Jim Holincheck » Contingent Workforce Management

Making the Case for Keeping Recruitment in the HR Organization

Jim Holincheck — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 20:57:52 +0000

There has been a lot of interesting discussion in the blogosphere about the notion of Recruitment leaving the HR organization (see Dave Lefkow’s post on ERE). Here is a quote from that post: “Instead of being HR’s red-headed stepchild that’s locked away in the basement (only to see the HR team take all the credit for the big accomplishments of your team), it’s time for truly strategic talent management departments to secede from HR. To stop sitting at the “people-people” table and start sitting with the “businesspeople.”

I disagree with the premise of recruitment being thought of as talent management (follow this link to my research about talent management application suites). Sorry folks, it is not. It is part of talent management, but only a part. It does not deal typically with the contingent workforce, which is becoming an increasing percentage of the workforce. What about internal mobility? retention? development? even separation (I know we do not like to talk about it in the HR world, but it is important)? In my opinion, strategic talent management can happen only when it deals with the full workforce and in an integrated way with the talent lifecycle.

I wholehartedly agree with Dave about the need to start sitting with “businesspeople”. However, to help the “businesspeople”, all of HR, not just the “red-headed stepchild”, needs to start focusing on what the business needs to successfully leverage talent.

Market Landscape for Contingent Workforce Management Solutions

Jim Holincheck — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 21:24:40 +0000

I sometimes get questions from clients about solutions for contingent workforce management. We have not done a MarketScope or Magic Quadrant on this market at this point. However, it is an area that we are monitoring and I will be publishing a more detailed note in 2006. In the interim, I thought I would post a listing of vendors that have solutions in this space. There are five main categories of vendors in the market:

Procurement-Focused Vendors — These niche vendors really target the procurement organization with their solutions and are evolving into platforms for broader services procurement.

Agile-1 Covendis eLance eWork Fieldglass IQNavigator nextSource WorkforceLogic ZeroChaos

HR-Focused Vendors — These vendors come from an HR-background (recruitment) and have either built their own solution or have acquired a procurement-focused vendor.

PeopleClick Recruitmax Taleo VirtualEdge

Subsidiaries of Staffing Firms — These providers offer vendor-neutral software and service solutions but are separate entities from their staffing service parents.

Beeline CHIMES

Staffing Firms — Some of the large staffing firms offer software and managed services for contingent workforce management.

ProcureStaff (Volt) UltraSource (Manpower) Workcard (Adecco)

Enterprise Application Vendors — These vendors offer broader ERP solutions.

Oracle Oracle PeopleSoft SAP

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