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Ted Weyn of HCM Works and Jeff Nugent of Contingent Workforce Solutions to Present a FREE Webinar on Demystifying the Marketing on Vendor Neutrality – January 30, 2012 at 3:00 PM EST

In this 60 minute presentation, Ted Weyn of HCM Works and Jeff Nugent of Contingent Workforce Solutions, will introduce the audience to the concept of Vendor Neutrality.  Although this issue is not new, Neutrality is emerging as a hot topic among Corporate HR and Procurement professionals since the lines between program management vendors and staffing vendors are blurring as the Contingent Workforce Management (CWM) industry evolves.  This presentation will focus on the History & Evolution of CWM Managed Service Providers (MSPs), the different program structures and various pricing options.  The session will also empower attendees with the knowledge on how program structures and how vendor neutrality affects your organization’s CWM program over the short, mid and long term.  Ted and Jeff will also uncover the truths and myths behind what it means to be neutral and provide logical methods to ensure that all stake holders objectives are met in order to achieve success.

Date: January 30, 2012
Time: 3-4 PM EST
Price: FREE!!!

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Registration Instructions:

To register visit: http://www.hr.com/en?t=/contentManager/onStory&s=t23D1ljBn8iCuaPpPZl&StoryID=1307043839383

Click Register Now – It’s Free!

Fill out your account details

You will be prompted to select the type of account you would like to register for. To sign up for the FREE account select No Thanks.

Once you have successfully completed these steps you will be sent an email with an activation link.

Clicking on this link will activate your account and direct you to the website homepage.

Under Webcasts & Events in the top navigation bar select Virtual Conferences > Upcoming Virtual Conferences.

Click on the first event: Contract Workforce & Talent Exchange Virtual Conference

Click Enter Event.

Click Auditorium to enter the Webcast Auditorium.

Click the 10/13/2011 date tab.

Scroll down the 12:30-1:30 pm session and click the title: Building a Best of Breed Contingent Workforce Management Strategy

Click Attend Webcast.

A confirmation email will automatically be sent to you with details on how to join the webcast.

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For More Information Contact:

Christina Fabugais
Marketing Manager
Contingent Workforce Solutions Inc.
Direct Phone:  416-642-9077
Toll Free:  1-866-837-8630 x9077
Email:  christina.fabugais@cwsolutions.ca

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Cross-Functional Collaboration: Discovering Its $ Value and the Genius of Google

Someone recently asked me to name an aspect of talent management that has the potential to largely impact business performance, but that is essentially ignored by most organizations. It was a genius question … most talent management leaders spend hundreds of hours trying to marginally improve existing practices, but few even attempt to identify and execute on new opportunities. My answer is…

A systematic process for improving cross-functional collaboration.

Such a process has the potential to significantly improve organizational performance and innovation and is almost totally absent as a talent management discipline.

Collaboration, the process of working together, routinely occurs within functions and business units without the need for intervention, but rarely occurs across functional or professional borders where it has the potential to deliver the greatest impact.

No One Manages Collaboration

Years of business experience have proven that increasing external collaboration has a tremendous business impact. Deloitte found that 75% of business executives rank collaboration with vendors and partners as a top priority and 70% report that this type of collaboration increases profitability. The same business impact could be demonstrated as a result of enhanced internal collaboration, if talent management were to pay attention to the concept.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of a single major corporation that has a full-time manager and a formal process for identifying and breaking down internal silos and encouraging collaboration. Does your firm have a set of metrics for assessing to what extent related but independent functions are working together smoothly? Three firms have been leaders in HR-driven collaboration. GE under Jack Welch pioneered the concept of a boundaryless organization and Sun designed office layouts and even stairwells to enhance collaboration. However, Google has significantly raised the bar and turned improving cross-functional collaboration into a science and a revenue-generating machine.

How Does Cross-Functional Collaboration Produce Such a Large Economic Impact?

