29 Apr Dispatch from ProcureCon 2024: Contingent Talent Changes In Progress
As the glow and excitement from ProcureCon 2024 in Los Angeles fades, some of the enduring insights are starting to shine through. The participants made a lot of great new connections and refreshed long-valued relationships in ways possible only through a well-organized industry gathering.
Underneath it all was the subtle but persistent sense of profound change underway in our industry. There were no “Black Swan” moments or disruptive announcements, just increasingly clear evidence that game-changing practices and technology are starting to accelerate and transform the world of contingent staffing.
Practices: Doubling-Down on the Human (Resources) Element
Over the past few ProcureCon events, many of us have noted a convergence between Procurement and Human Resources teams around non-employee workers. This makes sense given the importance of the contingent workforce in optimizing workforce spend and flexibility across the enterprise. While last year’s event was marked by sessions like “How to Collaborate Better with HR Colleagues,” this year’s sessions and conversations focused on what people are actually doing to bring the best of procurement and HR to the contingent workforce.
In a session titled “Mastering the Contingent Workforce Expedition,” a group of seasoned panelists described how they updated the worker experience, data practices, and cultural elements around their contingent workforce programs. These practices, essentially the core elements of digital transformation, reflect the embracing of contingent workers as essential, value-producing members of the enterprise talent strategy. Notable was the deliberate deconstruction of “other-party” mentalities to unify around common goals in the organization.
One of my favorite presentations given my background as an HR Leader, was a session on the Contingent Workforce Business Partner. I have long maintained that the HR Business Partner is the most challenging and rewarding role in HR. To be successful you need to understand and apply all aspects of the business, including expected outcomes, talent strategy, human behavior, organizational design, and business analytics. It was great to see validation of this role focused on the contingent workforce, partnering with business leaders in much the same way.
Many of the sessions I attended and people I spoke with brought HR and procurement together to finally enact a total talent strategy. This means doing the hard work of building trust, often in person, while reaching across the aisle to help each side understand the diverse interests and requirements necessary for creating a holistic, flexible total talent strategy while managing costs and risk across the board. It was encouraging to see the work happening live rather than sit through a combination of projections of “when” we’ll see this phenomenon, or discussing what went wrong after so many years of talking about it.
Technology: Some are Talking About AI, Some are Acting On It
To put it bluntly, it’s impossible to talk about work, attend an event, or do anything online without hearing about AI. The buzz around AI has reached saturation, eclipsing the “big data” and “digital transformation” trends of the recent past by a mile. ProcureCon 2024 was no different, but it became clear that while some people are talking coherently about AI and making informed predictions, others have rolled up their sleeves to take action.
One of the best examples of this was a session titled “The Unicorns: Real Time Global CW Census and AI,” delivered by Geoff Dubiski of Intuitive Surgical. In this session, Geoff describes how he marshaled considerable support across the organization to collect and analyze all contingent workforce data, even to the point of accessing in-house AI for a full week to process the myriad data he collected. Most notable was the focus on freeing current human capacity to grow without hiring more instead of making across-the-board cuts in staff. Geoff also shared that AI bots, while capable of great processing power and managing tasks at enormous scale, can only handle what they are trained to do and can fail when unpredictability arises.
Of course, Flextrack filled our demonstration schedule and our breakfast session with live demonstrations of AI around common use cases in the contingent workforce. By combining both predictive and generative AI, we demonstrated a powerful combination of capabilities that can be applied to solve a myriad of challenges and create incredible efficiencies in running a contingent workforce program.
Most importantly, the users of these incredible technologies don’t need to be experts in data science, algorithms, or technology. They simply need to ask the right questions of the technology to gain new insights and possibilities through on-platform AI – available now.
Conclusion: The Future Has Arrived. Are You On Board?
The combination of real insights and forward-facing practices shared at ProcureCon Contingent Staffing 2024 suggests that change has not just arrived in our industry – it’s accelerating. The time for waiting to see is over.
I’ll end with one of the most compelling quotes a visionary panelist delivered early on Day One when talking about mastering today’s challenges along with the future of contingent staffing: “Don’t be trapped by the technology you currently have in place when strategizing on your contingent workforce program.”
To me, this sums it up well.
If you have questions, we have answers.
Jeff Mike
Managing Director, Customer Strategy and Value, Flextrack
Jeff Mike works closely with HR, Procurement and IT leaders to design extended workforce ecosystems that fuel and future-proof enterprise talent strategies. Jeff brings over 16 years of experience leading HR functions, along with six years leading global HR- and workforce-related research, to combine the best thought leadership, business practices, and platform technology into purpose-built solutions.
