As the marketplace has evolved in recent years, contingent labor has emerged as the “workforce of the future.” Empowered knowledge workers have more employment choices than ever, with many taking advantage of and pursuing contingent work opportunities. According to Intuit 2020 report, “Over the next decade, the number of contingent employees will increase worldwide. In the U.S. alone this segment will exceed 40 percent of the workforce in 2020.” At the same time, organizations worldwide are exploring new avenues for leveraging the advantages a contingent workforce offers. These include such as access to talent, greater flexibility, innovation, cost reduction, and protection against financial risk.
Additionally, it’s becoming a large spending category. It’s now an enterprise valuation driver, so it’s front and center with the CFO. This has not always been the case. The industry has transformed from a small temp-staffing niche to a C-suite strategic priority over the past 30 years. This transformation includes change within talent and procurement programs. It also highlights an explosion of innovation and new technology platforms. These platforms, including the technology stack, are going to evolve, and more importantly, need to evolve. The established Procurement/Spend Management and HCM platforms do not currently address the full contingent workforce management lifecycle. Furthermore, they aren’t capable of managing its complexity or harnessing the data to provide analytics and intelligence on companies’ contingent workforce segments that executives demand.
Fortunately, PRO Unlimited is uniquely positioned to become the holistic platform for the industry. This company is incredibly well-positioned in terms of technology, data/analytics, managed services, and, most importantly, its people. That’s one of the main reasons I decided to not only make the jump to the contingent workforce management industry but also to join PRO specifically.
PRO’s Unlimited Strategic Position
To position PRO as the technology platform for the contingent workforce industry, there are six key areas that I’ll focus on, including:
First, I’ve led companies where they went from only offering point solutions to an evolution into holistic platforms. At PRO, we’ll continue evolving our Managed Services Program (MSP), Data/Analytics, Integration Ecosystem, and Vendor Management Software (VMS) offerings toward an even more comprehensive contingent workforce management platform. This approach will continue to drive our clients’ program success as the marketplace shifts.
Second, the “scale player” is going to win in this industry. The need for scale is critical, and that means scaling both organically and through M&A. I’ve run several large businesses that have gone through this explosive growth. I’m looking to apply many of these tenets and lessons learned to PRO. We look to widen the scale gap versus our competitors in the industry.
Third, there’s a global need for our software, data, analytics, and services platform. Providers need to become more global as this industry expands. The use of contingent labor grows with both Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. I will draw upon my deep expertise in globalization to continue to expand and extend PRO’s global reach.
Key Areas
Fourth, I have been through several industry transformations, and the contingent workforce management industry is about to embark on its transformation. As stated earlier, PRO is uniquely positioned to become the holistic platform for the industry by not only providing our solutions to customers but leading them up the maturity curve as they go through their own FTE to contingent transformations inside their companies.
Fifth, the importance of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) needs to grow at scale worldwide inside of both large Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations. The platform we provide will continue to support moving D&I front and center at companies, as well as investing heavily in our own company on this mission-critical front. I have spent the last decade driving large-scale D&I and social/corporate responsibility programs, and I am excited to do that at PRO.
Sixth, the importance of developing a holistic partnership ecosystem is critical to how PRO will grow and transform the industry. This ecosystem will be comprised of analytics, data, service and advisory, and technology partnerships.
Leveraging Competitive Differentiators
Beyond these focus areas, I also intend to exploit PRO’s competitive differentiators both strategically and operationally. First and foremost, the strengths of PRO reside in its people and talent. For 30 years, PRO has always had the best talent in the industry. Moving forward, we’re going to continue evolving from the trusted advisor that has delivered program management, service delivery, and flawless execution to a strategic advisory, intelligence, and business decision-making partner leveraging our world-class best practices, insights, data, and analytics.
Second, PRO has industry-leading VMS technology that’s been recognized and validated as best-in-class by leading third parties such as Gartner. We’re going to leverage our highly configurable and interoperable platform, and tap into our deep network, to build a new ecosystem that clients will need as this industry evolves.
Third, the importance of data, analytics, and business intelligence has permeated every industry, and ours is no different. Our Strategy, Analytics, and Metrics (SAM) team, coupled with the powerful analytics/intelligence SaaS solution we offer, will help propel new solutions that organizations will be able to use to elevate their contingent workforce management programs.
Fourth, while we’ve already established ourselves as a global leader, we’ll continue to expand our footprint very aggressively and extend our lead over our competitors.
Future Trends
Lastly, many anticipated trends will influence the contingent workforce management space. These include the continued preference of knowledge, specialized-skilled, white-collared workers across the globe to only be willing to work on a contingent basis, not FTE. This will be a career choice for many, which will radically accelerate the complexities of this segment. Companies will need to not only navigate these evolving areas at a rapid pace, but also expertly address localization, globalization, changing regulatory and labor laws, remote work, and D&I, among others. The notion of things like the “gig economy” is going to dramatically expand across virtually all categories of the skilled workforce, and in many industries, those leaders will have more contingent workers than FTEs.
Industry Impact
In addition, as the spending under management continues to expand, it will be mission critical for the C-suite to be more involved. Currently, for the most part, the selection and management of outsourcing a company’s contingent workforce management program has been relegated as “tactical” and pushed fairly far down the organization’s org chart. This will change as C-level executives will play a much greater role in the decision to not only outsource the non-employee management function but also to deploy a technological ecosystem to harness data and intelligence to drive their businesses forward as part of their human capital strategy. Furthermore, the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence and other emergent technologies tied to both data analytics and VMS is going to be more important than ever. They’ll need to provide stakeholders with the ability to enhance sourcing, managing, and tracking of the non-employee workforce by region and around the world.
To this end, integration will be critical. The ability to span across siloes where vendors have lived for the past 30 years is going to be a more integral part of a much larger technology stack and services ecosystem. Being the platform that seamlessly interoperates with ERP, HCM, HRIS, P2P, and Data and Analytics systems will be paramount.