Everyone knows that having functions or individuals operating independently is a bad thing within a long interdependent process like hiring or product development. Because talent management leaders are generally not willing to invest in any formal process unless they can see a direct economic impact, here is a list of reasons why this type of collaboration is so impactful:

  • Increased innovation levels — learning from the innovative ideas and methods of others and then adapting them to your situation can dramatically increase levels of effective innovation. Even learning about the levels of innovation within other functions may spur internal competition and increase interest in innovation.
  • Reducing development time — the speed at which an idea is implemented can result in higher “first entry” margins. Unfortunately, resistance or lack of trust within downstream functions can delay the approval and the implementation of even the best plans and ideas. More collaboration and stronger relationships means less resistance and less time spent protecting of one’s turf.
  • Faster product improvement — increased interactions between product development, manufacturing, sales and customer service employees may result in faster product improvement and increase customer satisfaction.
  • Increase sales — enhancing collaboration may lead to an increase in the number of sales leads that are provided by employees. The increased collaboration among regular and global employees may result in access to new markets.
  • More best practice sharing — increased collaboration means more direct sharing of effective business practices and processes (like CRM) that can be adapted to the problems in other functions.
  • Reducing errors – an increased rate of interaction between individuals who “think differently” may result in more “fresh eyes” assessment. This different perspective can dramatically reduce major errors, increase quality and reduce costs.
  • Alerts — working closely makes it more likely that you will positively receive and then act on warnings you receive from outside collaborators on problems and opportunities that they have already faced (and that you might face in the near future).
  • Increased learning — collaboration may increase your overall learning speed. Increased interaction with functional experts in computers, social networking, and finance means that learning will be naturally expanded without the need for formal training. This cross learning may increase organizational agility and the availability of temporary “fill ins.”
  • Less resistance for rule makers — increased interaction with staff that makes “the rules” may over time work to make those regulations less burdensome. It may also cause your employees to follow the rules as a result of a better understanding of the need for rule makers and rules.
  • Enhancing the impact of diversity – developing processes that ensure that diverse workers interact with a wider segment of the employee population means that more employees will benefit from diverse perspectives.
  • Enhanced internal movement – increasing the exposure of star employees to other unrelated functions or different business units will increase their career path opportunities. Learning and working with different units might better prepare them for transfers or promotions in the long term and in the short term. This enrichment might increase their engagement and retention levels.

The Genius of Google

The two most under-recognized management gurus on the planet are in my opinion Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. You might know them for management innovations like 20% time, standup meetings, and free food. However, they don’t get much external credit for their most impactful and innovative management practice, which is acting consciously to increase cross-functional collaboration. Unlike most classically trained talent managers, these visionaries treat people management as a direct-revenue-impact function. As a result, Google has used numerous direct and indirect methods and tools for increasing cross-functional collaboration.

Some of the more interesting methods include:

  • Providing an on-site laundromat and free employee shuttle. While these may seem like rather benign perks, each encourages employees to interact at length with other employees from completely different functions.
  • Using a “marketplace of ideas” approach to identify and build support for new projects and ideas. (Briefs on new ideas are published internally and employees rank/vote on them and volunteer support or register interest in working on them.)
  • “100-foot rule” (no employee should be further than 100 feet away from free snacks). Wait times are tracked to ensure that there is enough time to collaborate while in line, but not too much to keep hurried employees at their cubicles.
  • Work areas and the cafeteria are arranged to encourage interactions with employees from different functions.
  • Employees are encouraged to design and personalize their own cubicles, in part so that outsiders will stop by and begin to build relationships.

When the firm was smaller, all employees took an annual ski trip in order to collaborate and bond. Other occasional activities at Google including pajama day, martini blow out, picnics, and VIP speaker series encourage employees from different units to interact. By putting its strategic plan on a huge whiteboard in the lobby, it found a unique way to “get everyone on the same page.”

Its strategy and the methods it employs don’t force employees to collaborate; it create unique opportunities for employees to share an experience with former strangers that most Googlers see as fun!

Online Collaboration Must Also Be Part of the Strategy

As Internet and social media usage grow, cross-functional collaboration strategies need to include enhancing opportunities for online interaction. Smart firms are setting up internal Facebook like sites and wikis that are designed to increase cross-functional collaboration. Meetup-like sites and location aware software features should be developed internally and added to your plan (in addition to existing affinity groups) as a method to increase overall social interaction (and eventually collaboration) between employees from different units, contingent workers, and vendors.

Final Thoughts

The growth of social network collaboration by marketing, customer service, and recruiting has reinforced the tremendous economic value and the high ROI that can result from increased collaboration. The time has come for talent management leaders to also recognize that an even greater revenue impact can result from a deliberate data driven effort to increase cross-functional collaboration among employees. The economic value of the increased rate of innovation and the decrease in time-to-market alone make the value of the program something that is hard to dispute.

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More Cell Phones Than Computers Means You Can’t Ignore Mobile

At every HR trade show, demo, product announcement, or webinar technology vendors of every stripe talk about their mobile interfaces. Even if it never occurred to you to manage a workforce by cell phone, you can.

And now would be a good time to start thinking that way. Just last week the Pew Research Center reported that 85 percent of Americans own a cell phone vs. 76 percent who have a computer. Among the 18-29 year group, 96 percent own a cell phone.

