President-elect Trump has wasted no time intrepidly wading into numerous policy areas. One notable area of action has been federal spending, where his frequent pledges to cut costs from federal programs has made him seem more like the chief procurement officer of the United States (CPOTUS). Beyond federal spending, however, we as analysts of the contingent workforce and services procurement space have a far more specific question we’d like to address: How will Trump deal with the gig economy?
Qwil, founded in San Francisco in 2015 by three experienced entrepreneurs, is now taking its place as one of a number of new specialized gig economy players focused on providing workers with support services. The chief focus of Qwil, put simply, is “helping independent contractors get paid as quickly as possible.”
VMS started to emerge, as the name implies, as an on-premise vendor management software solution in the late 1990s. Since then, it has evolved as the central technology solution for supplier, spend and compliance management in formal, enterprise contingent workforce management programs. VMS has been evolving in a number of ways, including depth and breadth of functionality, technology modernization of architecture and the role the solution plays in enterprise workforce management. Today, that evolution is continuing, as demonstrated by solution developments of several select VMS providers. For these reasons, as well as the continuing increase in the use of the contingent workforce and services under SOW, VMS is becoming more important than ever.
Though we can’t agree on how we define and label them and how big and significant they actually are, there seems to be a consensus that, increasingly, new ways of arranging and performing work are emerging in many different places of the economy. These work arrangements are shorter and more fluid than what has been the norm, they are about work done outside of firms, they are often intermediated in some way by some kind of digital platform and they are raising contention about how laws and regulations should be applied. Whatever this new world of work is, developments in an around it now surface every month. This a short summary of such developments from just recent weeks, presented at face value for you to peruse and consider.
Intuit, the provider of QuickBooks Self-Employed, and Etsy, the online marketplace for crafted products, announced they will be partnering. Etsy sellers in the U.S. and the U.K. will be able to use QuickBooks Self-Employed under special terms of the partnership. So why do we think what Intuit is doing in the “gig economy” — even with an Etsy — is relevant to enterprise buyers?
Randstad Holding NV, the second largest staffing and recruiting business in the world, announced this week it has entered into an agreement to acquire Monster Worldwide Inc., one of the first job boards launched in the mid-1990s. Randstad will acquire Monster for $429 million in cash, or $3.40 per share, representing a 23% premium relative to the Monster’s closing share price on Monday.
HourlyNerd, a work intermediation platform (WIP) that enables enterprises to access highly qualified freelance business talent, has announced it is rebranding to Catalant. The announcement comes on the heels of the company receiving $22 million in private equity funding earlier this month. The “new name — a combination of catalyst, brilliant and talent — reflects the company’s leading role in redefining how enterprises access top talent to solve critical challenges,” the company said in a press release.
The independent workforce is growing and becoming an important source of talent for enterprises. But this increase, from Uber drivers to online software developers, has unleashed a worker classification firestorm, spreading through businesses, government and the courts. The related ambiguity, uncertainty and risk, often driven by technology, is increasing, as well, even as new demographics are giving rise to a growing portion of the much in demand skilled talent population that prefers independent (non-employee) work. This contradiction is at the heart of the worker classification conundrum.
MBA & Company, based in London and founded in 2009, is a provider of an online marketplace platform which — as perhaps suggested by its name — allows enterprises to engage independent business consultants. The company’s platform and network of consultants is bundled with a set of services — namely account management, final matching of candidates to client requirements and upstream vetting of talent. MBA’s platform and services effectively support a full lifecycle of source-to-pay (S2P) solutions (i.e., from talent sourcing to payment).
Last week, Randstad Holding announced its acquisition of twago, the largest freelancer marketplace platform based in Europe (founded in 2009 in Berlin). The acquisition is a significant event for a number of reasons, not the least of which is it being the first time a staffing and workforce solutions company has acquired a true online freelance marketplace.
We recently had the chance to speak with Jason Ezratty, the president and co-founder of Brightfield Strategies. Brightfield, already known as one of the top analytics-based consulting and advisory firms in the contingent workforce management space, has created a unique data aggregation and analytics platform, the Talent Data Exchange (TDX). In this article, we peel the onion back a little on TDX and set the stage for our subsequent slice-and-dice drill-downs (for our PRO members) on what a data platform solution like TDX can mean for workforce and services procurement.
Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Leslie Marsh, vice president of channel partnerships, HireTalent.
Statement of work (SOW) has become a fast-growing component of contingent workforce management (CWM) programs. While SOW has been much discussed, there has been little conversation around acquiring the actual skills and knowledge needed to make SOW work and manage it effectively.