Managing Staffing Suppliers Using Spreadsheets: The Dangers

Manually managing your staffing suppliers is tedious, costly, and risky. Experts estimate that relying on these processes doubles the costs of businesses when compared to automated solutions.

While large enterprises with high contingent labor spend typically have a managed service provider (MSP) and a vendor management system (VMS) to govern their processes, those with relatively lower spend often fail to adapt to those same tools. 

 

Many of these smaller companies use manual systems built using spreadsheets, in-house databases, or Sharepoint-like websites to facilitate their vendor management processes. Common reasons they don’t make the transition to an automated system are perceived cost, available technology infrastructure, and fear of change. The result? A number of increased tangible and intangible costs because of missed opportunities and the added expense of their employees’ time and effort.

The Downsides of Manual Vendor Management

When you use spreadsheets to manage your suppliers, you sign up for tremendous amounts of tiresome work that yield little information about actual supplier performance. Manual vendor management results in your business partnering with under-performing vendors, overpaying staffing agencies and workers, creating critical compliance issues, and more. 

Let’s explore the drawbacks in detail:

Lack of centralization

When you manually manage the staffing suppliers providing your contingent workers, 

it’s nearly impossible to establish standard processes and pricing. Without consolidation across your business,  you waste valuable time and still don’t establish spend transparency, diversity tracking, and efficiency. You also lack insight into how your suppliers perform and can’t track department budgets, all which contribute to rogue spend.

Legal and compliance risks

With dozens of spreadsheets floating around your emails, vendor data is likely dispersed across multiple channels, making it difficult to track and manage vendor contracts. Since you’re dealing with multiple vendors, the various agreements are likely to have inconsistencies when it comes to terms and rates. This only confuses your team and creates an unpredictable, poor candidate experience among your contingent workers.

Inefficient workflows

Spreadsheets need to be frequently updated and analyzed. And with contingent workforce management involving multiple stakeholders, re-sharing updated excel-sheets across multiple departments is highly inefficient. This ultimately results in errors, wasted effort, and low-quality workforce decisions.

Decreased focus on business intelligence

End-to-end contingent workforce management involves a range of activities including:

  • handling administrative back-office work
  • managing contractual changes
  • finding and setting up vendors
  • issuing W9s
  • handling insurance and taxes
  • auditing payroll and managing I-9 compliance
  • candidate engagement and interview scheduling

 

Using spreadsheets to govern all these tasks and trying to keep up with the seemingly endless changes creates chaos and bogs down your internal teams. Think of all the time spent on grunt work that could be dedicated to strategic business planning and other longer-term activities that will help achieve your business goals.

Challenges with vendor performance

Using manual spreadsheets to collect data and produce high-quality performance reports is a laborious, time-consuming task.   It requires your business to collect and parse data, then create the right formulas to track vendor performance KPIs. Your organization may not have anyone on staff who is able to compile and analyze the necessary data, so hiring that person is an added expense. But even if you do, there is always a risk of human error that can completely skew the results. 

 

Any manual process is unable to offer a dynamic assessment of data to provide you with real-time performance metrics for your vendors. Access to this immediate information is a game-changer for businesses striving for consistency in program performance.

Real-time staffing vendor management allows you to:

Partner with the right suppliers

Strong performances should be required of your supplier relationships. Engaging with poorly-performing suppliers impacts the overall performance of your contingent workforce programs, resulting in slower hiring timelines and poor candidate quality that doesn’t justify their bill rates. Real-time metrics help you gain control over vendor performance, so you can always be sure that open jobs are being filled by the most qualified suppliers.

Overcome contingent hiring bottlenecks

Job requisitions perform poorly due to mediocre supplier performances or badly-designed hiring processes. And when you have no live data on the performance of your requisitions, process lags can go uncorrected. Real-time metrics help you pinpoint the reasons why your open jobs aren’t receiving the expected responses and help you institute effective processes to improve program outcomes. 

Making Automated Staffing Vendor Management Accessible

Too many smaller companies (and that can mean those with as much as $25 million in contingent workforce spend) think automated supplier management is out of reach.  We believe every company has the right to the latest technology and expert services to help them meet their business goals.

That’s why we developed the only solution on the market that has a networked VMS with an integrated hiring marketplace. Unlike traditional staffing solutions, our platform unites businesses, staffing suppliers, and candidates in a common talent ecosystem, putting end to fragmented processes and providing a universal user experience. Our digital hiring ecosystem helps you manage your staffing suppliers while providing access to a diverse network of talent. 