Pew didn’t report the percentage of smartphone usage in this latest report, but earlier this summer another Pew survey found that 40 percent of adults use their phone to access the Internet, IM, or email.

That report also found cell phone use for things other than voice communications were higher for Blacks and English-speaking Latinos. Cumulatively 87 percent of the two groups own a cell phone versus 80 percent for whites. Half (51 percent) of the Latinos surveyed use their phone to access the Internet, while 46 percent of Blacks do. The survey found only 33 percent of non-Hispanic whites do.

Part of the explanation may be that Blacks and Latinos own computers at lower rates than do whites; 67 percent of Blacks and 70 percent of Latinos own a computer compared to 79 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

Obviously this has implications for diversity recruiting and for meeting the needs of a diverse workforce. Indeed, in many ways recruiting was ahead of the mobile trend. The first use of mobile by recruiters was SMS to alert candidates to opportunities. Candidates still had to access the posting via a computer to get the details and to apply. Today, job alerts are commonly sent via Twitter. It’s a feature offered by all the largest job boards and most of the major company career sites.

So sophisticated has mobile recruiting become that a job-seeker tweeted an interesting possibility can access the listing and even apply entirely by smartphone.

Then there’s the social networking aspect. comScore says that 74 percent of smartphone users accessed a social network with either an app or by browser. That’s practically a dead heat with search (73 percent). One telling data point that recruiters should be mindful of in their social media strategy: 31 percent of all smartphone users who access a social network did it via an app; 43 percent used their browser.

Earlier this month CareerBuilder announced an expansion of the mobile services it first launched two years ago. iPhone users, who account for 1.6 million searches on CareerBuilder and 115,000 job applications monthly, now will see jobs in their field of interest near where they happen to be at any given moment. They’ll also be able to actively search for nearby jobs, apply for them and view their application history, even create a new resume.

Android users also get many of the same capabilities. They can now search for jobs, use the advanced search functions, including geo-location, apply, check their application history, and create a resume, among other functions.

If you have any doubt about the market for mobile uses, CareerBuilder said it will build mobile career sites for its corporate clients. A mobile site is different from a typical website in that it has been optimized for viewing on small cell phone and smartphone screens.

The announcement about this new service says: “Recruiters can post jobs through their smartphones and leverage company employees as mobile ambassadors. When employees access the site through their mobile device and email jobs to contacts, it becomes hard-coded as a referral that the company can track. “

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New Research Points to More Strategic Contingent Labor Programs

The Human Capital Institute (HCI) recently released its 2010 research report on contingent labor, titled “Contract Talent: An Imperative for Talent Management in the New Normal.” Fieldglass was one of the sponsors, and the research reported on survey results from HCI members. The findings are in line with what we’ve all heard about temporary labor: it’s growing. Case in point? 20 percent of a company’s workforce is now considered contingent labor.

According the report, one of the current reasons companies are deploying contingent labor is to “cushion their traditional workforce from the ebb and flow of the economy as it recovers.” Or, it goes on to say, temp labor can “serve as an organizational shock absorber.” Not surprisingly, 79 percent of respondents said flexibility was the most important benefit of contingent labor.

The more surprising finding out of the report – and one that will give us some insight into the future of the space – has to do with how a program is viewed by an organization. HCI reported a trend towards aligning the labor contingent labor program with the overall business strategy. As a vendor, we have seen more and more companies use our solution in more sophisticated and strategic ways, but it has typically been the exception rather than the rule.

It appears contingent work is no longer a one-off category of labor managed behind closed procurement or HR doors. Management is now shared across the organization and incorporated into the business strategy. We are curious to see how this evolves as our US economy changes.

How has your company’s contingent labor strategy changed? Has it become a more integral part of the business, like HCI respondents reported?

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Vendor Neutrality – Is it Important?

The reason I founded a vendor neutral company was that this is the only realistic way that the MSP and or payrolling firm can act as an objective partner/advisor working 100% in the best interest of the client without the inherent conflict of interest (financial or other wise) that is present by allowing a staffing firm or staffing firm owned MSP manage a program or perform the payrolling of independant or directly sourced contractors.

To no surprise there has been a HUGE marketing push by the large staffing firms to rebrand their MSP offerings and talk about neutrality. The reality is that the entire business case around investing in a Vendor management / MSP solutions is to protect or give a competetive advantage to the overall higher margin staffing line of business.

