Pontoon's recently reimagined Services Procurement contingent hiring solution enables a simplified, client-centric journey, with best practice at its core and underpinned by industry-leading technology.

In 2021, Pontoon conducted a thorough evaluation of its existing offering, other solutions in the market, and what current and future clients were looking for from Services Procurement. The result is a solution designed around three primary pillars: manage the process, facilitate the buy, and outsource the category. The approach is modular, offering the flexibility needed for a broad mix of clients, with each pillar increasing in level of complexity and value. Pontoon’s client engagements range from small and mid-sized to billion-dollar global programs.

Whereas a traditional MSP is a holistic program needing organizations to embrace an all-encompassing change in their contingent hiring processes, Services Procurement and Statement of Work (SOW) can be perceived as an evolutionary service offered as a part of an MSP.

Build a solid foundation on which to grow

The aim is to start with the foundational elements of Services Procurement rather than an immediate introduction of a high-level procurement service. By starting at a managed level, procurement professionals can focus on their core business priorities, day-to-day operations can continue uninterrupted, and adoption rates are driven up.

Pontoon believes that its approach would ensure success and establish a solid foundation to build steady, manageable, and successful change, irrespective of a company’s readiness and Services Procurement ambitions.

It has deployed its new approach with a U.S.-based healthcare client who started their Services Procurement journey on the first pillar: manage the process. When Pontoon first met the client to discuss MSP services leveraging the client’s existing ATS and VMS platforms, they stated their ambitions to embrace SOW services quickly. However, cognizant of the risks of moving too fast, Pontoon followed its tried-and-trusted approach in first establishing itself as the client’s MSP vendor. The focus was on delivering results (process efficiency, visibility, compliance, and cost-savings) and building trust (achieving a consistently high stakeholder satisfaction score) before helping them navigate Services Procurement/SOW. In the initial phase, Pontoon took on some of the tasks and activities in the ATS to ensure the contingent workforce records were compliant across both platforms. Within six months, Pontoon leveraged data and analytics to identify action items to optimize the existing supplier pool, ensuring selected suppliers were best suited to the client’s needs.

As the client’s MSP vendor, Pontoon was aware that internal stakeholders had brought in SOW resources (though SOW was out of program scope), and it was therefore likely there would be a degree of worker misclassification. Pontoon suggested it run a project with the client to analyze those resources, and subsequently identified 20% as incorrectly classified. Pontoon was comprehensive and thorough during the resulting discovery process. The rigor applied from understanding how an organization’s contingent labor can be hired, hidden, and allocated in different ways enabled Pontoon and the client to gain full visibility of all SOW resources, ensuring that both parties could collectively isolate the actual SOW versus contingent spend.

Invest the time and enjoy the discovery… 

Pontoon emphasizes that a successful Services Procurement/SOW program requires a methodical approach, bringing net new contracts under the program scope in the first instance and avoiding mid-contract changes. The client, with 105 SOWs in flight and 600 workers associated with them, would not be able to cope with the disruption of immediately changing all contractual terms. Similarly, the client’s existing VMS technology would require significant work to update this change in volume.

Pontoon walked the client through the Services Procurement/SOW Discovery, Data, and Recommendation steps, determining how it would implement Services Procurement/SOW and walking through every workflow step, establishing who would take responsibility for specific actions.

Pontoon identified that cost savings would be ~12% (which, projected forward, equated to $4m per year), essentially driven by the solution design team through rate card and invoicing compliance. The team determined what the client wanted from a rate card strategy perspective, backed it up with market data, and ensured it aligned the right strategy to the client’s brand perception.

Typically, these programs are supplier-funded. However, in this case, the client is financing the program, encouraging more suppliers to get on board, notably big consultancy firms. In such circumstances, this can be a harder sell to a leadership team. However, the business case created for the procurement team to present to their leaders showed the added value that Services Procurement/SOW could bring and how they would outweigh the cost of the client-funded expenses. In preparation for Services Procurement/ SOW, the tech stack for SOW was streamlined and aligned to the broader MSP – comprising the VMS and a few additional tools for onboarding and analytics.

…and the recommendations will reap rewards

The business case evolved into a complete policy change, with non-compliance post go-live resulting in withholding budget sign-off. By coincidence, the new policy gained executive approval on the third anniversary of the initial MSP launch.

