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Companies relying on a temporary or contingent workforce need an efficient, focused staffing approach. After all, it becomes quite difficult to manage your staffing process at the same time you are running your business. In this scenario, partnering with managed staffing service provider offers a useful solution.
Leading MSPs also understand the importance of leveraging a vendor management system (VMS) as part of any client solution. These tools provide a host of benefits to both staffing MSPs and their business clients. They provide the scalability and visibility for companies to ensure they right-size their staff for any situation.
Introduction to Vendor Management Systems (VMS)
Let’s provide a quick introduction to vendor management systems and their role in effective contingent workforce management. Businesses and MSPs leverage VMS tools to manage various aspects of a temporary workforce. These applications handle everything from recruiting to payroll, duties typically managed by an HR team. As such, businesses with a large temporary workforce and small HR team especially benefit from using a VMS.
Modern VMS applications automate a variety of staffing-related processes, including résumé analysis and candidate matching. These AI-powered features greatly improve the efficiency of any contingent workforce management effort. From expense tracking to virtual timesheets and more, VMS tools help businesses become more efficient and successful.
The best VMS tools also provide meaningful visibility into a business’s contingent workforce. Strong reporting and analytics functionality helps leadership make data-driven talent acquisition decisions. Any business relying on temporary talent needs to explore partnering with a staffing MSP currently leveraging VMS applications.
The Role of Managed Service Providers in Staffing
As highlighted above, many businesses simply don’t have the time to engage in time consuming staffing efforts. However, if they rely on temporary employees, these staffing efforts ultimately become a regular occurrence. Spending too much time analyzing résumés and vetting candidates keeps managers from actually running their business.
Managed staffing service providers handle these duties for their clients. This obviously provides meaningful benefits to their clients, especially companies with large contingent workforces. In addition to these other advantages, business managers simply gain more time to run their company. Partnering with a staffing MSP allows companies with contingent workers the ability to improve their operations and profitability.
Key Benefits of Integrating a Vendor Management System
Now, let’s examine a few of the most important advantages of integrating a VMS application for contingent workforce management. Use this information to understand these benefits as it informs choosing a managed staffing service provider for your organization. You want a partner that fully understands the capabilities provided by the industry-leading vendor management systems.
Streamlined Contingent Workforce Management
One of the biggest benefits of using a VMS application involves making your contingent workforce management process more efficient. These tools provide an easier way to keep tabs on your entire team, no matter their location. It informs your planning process, including budgeting and determining the ideal size of your workforce.
Simply stated, using a VMS tool lets you manage your workforce much more efficiently than using a manual process. Use that extra time for more value-added tasks, like expanding your business or finding new projects. This highlights one of the most important advantages of partnering with a staffing MSP.
Enhanced Visibility and Transparency
As noted earlier, the best VMS tools provide strong reporting and data analytics capabilities. This helps your managers leverage data-driven decision making to improve your operations. The enhanced visibility ultimately improves your ability to manage your temporary workers.
Additionally, note that these tools provide valuable information on a real-time basis. This helps you and your managers quickly react to any issues before they become problems. It ultimately lets you stay nimble as an organization, an important point for businesses with contingent workers. When meeting with potential staffing MSP partners, pay close attention to their VMS tool of choice.
Improved Compliance and Risk Management
Businesses with locations in multiple regions also need to deal with a variety of regulatory compliance issues. Managing this process requires an inordinate amount of time from company leadership. This provides another example of an important benefit gained from a partnership with a staffing MSP.
The best VMS systems simply make it easier for businesses to stay in compliance. This becomes especially important when you consider the constantly changing labor laws across the country. After all, no business wants to incur fines and tax penalties for being out of compliance.
Cost Savings and Efficiency Gains
With improved efficiency comes significant cost savings, a healthier bottom line, and higher profitability and growth. These significant benefits become easier to achieve when using a VMS for the business’s contingent workforce management efforts. The entire talent acquisition process becomes more efficient when leveraging a modern tool to automate time-consuming tasks.
When meeting with potential MSP partners, deeply explore how their VMS improves efficiency. As noted earlier, it touches everything from recruiting to managing payroll and compliance. Their answers to these questions ultimately help you make an informed decision on the right partner for your business.
Better Supplier Performance and Accountability
Notably, managed staffing service providers leverage a variety of talent suppliers, ensuring a diverse candidate pool. You and your MSP partner need to ensure each supplier provides the high standard of temporary talent your business needs. The enhanced visibility of a top-shelf VMS provides the means to measure the performance of your talent suppliers.
As a result, you easily compare the different talent suppliers, allowing you to work more with the best providers. When a supplier knows their performance is being compared with their competition, they simply perform better. This accountability remains an important contributor to having the top-shelf talent you need for successful operations.
Simplified Procurement and Billing Processes
Once again, recruiting and managing a diverse contingent workforce requires an inordinate effort from companies with small HR teams. The includes everything from the process of procuring the necessary talent to handling the various billing and tax processes. These large administrative tasks effectively overburden businesses who need to focus more on efficient operations.
Leveraging a VMS mitigates this burden for your HR team and managers, allowing them to focus on your internal operations. The best vendor management application suites also improve the accuracy of these important tasks, reducing the risk of mistakes. Needless to say, spend significant time vetting each potential MSP partner’s VMS tool of choice to understand their capabilities.
Scalability and Flexibility in Workforce Management
Companies with large contingent workforces obviously need to stay nimble, with the flexibility to scale their operations on demand. Partnering with a staffing MSP and their VMS provides you the scalability to thrive no matter the business scenario. When you need to quickly add talent to complete a project on time, these applications definitely make a difference.
Simply stated, your business probably lacks the time and resources to engage in these critical staffing efforts. As a result, it becomes difficult to achieve the flexibility you need in a competitive job market. Fostering success ultimately requires a highly scalable workforce; a top-shelf VMS makes that possible.
Choosing the Right Vendor Management System and Your MSP
Making the right decision on a VMS (and MSP) requires a discerning effort similar to any important staffing process. Spend time vetting each potential partner as well as their chosen VMS application suite. Analyze the feature set of each application, paying close attention to how well it integrates with your current apps. A tool with superior performance, especially with a large contingent workforce, remains essential.
Of course, the reasons for partnering with a certain staffing MSP include other factors beyond their VMS. You want a staffing partner with significant experience in your company’s business sector. Strong alignment and an understanding of your company culture helps them find the right candidates for your team. Still, a top-shelf VMS ultimately facilitates their ability to find you the right temporary talent as quickly as possible.
Maximizing Benefits with a Vendor Management System
In the end, your business needs fast access to talented contingent professionals to forge consistent growth and success. Managing this need using an internal staffing process ultimately overburdens your HR team and company leadership. This situation requires partnering with an experienced staffing MSP leveraging a top-shelf vendor management system.
As a result, your business gains the talent scalability it needs to thrive no matter the situation. It also provides the visibility to track your entire contingent workforce. You enjoy more time to actually manage projects and grow your organization! It’s ultimately the right strategy for any company relying on contingent professionals.
Partner with the Staffing Industry’s MSP of Choice: Anserteam!
If you want to the find the right managed staffing service provider for your business, connect with Anserteam. We boast efficient processes for finding the talent you need in a fast and cost-effective manner. No matter your current workload, leverage our skills and expertise to keep your operations running smoothly. A member of the Alliance of National Staffing and Employment Resources and the WBENC Staffing Agencies, we look forward to hearing from you.