The Prosperix VMS Network automates the management of your entire contingent workforce program, and the Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace keeps your hiring pipelines filled with world-class talent.

By partnering with Prosperix, your company can say goodbye to complicated manual processes and benefit from smooth automation using our intelligent AI that matches open positions with the best suppliers in real-time. We connect you with thousands of suppliers that have the ability to fill your jobs now. 

Our clients stand as testimony to our capabilities. South Jersey Industries effectively engaged 602 suppliers and achieved a best-in-class contingent hiring experience using our patent-pending VMS network.

Curious to know how intelligent automation can transform your contingent workforce program?

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Combined MSP/VMS Solutions: How Your Contingent Workforce Program Can Benefit

A company’s workforce is often its biggest – and arguably most valuable – resource. Factors like the global pandemic, innovations in technology, and the nature of many job roles, have led companies to accept (and in many cases welcome) a workforce composed of full-time employees and contingent workers. 

As the number of contingent workers used across the global economy continues to rise, organizations are turning to managed services providers (MSP) and vendor management systems (VMS) to optimize their contingent workforce management programs. We’re seeing more organizations adopt combined MSP/VMS solutions, embracing the ease of managing their workforce program that comes with a single entity.

What the MSP and VMS core components can do

Vendor Management System (VMS) technology makes the implementation of MSP services possible. Implementing a VMS in staffing can be game-changing for businesses because they:

  • increase supplier and candidate engagement
  • automate hiring processes
  • reduce requisition times and costs
  • support compliance measures and provide employer of record services
  • serve as the data hub for an organization; provide analytics and reporting 
  • bring transparency to the entire contingent workforce management process
  • serve as the backbone for an organization’s technology ecosystem

Managed Service Providers facilitate the end-to-end management of the contingent talent lifecycle and provide visibility around all  factors associated with their contingent workforce, suppliers, and other partners. An MSP in staffing can:

  • create job requisitions
  • source candidates
  • onboard and manage the entire worker lifecycle
  • support all facets of contracting, invoicing, and payment
  • provide program scalability
  • offer insight into industry best practices and make individualized recommendations for program improvements
  • ensure compliance
  • provide continual technology updates and training

The intertwined evolution of MSP and VMS

Introduced in the U.S. staffing market in the early 90s, MSPs were a way for organizations to manage third-party suppliers and reduce outsourcing expenses. VMS platforms emerged when MPS providers realized they needed technology to support the implementation of their processes. 

The role of an MSP has evolved, becoming a strategic partner for day-to-day contingent workforce management and long-term strategic planning. Combining the power of a modern VMS with expertise of an MSP enables businesses to gain the significant insights they need to expedite growth, improve process efficiencies, perform quality evaluations and improve outcomes.

Both solutions are well-established in the staffing industry. According to Staffing Industry Analysts’ 2020 Workforce Solutions Buyer Survey, 88% of responding organizations have a VMS in place and 66% have an external MSP.  

A strong MSP/VMS program modernizes an organization’s contingent workforce management by bringing a solid understanding of industry best practices that incorporate ethics, impartiality, compliance, and data security, balancing the needs of businesses, suppliers, and candidates. 

The perks of Prosperix’s combined MSP/VMS solution

At Prosperix, we provide exactly what companies need to grow and manage their extraordinary contingent workforces. Our industry-first VMS Network provides a fully-integrated experience that brings businesses, suppliers, and candidates together in one ecosystem. When it is supported by our MSP in staffing services, companies benefit from:

Combined-MSP-VMS-in-Staffing-Solution-from-Prosperix

Reduced Hiring Spend

One of the most significant benefits of VMS platforms, especially when supported by MSP strategies, is their capability to consolidate payments and manage multiple suppliers simultaneously, allowing businesses to enjoy greater productivity more cost-effectively. 

Using Prosperix’s MSP/VMS services means that your contingent workforce spend is managed by one system, eliminating the need for multiple platforms and providers. And, technologies used by other departments can be integrated with Prosperix, so expenses remain transparent, accessible, and consolidated across your organization. 

Centralization and Flexibility

Our MSP/VMS solution facilitates success in contingent hiring. We recognize that factors like supplier relationships, scaling operations, and streamlined processes are essential for growing businesses. So, our vendor management tools are designed to be flexible enough to be tailored to your operations, while gathering and recording all relevant data within a centralized system. Prosperix’s solutions are adaptable to perfectly complement your existing workforce management program or build one to achieve your workforce management goals the best possible way. Rest assured, we will work with you to customize our MSP/VMS solution to your program and workflow.