Pontoon would like this client-funded model to be repeated to prospects, to drive better adoption rates and to better support client business objectives.

Pontoon is now working on the second pillar of the program's evolution. Using its accumulated data, it anticipates supporting the client with enhanced vendor selection and assessing bids so that the client can take on more strategic elements internally. It is clear that results have been delivered by taking a systematic, manageable approach, paving the way for further success.  

This is the second part of a 2-part blog presenting an analysis of key trends from NelsonHall's HR Technology & Services team. Here, Nikki Edwards looks at talent management services, including recruitment and learning services.

Recruitment Services

RPO and CWS/MSP vendors shone in 2020, as they supported their clients through their COVID-19 challenges, adding another dimension to an already-complex picture of Talent Acquisition (TA) trends. Vendors initially advised on digital tools to enable remote hiring and onboarding of talent, and broader services around working from home, keeping safe, and maintaining wellbeing.

This was immediately followed by vendor taskforces re-allocating resources to meet organizations’ urgent hiring ramp-ups (particularly in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and food retail), while supporting clients who were scaling back or needed a different modus operandi. The year closed with recruitment vendors supporting their clients with mid- to long-term TA planning, as remote, and digital hiring and working were becoming the new business-as-usual.

Outlook

While organizations focus on essential hiring in 2021 amidst economic uncertainty, and realize they cannot single-handedly navigate the rapidly-evolving TA trends and ongoing pandemic challenges, they will reach out for third-party vendor support to help them strategize and execute plans to ensure they are hiring-fit and work-fit for the future. As vendors continue to evolve their TA solutions (services and tech/tools), they will also contribute to advancing key TA trends:

A total talent/holistic approach to hiring. NelsonHall research in 2020 showed 90% of major enterprises interviewed recognize the need to embrace a holistic approach to talent acquisition, comprising full-time/permanent, contingent, and internal talent (the latter having been somewhat neglected to date).

Organizations are considering using contingent workers (such as freelancers and gig workers) over full-time/permanent workers to avoid long-term employment costs. Vendors already offering total talent solutions are in a stronger position to support them, as they can vary the proportion of each delivery channel based on changing demands and relocate resources accordingly. With the need for worker compliance intensifying, giving organizations better visibility of data/insights concerning their internal talent is a growth area, closing the gap on this under-used talent pool.   

Building talent by upskilling and reskilling organizations’ workers. On the one hand, organizations will continue to seek talent which is in short supply (for example, digital skills, other niche STEM skills, some trades skills). Yet on the other, those organizations will face the reality of skillsets being augmented or replaced by automation, requiring affected workers to be upskilled or reskilled in new areas.

The ‘build’ element of the buy, borrow, build, and bot approach to TA has never been so important. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how organizations’ digital skills fell woefully short of what is required for 2021 and the need to address this (notably in areas from basic use of collaboration platforms to advanced cybersecurity). All recruitment vendors will play a role in skills development and embrace the opportunity uniquely according to their client base and their specific needs. 

Expansion of talent advisory services. With a more highly distributed and flexibly working workforce here to stay, RPO and CWS/MSP vendors will expand their portfolios to offer services around the future of work. This could encompass the evolution of employer branding/recruitment marketing services pivoted to focus on compelling EVP building – showcasing/storytelling values demonstrated by client organizations through the pandemic.

Opportunities abound in areas beyond TA, encompassing broader HR and organizational issues. Consulting will cover working with a fully-remote, globally spread workforce (covering topics such as tech/tools, employee communications, employee engagement, workforce wellbeing/safety (shielding), workplace redesign, to business continuity planning and building corporate resilience). 

Next-generation platforms/tools. In readiness for the new era of work, recruitment vendors will continue investing in data, AI-based predictive analytics (for example, the impact of automation on skills augmentation or replacement), intelligent automation (looking at workflow bottlenecks), niche human clouds, and learning tech (for reskilling/upskilling). Also, chatbots, voice-enabled tools, the use of AI for resume parsing, candidate matching, and assessments will continue apace.

Learning Services

In 2020, Learning Services vendors supported clients in digitalizing in-person training content for cloud-based peer-to-peer platform delivery in a bid to continue essential training (for employee onboarding and business compliance needs). Vendors saw increased demand for specific skills training, notably digital skills and reskilling for COVID-19-specific healthcare/pharmaceutical initiatives. Within a few months, vendors were supporting clients in choosing the most appropriate modalities for delivering learning digitally, whether via simple videos or animation, for example. Although there was some return to socially-distanced classroom training at the close of 2020, organizations recognized that digital learning solutions and updated skillset training were going to be the priority for 2021 as geographically-dispersed, remote workforces become the long-term norm.      

Outlook

Organizations will continue to have reduced training budget spend in 2021, until the economic situation improves in a COVID-19 vaccinated world. Vendors must maintain/increase support for their clients as they navigate further challenges, which may include the downsizing or removal of in-house learning teams, while ensuring their employees learn in a safe, collaborative environment, cognizant of pandemic-induced restrictions. Vendors will continue with their planned developments in services/learning tech/tools driven by existing PESTLE factors, yet also advance several learning trends:

Digital/virtual modalities for geographically-dispersed/remote workers. Priority will be on blended learning (with a significant proportion of VILT to enable most learning to take place remotely, with any return to in-person learning reserved for final skills demonstration/reinforcement), and eLearning. Learning will be in bite-sized chunks, embracing engaging modalities to drive self-service pull versus push learning. Such modalities will include video, animation, gamification, simulation, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and alternate reality.

Curated content over created content. Learning Vendors will continue to curate content (where there is an abundance of ready-made material available), as organizations seek quick fixes to plug gaps in their content libraries. Created content will remain popular for niche/specialist content, where it is tailored for a specific organization or product, or for compliance reasons.

Learning tech/tools (including tech admin). Augmenting organizations’ existing LMS/LXPs/HCM learning modules with other platforms/tools to enhance the learning experience will expand vendors’ ecosystems. Platforms will include curated content, extended reality, EPSS, microlearning, rapid authoring, and alternate reality. Mobile learning, learner data/analytics, and learning systems admin will continue to grow in importance.   

Other services. Consulting services will expand to focus on digitalization of learning (including tech/tools advice as above), driving learner engagement, and reskilling/upskilling, based around the new organizational structures of the future. Administrative services may increasingly focus on third-party learning vendor management, for example, as procurement teams shed administrative duties, and traditional classroom support diminishes in importance. 

In Part 1 of this blog, Pete Tiliakos & Liz Rennie look at the key outsourcing trends around core HR functions, including cloud HR transformation, payroll, and benefits administration services.

My initial research into Impact of COVID-19 on Recruitment Services: Vendor Perspective (March 2020) highlighted several stand-out dilemmas that client organizations face. Notably, some organizations need to continue hiring and the only way to do so is by embracing technology (sometimes reluctantly), enabling them to carry out recruitment steps remotely. Also, some sectors were ramping up hiring (in an already-tight labor market), while other industries had ceased all hiring activity for the immediate term. Without the appropriate technology in place, how would organizations needing to furlough workers, and end contingent worker contracts in the short-term, be able to rehire them later?

I recently spoke to Cory Hansen, VP of MSP Operations at Allegis Global Solutions, to establish how they have been helping organizations navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. I was keen to focus on their expanded (via acquisition) healthcare vertical (representing 20% of their MSP clients), the cyclical nature of demand for hiring support of contingent workers in the sector, and their use of technology to track those workers.     

Allegis Global Solutions’ initial approach

Following initial focus on preserving employee health and safety, enabling its employees to work from home, then supporting its clients to do so too (by setting up its MSP COVID-19 taskforce), there was a wave of MSP clients that needed to either ramp-up or reduce their workers with immediate effect.

Within 12 hours, Allegis Global Solutions had set up a COVID-19 Operational Demand Center (with a Leader, a Recruitment Manager, a Supplier Manager, and three specialist recruiters) to control all the different client demands centrally. Being able to holistically see all recruiters and manage their movement, from program teams seeing declining recruitment to program teams seeing recruitment surges, was essential. More importantly, Allegis Global Solutions needed a grip on the movement of all contingent workers (whether those of their existing clients or new organizations reaching out for the first time for COVID-19 support).

Healthcare sector focus

The Healthcare vertical, with three clusters of clients with hiring needs at different times throughout the pandemic, would add another layer of complexity. Life Sciences (including Medical Devices, Pharmaceuticals, etc.) were ramping up hiring from the get-go. One client, manufacturing items to combat COVID-19, required an additional 250 resources, which Allegis Global Solutions delivered within three weeks, leveraging their existing supply chain. Another client needed to reach a target of delivering 100,000 medical devices to hospitals, requiring 100s of extra staff to manufacture those devices.  Also, clinical clients were ramping up, but with the complexity of worker reassignment. Allegis Global Solutions uses its proprietary platform to keep track of the workers. Information stored comprises key details of the worker; the supplier representing them; the manager they report/reported to; the client they are/were deployed with; and the original requisition number. This enables Allegis Global Solutions to successfully reassign workers to new jobs and track their location so they can be hired for a new assignment or rehired in their original position, should circumstances allow.

One client, providing occupational health services, was adapting its services to support the COVID-19 pandemic (temperature screening, nurse provision, etc.), requiring tracking of their redeployments.  Similarly, hospital network workers were being redeployed from areas (such as elective surgery, where demand has slumped) to ICU, which was desperate for additional resources.

Allegis Global Solutions’ proprietary technology proved its worth when it was asked by a State Governor’s office to stand up a hiring solution within 24 hours. The solution required 1000s of clinicians to be on the front line to save lives at existing and temporary hospital sites, as well as to skill nursing facilities throughout the State. Twelve hours later there was a verbal agreement in place to deliver MSP-type services for them (normally a 12-month engagement cycle) and deploy technology (a four-to-six-week process, usually). The project was to supply talent and create an outreach web portal for talent (possessing medical skillsets). The program could potentially have needed 12-15K extra hires as a worst-case scenario. Further complexity has come from the need to interface with and source talent from several existing hospital networks, which would normally be competing with each other. To date, there have been over 1000 clinicians hired and dozens of individuals reassigned from other jobs.

Allegis Global Solutions has been leveraging its ACUMEN Business Intelligence technology, too, where at the presentation layer, it can get access to as much data as it needs to see what is happening in real-time. It keeps track of all clients, what jobs are open, and what jobs have been cancelled. Also, it identifies where there is a surplus of workers who can be redeployed to another client with a spike in demand. It has been a useful repository of pay data, too. The already severe clinical staffing shortage has been exacerbated with COVID-19, as clinical workers have demanded a 30%-100% pandemic/ quarantine premium in addition to their basic pay to consider a temporary role. This data set from the pandemic will be invaluable for the future if similar events happen again.

Looking ahead

As per the NelsonHall March 2020 research, Allegis Global Solutions is one vendor advising its healthcare clients (especially frontline clinical workers) on the quickest way to leverage technology to aid remote hiring, especially for virtual interviewing (where face-to-face interviewing has been the norm), timely background screening/credentialing (including drug testing), and the virtual onboarding of workers. Allegis Global Solutions has helped clients to prioritize the components, from the most important to the least important, making concessions allowing contingent workers to start work, with checks following on later than would otherwise be permitted.

Into Q3 and beyond, essentially a lag of several months, the healthcare payer providers will see an uptick in work, resulting in a surge in demand for extra staff from Allegis Global Solutions, as end customers will make claims, require preventative testing, and the window for open enrollment looms (with expectations of enrollments being higher than ever before). This activity may be post-clinical ramp-up or sit alongside (depending on how long the COVID-19 pandemic remains at a “requiring social distancing” level). It will, however, add further data/tracking insights into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic via its proprietary platform and ACUMEN. When the pandemic is over, it will be interesting to see the patterns of reassignment and rehire of workers throughout the period. 

Conclusion

For me, what the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted is that organizations have left themselves exposed through their slow uptake of digital transformation (especially in the recruitment space). On a positive note, it has made everyone aware of the importance of technology in their daily lives (and how it has enabled organizations to have some level of business continuity). It has forced organizations to embrace digital transformation at an initial break-neck speed, such that there is now no turning back. The Allegis Global Solutions case study highlights that organizations cannot embrace digital transformation/ recruitment transformation single-handedly. Organizations must seek out a suitable partner who can guide them on their transformation journey.

There is so much hype around RPA and AI technology that RPO, MSP, and Total Talent vendors could get carried away in the race to launch the latest RPA or AI technology feature at the expense of delivering excellent customer service. 

Cielo has a more grounded approach to technology, suggesting that “Technology is only as valuable as the human experience it improves” and is reflected in its current technology strategy to improve customer service. Here I take a look at Cielo’s TalentCloud, which comprises 3 elements: SkyRecruit, SkyAnalytics and SkyLabs.

SkyRecruit

SkyRecruit is Cielo’s CRM platform. Launched in 2015, it has been rolled out to all its global clients and is Cielo’s operating engine, with the advantages of its employees being able to work with different clients using a common platform.  Having a choice of 13 modules, its two most popular modules are sourcing and events. Candidate nurturing is one module which Cielo sees as essential for building candidate engagement. Whilst there are core modules, the majority are taken up by clients once they are ready to do so according to their business needs. Cielo has recently enhanced SkyRecruit in several ways.

Firstly, Cielo has introduced a process bot for automated sourcing. This is particularly effective where there are high recruitment volumes, such as in retail. The process bot finds a high number of suitable candidates and uploads those details into SkyRecruit – a process now taking one minute compared to 15 minutes by a human. Candidates are automatically sent jobs of interest to them, candidates can engage with a recruiter and move through the hiring process. Whilst talent pools can then be created by the process bot, the real value comes in how the process bot organizes the talent pools and communicates with candidates on an ongoing basis through social media, etc. taking into consideration candidate preferences for working with certain client brands.

Secondly, Cielo has introduced Celia, its intelligent job search chat bot. Celia starts a conversation with a candidate to find out what type of job/location they are looking for, and then can pinpoint relevant jobs and answer questions from candidates. If the chat bot cannot answer a specific question, it then escalates the question to a human recruiter to engage in the conversation.  Celia learns the answer from the escalated question, so that next time the same question arises, Celia can answer it. Celia will never replace humans, but will answer an increasingly complex range of questions, releasing humans to focus on more value-add activities.   

Thirdly, Cielo has introduced assessment as part of the hiring process. This includes DISC profiling. As soon as a candidate applies for a role, a series of questions is asked (taking just over two minutes of candidate time), the answers to which build up a DISC profile of the candidate. Suitable jobs are sent to the candidate, based on their results. For example, a candidate with a “high D” profile would be advised of sales roles. For customer service roles, assessment focuses on emotion recognition to determine how well candidates can read its potential customers.

As SkyRecruit is mobile-enabled, candidates can apply via smartphone. A candidate can go through all stages of the hiring process in one transaction – be sent a job, apply and go through a series of assessment questions (DISC, emotion recognition, etc.) and be screened by an interviewer. Using voice tools gives a 75% application completion rate compared to a 30% completion rate when using video interviewing as part of its hiring process. Currently, feedback on performance is given to the candidate by the recruiter. The aim in the future is to automate the entire process.

SkyAnalytics

This is a relatively new addition to Cielo’s portfolio, and has already had a major enhancement – now built on the Birst platform – which is being rolled out to its clients. All client data, irrespective of its source, is visible on one platform.  But rather than Cielo presenting a plethora of graphs in a single view, bombarding the client with too much information, it has had a re-think. Cielo now only presents the key measures that are important to a client, yet has built more depth into the analytics, so that a client can drill down into those key measures. The data shows where the hiring manager and recruiter need to focus their efforts to enhance hiring performance.

SkyLabs

SkyLabs is the formalization of Cielo’s researching and testing of new tools and technologies in the areas of RPA, AI, natural language processing, etc. The features already discussed have come via SkyLabs. Cielo is learning as it innovates and monitors items which impact progress. For example, RPA requires stable technology systems and volume process repetition, so if a client decides to change its ATS after 3 months, it has an impact on the progress of RPA. Cielo is also looking at micro-automations, where simple process steps are automated. Cielo’s employees are at the heart of this automation. The process bot can learn from videos of Cielo’s employees completing talent acquisition tasks, such as uploading a file. Processes that can be replaced by automation free up Cielo’s employees to undertake roles that add more value to its clients. Cielo has also made some progress in the use of voice interfaces with the Amazon Echo. Cielo can ask Alexa a range of questions about the talent acquisition process, such as the number of interviews booked on a particular day of the week.

Cielo’s commitment to continuous improvement is demonstrated by sharing its Cielo TalentCloud three-year roadmap with clients. This allows clients to see other interesting developments scheduled, and while Cielo continues to focus on improving processes, candidate experience, hiring manager experience, etc., clients can be assured that Cielo will maintain its focus on providing a personal touch.