Leaders,
Our space is a weird intersection of staffing, VMS/MSP’s, tech, and freelance marketplaces. Most people are good at one, but very few can understand the full range.
Davis is one of those rare few as he was an early leader at SAP Fieldglass. He’s a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the history of VMS’s/MSP’s, and the below knowledge should be in a curriculum for every leader in our space.
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What is SAP Fieldglass?
SAP Fieldglass, which is one of the if not the leading vendor management system, it's a platform that companies use to manage all of the external workforce.
Why now? What changed for freelancing to be relevant now?
I think now you've got some services and you could set up a limited company, at least in the UAE in the UK just in a few hours, and things are becoming a lot more convenient and accessible. Whereas before the idea of just setting up a company you knew you had you know, quite a journey to go through.
The freelance platform themselves provide more and more services to help those freelancers to get started.
Why do you need a VMS?
it's really to manage your external workforce, and external vendors. You could have two main categories that you've got your your contingent workforce. You have people you get in on a temporary basis, based on a time and material, but you also have your service providers, those where you will engage more on statement of work where you will define a piece of work.
A VMS will tend to manage the end to end process. All the way to work being invoiced and paid.
If you think of an organization, they would have, obviously, the internal workforce, and then the external ones, the internal one, it's managing the HR system. And you can ask any company, how many employees they have. And they can tell you from this morning, I've got 27,333 employees, so it can be very precise, because it's every employee will be registered on that system.
But as soon as we say many external workers do you have, then you've got a bigger question mark uncertainty.
And then you go down to the question, what do you classify as an external worker is someone you know, working in the cafeteria or doing the landscaping, you see an employee, or we see an external worker, so you've got quite different complexity there.
Visibility is probably the main driver and from visibility, once you've got visibility on the external workforce, then you can try different types of value goals for your organization, in terms of how do you use that external workforce to the best of the organization.
Visibility, visibility, visibility
What’s the core drivers of complexity with contingent talent?
Defining the work that needs to be done » Deciding what is the best way to navigate through the different channels to access talent » compensation » then how to engage them.
There's not yet the full freedom of choice. You've got certain rules and regs that you need to follow, and those actually increasing as those more and more channels exist.
Then the compliance aspect becomes more and more relevant. As an organization it's how do you make sure that you've got the right classification across your organization, you've got the common way of engaging so you know, every channel that you have access to is compliant, it's properly regulated.
Because of that easiness, of access to talent, the talent and demand, it becomes so much easier for, obviously, the hiring manager in a very decentralized, let's say, location or business unit of the business to just go and use of prevents. But how do you make sure that that doesn't put the company at risk?
It's making sure they get the best talent at the best price at the best time that they need it. And that's also where technology can help and but processes as well that you implement internally within the organization can help.
Will the world become 100% freelancers?
No, I don't think it will be. It's crazy.
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