Trust me I founded two of the first VMS programs in Canada (Brainhunter Talentflow and Procom’s Flextrack) and have evaluated many other MSP vendors and when you get deep into it (past the brochure and sales pitch) the main business driver generally falls back to driving more staffing business.

Although I know the intentions are often good at the operational level it falls on deaf ears at the ownership or board levels who look at overall enterprise wide financials and profitability.

In saying that the capabilities of the larger staffing firm owned MSP vendors have increased considerably in concert with the sales and marketing efforts.

This sales effort often lead by the staffing firms account managers glosses over the conflicts of interest.

To protect yourself and ensure Zero conflicts of interest when engaging with a MSP arm of a large staffing firm:

1. Ensure the underlying technology supporting the MSP program is not the same technology (no matter what the sales pitch is) used by the staffing firm to track their applicants. Although you may get lots of technical jargon on how separate the information, its only 1 human error at the data entry level that can have confidential information ending up in the staffing firms database.

2. Contractually obligate that the affliated staffing firm is not allowed to do any staffing business with the client. This is the true litmus test. The key is contractually obligate. Lots of firms agree in presentations but when you state it as a contractual obligation they will have to choose what business they are in.

3. Inquire into compensation of MSP management and key program resources. I know this seems quite invasive but at the end of the day human actions, especially in the agency world is about the money and you want to ensure that the key program resources, the MSP management team etc. are incented to act in the appropirate neutral fashion. This compensation should take into consideration commissions or bonus plans, stock in the parent company, etc.

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What is the Purpose of Vendor Score Cards? What should be Measured? How are they to be Administered?

In putting together a “Vendor Score Card” you want to make sure the metrics tell the true story of who your key suppliers are and not only the ones with the highest volume of spend, head count etc. Also its very improtant to make sure that the metrics that vendors are being evaluated on create the right behaviors. In the very competitive staffing industry market, metrics being evaluated on motivate vendors to act in various ways.

Also these same metrics in agregate can give you a health check on your program’s sucess when measured against the original objectives that you had probably written into the SLA with your MSP provider.
So when building a score card ensure that you understand what the numbers spit out of the VMS are telling you so that you can make adjustments to your program when necessary to ensure your objectives are being met.

When building a vendor score card I like to use the 5 general topics of: Quantity, Quality, Time To, Customer Satisfaction, Compliance.

  • Quantity – these are the pure numbers. how many requests, how many directly sourced independents, how many submissions, how many fills, by which vendors, by category, etc.
  • Quality – these are the ratios of requests to hires, submissions to hires, avg contractor satisfaction ratings etc. when reviewing these metrics its important to understand and take into consideration the pure numbers that calculate the ratios. It may be awesome that a vendor has a 100% rating but if it came with only 1 hire you may want to take it with a grain of salt.
  • Time To Metrics – These are the time to acknowledgement of request, time to first submission, time to interview, time to hire. These metrics help to measure vendors “attentiveness” to the program as well as gives you a prospective of hard to fill roles or where bottlenecks lie in the process.
  • Customer Satisfaction – This is the more qualitative section of the score card. In programs that we run I like to send quick surveys out to hiring managers and contractors at various intervals in the process to measure customer satisfaction of the staffing vendors but also of the program itself. This helps gage the clients and contractors experience through the hiring, onboarding, billing/payment etc process. In the end customer satsifaction is often key metric that solidifies the story that the quantitative numbers are telling.
  • Program Compliance – This mesaures things like compliance to rate sheets, paperwork i.e. contracts, rights of authorship, worker classification documentation on file etc. it also measures compliance with deadlines for timesheet submissions, invoice approvals, rebates, etc. Vendors that pay attention to the details around compliance in general will help you complete transactions more efficiently, reduce costs, and ensure that you reduce your risk of co-employment.

Although it looks like alot of things to worry about try to keep it simple by organizing the data by the 5 general topics. You may even choose to simplify it into the first 3 topics and phase the others in at a later date.

Under each general topic you will then be able to drill down in the VMS and see the numbers that tell the stories behind the various vendors sucesses or failures.
Once designed, the key to implementing a sucessful score card program (and a sucessful program in general) is communication with your vendors.

Vendors need to know what they are going to be measured on, the frequency of measurement, the repercussions of poor scores, etc. I also like involving key vendors in the development of the score card pror to implementing it. The more you allow your vendors to be part of the process, the more they will buy into the program and behave in the way you want them to.

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Effective Vendor Management: A Framework for Selecting Suppliers and Partners of Recruitment Related Services

The attraction and management of a total workforce requires a significant number of providers to bring this function to life.  Some of these providers are transactional “plug and play”, but others require a bit more thoughtfulness when scoping the need, implementing and managing this solution.  This article will review the different types of solutions found inside of Corporate Recruiting Functions and some tips to developing an effective vendor mgt. program.

