Are you looking for more insights into how your organization recruits, pays and manages its contingent workforce? If so, your business can realize a huge number of benefits from the implementation of a vendor management system.
That's because data and actionable insights, which come from VMS software, are the leading contributor to contingent workforce management success factors.
Technology, and data, is the foundation to any effective contingent workforce management program. It gives you a level of control and visibility over your program that you just can’t get without it.
Organizations that don’t manage their contingent workforce programs strategically with technology and data suffer from invisible costs and risks. Spreadsheets, in-house databases and Sharepoint-like websites just aren’t good enough to manage your contingent workforce.
These manual methods of managing a contingent workforce lead to a complete lack of visibility into program performance and where you are spending money.
This lack of visibility leads to poor hiring decisions, unoptimized vendor partnerships, a lack of standardization across your hiring managers, rogue spend that seeps into your program and additional risk across all areas of your contingent workforce management program (including both compliance and vendor risk).
A lack of visibility means your organization probably doesn’t know that it needs a vendor management system, also known as a VMS or VMS software, but it does. And the contingent workforce performance data you get from VMS software will help you improve your program significantly.
What technologies help improve your contingent workforce management program?
To achieve the desired level of visibility into the contingent workforce, organizations must go beyond their existing human resource information system (HRIS) and talent acquisition technologies.
They need a system that gives them insightful data into how long it takes them to hire contingent workers, how their staffing agencies are performing, how much they are spending on externally-sourced talent, as well as the ability to centralize this information and standardize rates and processes across the entire business.
That’s where a vendor management system comes in. VMS software allows businesses to manage the entire lifecycle of contingent workers from one centralized platform, including sourcing those workers, onboarding, invoicing, measuring vendor performance and so much more.
This, in turn, provides organizations with a range of data and insights that help them to strategically improve their contingent workforce program moving forward.
How VMS data can help improve your contingent workforce program
Here are some data and insights that you can gain from a vendor management system that can help your organization significantly improve how it manages its externally-sourced workers.
1. Visibility into program cost
By centralizing your entire program into one location and standardizing processes across your business, a VMS will give your organization complete visibility into contingent workforce costs. Not only will you be able to see how much your contingent workforce is costing your business and break that down into specific areas, you’ll be able to standardize pay rates for specific roles, easily capture staffing agency bill rates and markups and establish rates and rules that all hiring managers follow - giving you more control of the cost of your program.
2. Manage your vendor performance
Your staffing agencies are crucial to the success of your contingent workforce program. The better your staffing agencies perform, the better and faster you can acquire talent. A VMS will give you insight into the performance of your vendors, with KPIs such as turnover, time-to-fill and fill rate. These metrics give you an overview of targets such as workforce quality and speed-to-hire that help you improve your program in the future.
3. Visibility into contingent workforce numbers
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. When your hiring managers don’t follow company-wide rules, then contingent workers are likely being sourced on the hiring managers own terms without any real trail of those contingent workers being used in your organization. A VMS will give you insights into all of the contingent workers within your organization at any given time - so you know exactly how many you've sourced and how much you've spent.
Want to learn more about the benefits of a vendor management system, and why VMS data is a crucial contingent workforce management success factor that leads to a more strategic program?
Get in touch with Conexis VMS today. Our team would love to hear from you and answer your questions.
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