Rate cards have long been an important tool for enterprise-extended workforce programs. They help manage contingent staffing spend, harmonize and regulate supplier rates, encourage competitiveness among suppliers, and promote consistency in your overall program. These cards can also help navigate compliance requirements and social trends in the extended workforce such as pay parity and pay equity. 

Rate cards are useful, but they are not enough by themselves. In a dynamic labor market and ongoing talent shortages, pay rates can be highly volatile. Fortunately, a number of market intelligence and technology organizations have solutions that provide data on supply, demand, and pay rates that can be leveraged to better optimize hiring for their extended workforce programs. Most extended workforce programs have incorporated some of this market intelligence to help in the creation of rate cards and to provide insights about availability of talent. 

Refreshing the rate card once or twice a year, however, won’t help you keep up with changes in pay rates, candidate expectations, and what your competition is doing to land the best talent. What would have landed a strong candidate a few months ago, last time the rate card was updated, may not be enough now. In order to optimize the return on your labor market intelligence data, you need to incorporate this data into your talent acquisition process. 

An Ocean of Data: How Do You Navigate It?

Digital transformation and dynamic labor markets have produced unprecedented volumes of labor market data. In addition to the examples mentioned above, labor market providers also offer data such as local hiring trends to help pinpoint targeted hires and skills data that project availability and adjacency to predict which candidates might fit very specific needs. They also provide a wide variety of macroeconomic data that can inform hiring strategies such as vacancy rates and job changes among worker populations. 

While most vendor management systems (VMS) incorporate rate card data into the requisition and hiring process, this additional labor market data is not always available when it’s time to make a decision about opening a requisition or making a hire. The best way to make this data available to hiring managers is by directly integrating active market data into the hiring process. 

Combining Rate Card Data With Automation and Decision Intelligence 

Most organizations have automated the talent acquisition workflows. The automation of these processes and incorporation of this data in a just-in-time manner requires easy integrations from a number of market intelligence providers. It also requires custom low-code or no-code workflows to ensure that exactly the right data is provided at exactly the right time without costly and complex integrations. 

Perhaps just as importantly, extended workforce program managers need to educate their hiring managers on what the data means and how to use it to make their decisions. In addition, this data needs to be compared regularly with rate card data to ensure maximum spend controls without sacrificing access to candidates or time to productivity metrics that are so important to the effectiveness of extended workforce programs. 

By putting rate cards together with enhanced labor market data through a VMS solution that delivers decision intelligence and insights when the hiring managers need it, which is in their regular workflows, extended workforce programs can feel confident about this balance.