Access to Additional Tools

Since our innovation is focused on achieving outstanding hiring outcomes and workforce prosperity, we offer additional solutions and services that extend beyond our MSP and VMS solutions. We can create individualized programs that include other vital workforce management components like our Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace, on-demand talent pools, direct sourcing, payrolling and employer-of-record services, and more. 

Teaming with Prosperix allows companies to tap into these services so they can source high-quality candidates who are the best fit for open jobs. We also make sure workers have a positive experience during and after hiring, which fortifies and unifies contingent workforce programs. Ultimately, Prosperix’s extended workforce solutions are designed to work cohesively, improving people’s lives in the best way possible.    

Set up a demo today so you can see how Propserix’s combined MSP/VMS solutions can transform your company’s contingent workforce program. 

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Integrating VMS and Hiring Marketplace Technologies: The Collective Impact

collective-of-people-impact

Vendor management systems provide operational support for contingent workforce management. When companies combine that capability with a built-in hiring marketplace, they strengthen stakeholder relationships, deliver richer insights, and enable faster hiring.

Every organization wants a fully-functional and successful contingent workforce program so they can acquire top talent, save money, reduce compliance risks, gain complete workforce visibility, and standardize processes. 

Achieving this goal – often recognized as program maturity – can seem like an arduous task, but integrating the right solutions can move even the trickiest contingent workforce programs forward. 

Instead of using a holistic, integrated approach, businesses often choose specialized solutions that are not (or cannot be) integrated across their organizations to support the various aspects of contingent workforce management. 

Companies that cling to these traditional methods often become stuck with several technologies that don’t communicate, drown in spreadsheets, and struggle to coordinate multiple suppliers. Continued use of siloed solutions compounds contingent workforce management complexity by adding operational problems and hindering the collection and application of contingent program data. This leaves businesses ill-prepared to meet unexpected talent shifts, stunting their growth and profitability in the long run.

Two technologies that are changing the hiring landscape

Contingent workforce management has benefitted from the introduction of the VMS, which has facilitated so many well-managed processes that reduce duplication of tasks, save money and time, and support better outcomes.

 

Now, after years of incremental change with regard to this workforce management technology, a seismic shift is taking place. Modern VMS platforms don’t just cover the operational aspects of managing contingent workforce but are equipped with cutting-edge functionality supported by technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. And they live in the cloud which increases accessibility and streamlines the entire process.

 

Hiring marketplaces, a much more recent phenomenon, are shaping the future of staffing by automating the talent-sourcing process. These modern hiring platforms are built on crowd-based networks, incorporating recruiters of all sorts – international, national, regional, independent, boutique, and traditional firms – and are home to the respective talent pools they represent. Hiring marketplaces are single-handedly helping to minimize the volatilities of the staffing industry by providing businesses with continual access to qualified talent, making hiring easier. 

 

By facilitating automatic talent matching, hiring marketplaces help businesses quickly identify the best candidates in the market to fill their open positions. Hiring marketplaces leverage the competitiveness of suppliers to receive higher-quality submissions, enabling businesses to achieve better hiring outcomes with reduced time-to-hire.

The benefits of integration

Unlike traditional hiring models, a hiring marketplace integrated into a VMS solution unifies the hiring ecosystem. It simplifies access to talent across skillsets, geographies, cultures, and diversities without the need to navigate through disjointed talent sources like external supplier pools, internal pools, social media, and multiple job boards. It also eliminates the need for recruiters to manually source and submit candidates through various applications.

With an integrated VMS and hiring marketplace solution, businesses can manage their incumbent suppliers (and easily add new ones) in the VMS while accessing a diverse candidate list through the hiring marketplace. And now that all the hiring data is in a single location, businesses can easily track KPIs like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, total recruiting spend, and staffing vendor performance. Program managers are more efficient because navigating through various systems to effectively manage their supplier relationships is no longer required. 

Candidates benefit, too. They are inserted right into the VMS pipeline so all of the shortlisting, assessments, interviews and other requests are managed efficiently, with full visibility and transparency. They can even update their own profiles directly, which enables better decision making, faster hires, and superior outcomes – for everyone involved. 

A crucial benefit of having an integrated hiring solution is the ability to secure all contingent hiring-related data in one place. A unified, ecosystem-based solution to govern contingent hiring facilitates easy access to current data and reporting that ensures better decisions because of reduced guesswork, smoother workflows, better budget management, and better performance.

How Prosperix can help

Integrated VMS & Hiring Marketplace Infograph

We provide the only VMS that is fully integrated with a hiring marketplace in the market. With enhanced capabilities powered by intelligent algorithms, our VMS Network delivers both solutions seamlessly. Ours is the only solution in the marketplace that includes real-time reporting and analytics and automated supplier management supported with high-touch curation from our workforce specialists. So, enterprises can manage their incumbents while simultaneously accessing an ever-expanding network of diverse talent suppliers across the US and Canada. We ensure only the highest-quality candidates that are the best fit are submitted for review. 

Prosperix VMS Network facilitates the end-to-end management of your contingent hiring lifecycle while empowering you to exponentially hire at scale.

Post a job on our platform to start hiring immediately.

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The Economic Benefits of Workforce Diversity

The diversity of diversity

It can seem odd to hear business leaders speak about the world becoming a more diverse place. The world has always been diverse, populated by an array of cultures, ethnicities, races, religions and orientations. It only appears more diverse to some because they’ve not had the same level of exposure in the past, whether the result of isolationist policies, exclusionary practices or technological limitations in travel and communications. Even now, ongoing changes in legislation and technology are breaking down the barriers between nations and people, ushering in a new era of acceptance, globalization, assimilation and unity.

As we can see, the ethnic and racial composition of the workforce is evolving rapidly – a trend that will continue to gain speed and shape the nature of tomorrow’s workplaces and talent.

Minority hires are following a steady upward trajectory, so much so that they are changing trends and setting new records. According to an analysis of the U.S. Labor Department data by The Washington Post, “for the first time, most new hires of prime working age (25 to 54) are people of color”.

Redefining diversity

Top performing companies have long realized the benefits of workforce diversity, understanding that the definition of workplace diversity goes well beyond considerations of race, gender and ethnicity. Workplace diversity in the 21st century has expanded to encompass values – the motivating factors that inspire talent to join a company, embody its organizational visions with passion, strive to make meaningful contributions and reach higher levels of productivity. 

A truly diverse workforce cultivates creativity, productivity and innovation by bringing together talent from disparate backgrounds and experiences, who coalesce yet retain their individual identities.

Diversity has long been a hallmark of staffing providers. Back in the 1950s, the “Mad Men” years – and aptly named, because these were the halcyon days of powerful men in business – women who had taken unprecedented positions in the workforce to assist with the war effort were expected to return to lives of domesticity. Instead, many signed on to be “Kelly Girls,” a contingent labor program that catered to a minority segment of the workforce and which enjoyed enormous success and popularity.

Today, companies seeking a more inclusive, multicultural and integrated team of talent turn to staffing professionals for these needs. A 2013 Staffing Industry Analysts survey found that 66 percent of large companies that use staffing services emphasized a focus on diversity firms. It started with larger firms, but now almost every company is looking for it on their staffing suppliers. 

Successful businesses have learned that they can rely on having workforce diversity to strengthen their operations and bottom-line profits. Diverse talent are paving the foundations of a more robust and unified economy that will flourish for generations to come.

A new generation of diverse talent

Millennials, now one of the most closely watched and influential generations of talent entering the professional ranks, are also the most racially and ethnically diverse group in today’s workforce. A large majority of Millennials, 71 percent, appreciate the influence other cultures exert on the American way of life. That’s nearly 10 percent more than the outgoing Boomer generation.

Globalization contributes to rapid growth in industries, increased outsourcing and a need for multicultural savvy. Where the number of Boomers resulted from high birth rates, the presence of Millennials is fueled by immigration. This is important because the demographics of the nation are shifting to encompass unparalleled levels of diversity.

By 2050, according to estimates, the Hispanic population will grow by 167 percent, with Asians following close behind at 142 percent. Millennials, as progressive global citizens with a fondness for eclectic cultural qualities, will foster acculturation for the companies they serve through much needed language skills, attitudes, experiences and perspectives. And the benefits of having this true workforce diversity are enormous.

