendor Management System (VMS) is just what you need.
What is a VMS?
An innovative technology-driven solution, a VMS (Vendor Management System) is the go-to for procurement teams in structuring and handling all vendors throughout the recruitment cycle. A VMS reduces manual processes and time-to-fill positions while increasing efficient audit of vendor information, transparency of spend, and ease of maintaining vendor relations. Moreover, a VMS can exponentially expand access to vendors by leveraging the power of networks, provide automated onboarding and compliance assessments, and produce real-time analytics of vendor performance.
Here are 6 signs you may be ready for a VMS:
1. You need to expand your reach to more candidates
Whether your business requires more employees, niche skills, or diverse candidates to grow and compete, your capacity to manage a limited number of suppliers in-house will inevitably become a barrier. The labor-intensive investment required to work with vendors inherently limits your reach to those vendors’ ever-narrowing talent pools.
How a VMS can help
A VMS integrates a marketplace of hundreds of proven suppliers providing unlimited reach to a broad and diverse talent pool. The marketplace can handle virtually any specialty, location, or number of hires at any time.
2. You’ve outgrown spreadsheets, manual tasks, and continual supplier onboarding
Today vendor management has become a never-ending cycle of manual tasks, extended hiring cycles, missed candidates, and limited visibility into hiring performance. Entering data into Excel, cutting and pasting, rolling data up, emailing files, following up on candidate status with email and phone calls, tracking contracts and invoices, distributing job requisitions, are inefficient and create room for error.
How a VMS can help
A VMS immediately helps growing businesses eliminate many of the manual pains: one invoice, contract, and relationship for the vendor manager frees up resources to focus on driving performance. Easy hiring technology automates many of the manual tasks and connects hiring managers directly with recruiters and candidates, tracking every interaction.
3. You need to find new suppliers with experience in your roles
Most suppliers approach a client claiming they can serve your needs, vs. you proactively searching for the right suppliers. The only way to test a prospective supplier is to invest time and effort to onboard them to your program and wait for them to perform.
How a VMS can help
A VMS leverages AI to automatically match suppliers in the online marketplace to your specific needs. As soon as your requisition is posted, your role is matched to the right suppliers who have already demonstrated expertise in your domain and geography. Their team of recruiters receives an alert and begins searching from their talent pool.
4. You need data to understand exactly how your suppliers are performing
Virtually all functions in business today — accounting, marketing, operations, IT — have tools that provide a rolled-up view of how that function is performing, except for talent supplier management. Spreadsheets, supplier scorecards and backward-looking quarterly business reviews with each supplier are a poor substitute for real-time hiring performance metrics that are crucial to your business growth.
How a VMS can help
A VMS tracks every activity providing a total view of supplier performance at any time. With one glance vendor managers can see a complete overview of the entire talent supplier program, candidate pipeline activity, and individual supplier performance. Current suppliers join via a simple URL and have an unlimited number of logins at no cost.
5. You need a more consistent and positive candidate experience
Sixty percent of job seekers report a negative candidate experience with employers, and 72% of job seekers share their negative candidate experience online. When you juggle multiple suppliers and continuously onboard new ones you place blind trust that they will represent your brand well.
How a VMS can help
A single solution with one Account Manager and team of talent advisors who personally curate candidate fit means the entire candidate experience is consistent no matter which supplier submits the candidate.
6. You don’t have budget
Traditional solutions require investment in personnel or costly technology tools that address specific areas of the problem. Paying for individual seat licenses or costly integrations are often out of reach for growing businesses. Point solutions often create more headache because they address only a narrow problem.
How a VMS can help
A VMS requires no upfront investment and you only pay for successful hires. There are no costs for the technology, personal curation or access to the marketplace, and you have a single Account Manager to manage all of the relationships.
Have you identified with any of those signs?
If so, you’re probably ready to start using a VMS:
