Key Findings & Highlights:

Recent economic factors, a shrinking working-age population, skills shortages, and changing workforce aspirations are forcing all-sized organizations to contact third-party vendors for support in embracing cost-effective multi-channel contingent (and broader) hiring strategies.   

The range of programs and services offered by CWS/MSP vendors is now at its broadest to meet those organizational demands. The order of the day is a continuum of basic through to advanced programs, with accompanying services and tech, evolving in value-add and complexity.

Successful vendors are creating a new portfolio of enhanced offerings focused on the latest client and buyer pain points. Such offerings include tail spend management (to curtail rogue, low-value spending), contractor care initiatives (improving the end-to-end contractor experience, loyalty, retention, and enhanced value for clients), consultancy, global hiring/talent insights, and strategic workforce planning (SWP) for the contingent workforce, bringing together many of these new initiatives with other recent-to-market schemes of the past few years (such as Hire, Train, Deploy) which continue to gain market traction.

Technology priorities and roadmaps focus on automation and AI/GenAI, followed by platforms to enhance global talent reach, contractor care, analytics, mid-market VMS, and CRM for enhanced service delivery. Leading vendors are investing in AI/GenAI POCs and deployments, primarily in digital assistants, document creation, and talent matching.

Leveraging ground-breaking proprietary or third-party technology with AI/GenAI-enabled features and functionality to efficiently and effectively source, hire, skill, redeploy, and retain contingent (and broader) talent globally, will become the new standard.