The main economic benefits of workforce diversity

  • A diverse workforce fuels growth. Our share of talent — along with the unique skills and aptitudes they bring — significantly increases as greater numbers of women, racial and ethnic minorities, senior talent, and members of the LGBT community enter the workforce. Between 1972 and 2012, for example, the number of female professionals grew from 37 percent to 47 percent, which represented 25 percent of the nation’s GDP at the time. 
  • A diverse workforce facilitates innovation and creativity. Over 85 percent of successful businesses interviewed in a Forbes research in 2011 said that a diverse workforce was the key to innovation and creativity. When people from different cultural backgrounds, diverse qualifications and experiences get together, they deliver new ideas, new ways of thinking about performance and service delivery, new methods for solving recurring issues, and new ways of reaching a wider audience.
  • A diverse workforce markets to diverse demographics. Talent are living marketers. By tapping into the backgrounds and experiences of diverse talent, business are better positioned to market their products and services to a broader demographic of consumers: racial and ethnic minorities, women and customers who are gay or transgender. Growing up online, Millennials have an inherent grasp of the latest and greatest products, and who’s buying them. They constantly pore over social networks, 24-hour news aggregators, blogs, research wikis and pop culture sites. Close to half of them also live in the urban areas where the bulk of commerce occurs. Over 75 percent of the people in developed economies dwell in culturally eclectic urban areas — a radical change from just a few decades ago when the push was for suburban expansion. These are the stomping grounds of diverse Millennials and most likely their heirs. They have their fingers on the pulse of the target demographics of today and tomorrow.
  • A diverse bench of talent is a wider bench. Successful staffing professionals know that to get the best candidates, one must source from the largest pool. By expanding their focus on diverse groups of talent, staffing recruiters are more likely to find the best and brightest candidates, those who possess in-demand skill sets, international experience, multi-lingual capabilities and market insights vital to companies that are transitioning to the global nature of business.
  • Businesses with a diverse workforce have lower turnover rates. A company that nurtures and promotes diversity is one free of discrimination. As cultural fit, transparency and social responsibility become substantial motivating factors for new generations of talent, an environment that embraces the differences of its workers becomes more appealing. Workplaces that are perceived as exclusionary or hostile tend to experience high turnover rates. Businesses that welcome talent from all walks of life are more likely to retain and attract top performers.
  • Entrepreneurs are a great example of diversity. Entrepreneurs in the United States hail from all corners of the world. They are people of all colors, genders and sexual orientations. Many of them are the small business owners of today, and potentially the large business operators of tomorrow. They are job creators, employers and pioneers. According to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, 22.1 percent of businesses in the nation are owned by people of color. Women own close to 30 percent of all U.S. businesses, with Latina-owned enterprises emerging as the fastest growing in this segment. And data from the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce indicate that there are over 1.4 million LGBT entrepreneurs, representing about five percent of all businesses in the country.
  • A diverse workforce is key to corporate growth. According to the Center for American Progress, there will be no racial or ethnic majority in the United States by 2050. Having a diverse workplace is going to be key for companies that want to grow, including having women, people of color, and LGBT employment representatives in boardrooms. That`s how companies will be able to become competitive in the global economy.

You must diversify to grow

We’ve all heard the old business adages: diversify or die; don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Today, that axiom takes on new shades of meaning and truth. Business diversification must incorporate talent, not just product and service offerings or experimental directions in market strategies. New eggs must certainly be placed in the basket, and those eggs should not look the same.

It’s essential today to harness the power of workers from different cultures, genders, backgrounds, orientations and communities. Companies that want to succeed in a business-without-borders world of industry rely on the rising presence of women, people of color, and gay and transgender professionals in the workforce. The global economy is marked by variation, different beliefs and unique desires. To satisfy the needs of an increasingly complex and diverse society of consumers, business must capitalize on talent who understand those needs.

By 2050, if the forecasts hold true, we won’t recognize a racial or ethnic majority in the United States. The diverse talent of today will become the boardroom leaders and CEOs of tomorrow, none of them conforming to a certain image or backstory — none of them appealing to a single group of consumers. Staffing professionals understood this long ago. As the doors to global communities open, witnessing unprecedented levels of mobility and integration, more employers are reaching out to elite staffing partners who can help them find tomorrow’s diverse talent today.

Want to hire a diverse workforce?

We believe that the modern workforce thrives when the ideas and opinions are as diverse as the people behind them. As a minority-owned enterprise, we understand the value of diversity and cherish the opportunity to find talent with fresh perspectives and unique insights.  We work with several organizations and programs to do our part in building a diverse workforce. If you want the benefits of hiring a diverse workforce, request a demo.

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