First let’s take a look at many of the different types of products and services leveraged to acquire and manage a total workforce.  Each of these services may have different stakeholders, requirements, implementation and management processes.  All of these vendors will require an understanding of how their services, technology and / or solutions integrate into your processes which will result in contracts being developed, statements of work, SLA’s and governance practices to ensure the relationship is successful.

Vendor Options

  • Outsourcing :
    Contract Recruiters, RPO, MSP,  Project Recruiting, Onsite Contingent Mgt, Search Firms, Sourcing Firms
  • Recruitment Marketing:
    Ad Agencies, Job Boards, Social Media, Tools, Brand Mgt. Firms, Collateral / Printing
  • Operations/ Technology:
    ATS, VMS, Process Consultants, Memberships, Subscriptions, Training, On-boarding Tools, Collaboration Tools, Expat Mgt, TJTC Vendors, Survey Tools, ERP programs
  • Sourcing:
    Research firms, Web tools, Social Media Memberships, Contract sourcers
  • Screening:
    Background check  vendors, E-verify, Drug Testing, Assessments, Skills Testing
  • Contingent Labor/ Consultants:
    Agencies, Consulting Firms, MSP, VMS, 1099 Vendors and Payroll providers

How do you decide which vendors are for you? Building Your Requirements

1. Begin to answer the following questions: What type of vendor are you looking for?

2. Answer the related questions: What is your overall recruitment strategy?  What types of labor categories are you supporting? What is the volume?   What is the geography? Does your organization have any specific talent demand drivers, such as holidays? What policies do you have in place to support the acquisition of talent? What infrastructure is required to make this work efficiently?  How do you have to ensure compliance? How does cost play a role?

3. Apply your answers to the vendor type: Identify all of the roles or stakeholders who interact with this type of product or service.  What is everyone’s spoken and unspoken knowledge, assumptions and expectations of this service?

4.  Ask the questions: How does each stakeholder engage or leverage that service?  What are the expectations?  Is it supported by people and technology? How?   What if there is a problem?  Why would that occur?  What happens? How do you fix it?

5.   Identify the processes: Identify the work processes that support the engagement, utilization, management and measurement of that work effort based upon the insights above.   What would you change?  What can you change? Who do you need to drive that change?  How do you need them?

For example:  Do you have a situation where a recruiter goes out on Maternity leave? Who fills
her role?   Options: Do nothing.  Engage a contract recruiter.  Give her work to another
recruiter.

Example 2:  Need a recruitment advertising firm to support both common and creative projects.
Understand how does the entire recruiting organization procure advertising support
today?  Centralized or decentralized?  What would change or stay the same?  How does this
align to the needs communicated to the Advertising agencies? Who needs to be involved in the
selection process to achieve buy in?  How does this align to corporate brand efforts?   How can
you structure the pricing based upon your purchasing behaviors?

Once you identify your requirements, than create a RFP.  The RFP should:

1.  Articulate what you are trying to achieve.

2. Provide the adequate amount of information for the supplier to provide the best solution.

3. Provide your expectations of this solution?

4. Have NDA’s signed.

Upon receipt of the RFP responses, begin the Selection Process

The selection process must include:

1. All of the required stakeholders.

2. A clear rating  and selection system.

3. All stakeholders should have a common understanding of the service provider, clear definitions and has reviewed the RFP response.

4.  Timeline and results of the supplier presentations should be clearly and fairly articulated to all.

From here, you will move into the CONTRACTS phase.   This phase focuses on:

1. Liability

2. Terms and conditions

3. Pricing negotiations

4. Clearly defined statement of work

Once the Contract and SOW has been signed, the relationship begins to develop.   Now phase 2 of hard work begins.

Key success factors during this time:

1. Review of expectations and statement of work.

2. Relationship building.

3. Cultural assimilation.

4. Transition expectations.

As the program or product implementation stabilizes, the management this relationship may focus on: 1. Metrics

2. Escalations.

3. Performance.

4. Compliance.

5. Governance.

See figure below:

Vendor selection and management is a process. It requires knowledge of processes, technology, contracts and delivery outcomes.   Some vendor selection and management efforts require a bit more work than others, yet they all require thoughtfulness associated with the execution.

Feel free to reach out if you are looking at putting a vendor management program in place, for additional insights and details.  Tracey Friend tfriend@brightfieldstrategies.com

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