Direct Sourcing Archives - Page 15 of 15 - The Future of Work Exchange

Prosperity in the Future of Work: Interview with Sunil Bagai, CEO of Prosperix

Contingent Workforce Direct Sourcing Solution Providers Talent by Christopher J. Dwyer on 06/10/2021

The Future of Work is founded on change, whether that change is natural evolution or innovative progression. The world of talent and work has been changing at a rapid clip with the advent of new talent acquisition strategies, shifts in how enterprises optimize how work gets done, and the overall transformation of global business.

Crowdstaffing, a longtime market leader in digital staffing and workforce management technology, was an early pioneer with its Future of Work-driven offerings. Just recently, the company rebranded as Prosperix, a solution that aims to “fuel human, workforce, and business prosperity.” I had the opportunity to chat with the provider’s CEO, Sunil Bagai, about the rebrand, the evolution of the platform, and his outlook on the Future of Work movement.

Christopher J. Dwyer: Sunil, thanks for chatting with us. For our readers, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.

Sunil Bagai: I have over 25 years of tech experience at companies like IBM, Sun, and EMC, as well as multiple startups. I’ve been working in the talent acquisition space since 2005, and what I love most about it is the intersection between people and technology. Just like in the early days of the Internet, where hardware infrastructure was essential in providing everyone online access, I believe we are in the early stages of deploying similar infrastructure technology that will make it much easier to build and manage a workforce. We’re entering a very exciting time.

CJD: Let’s start with the big news first: Crowdstaffing has officially rebranded itself as Prosperix. Give us the lowdown on the evolution of the solution, the new brand, and what it all means.

SB: When we started Crowdstaffing, we wanted to emphasize the value of building network effects and how the power of the crowd can help in building scalable workforces. While that’s still core to what we do, we’re now inspired by a mission that’s even greater. We believe that hiring can play an instrumental role in helping businesses achieve their dreams and aspirations. Simultaneously, there is an opportunity to influence the design of the modern workforce so it can achieve a level of prosperity that hasn’t been possible in the past. With that in mind, we chose the name Prosperix to align with our long-term vision and mission of helping businesses build an extraordinary workforce and achieve outstanding outcomes.

The good news is that Crowdstaffing is not going away; It’s being transitioned into a product name for our Crowdstaffing Hiring Marketplace and Crowdstaffing VMS offerings. In addition to these core offerings, we have added new offerings to the Prosperix solutions suite, including Direct Sourcing, On-Demand Talent Pools, and a wide range of Workforce Services such as MSP, Payroll, and IC Compliance.

CJD: What strikes me as a major differentiator for Propserix is the sheer breadth of its offerings, from direct sourcing and talent pools to VMS technology.

SB: Our strategy has always been to solve the end-to-end problem of hiring and workforce management. Most clients have a very difficult time using multiple technologies. Not only does data end up living in different places, but you get a poor user experience and it’s very challenging to manage the entire workflow when you use different systems. We believe it’s better to provide a single solution that solves for all facets of workforce management, including talent branding and attraction, sourcing, candidate engagement and nurturing, applicant tracking, candidate assessments, vendor management, onboarding, and redeployment.

CJD: Why do you believe it’s so powerful to have a solution that can literally offer end-to-end workforce management functionality, from talent engagement to total workforce management?

SB: There are many advantages to an end-to-end workforce management solution. First, you simplify the hiring process substantially when you use a single technology rather than several disparate technologies. More fundamentally, you are able to access and utilize data far more effectively to achieve better hiring outcomes. For example, the best candidate can come from a supplier, an internal talent pool, or a variety of public talent pools. When you can see candidates across the entire ecosystem of hiring channels, whether it’s in your VMS, ATS, Talent Pools, etc., you can match candidates more effectively to open jobs, speeding up time to hire.

This is just the beginning. There are multiple other use cases that you can unlock, including large network effects, that are only possible when you impact the entire value chain.

CJD: We’re experiencing a much different summer than we did last year thanks to the business world somewhat returning to normalcy. How do you think the world of talent and work respond to the major shifts it experienced over the past year?

The new normal means that remote work is here to stay. Many businesses are hiring workers remotely even for core positions, especially if they are having a hard time finding talent in their local geography. To hire remote workers more effectively, businesses are requesting a more nuanced way to outline their needs, by specifying whether a position is Local Only, Remote with Local Access, Remote Only, or Offshore.

CJD: What’s the long-term vision for Prosperix?

SB: Our long-term vision is to fuel human, workforce, and business prosperity. We plan to accomplish this by developing innovative solutions that help businesses build and manage an extraordinary workforce.

An Unlimited Future: Inside PRO Unlimited’s Technology Transformation

Business Leadership Technology and Innovation by Christopher J. Dwyer on 06/07/2021

The world of talent and work seemingly reinvents itself frequently. Changes in the global economy amidst other major worldly events (including, of course, a pandemic) routinely force businesses to reimagine how they get work done. Over the past decade, the workforce management tech marketplace, which includes Vendor Management Systems (VMS), Managed Service Providers (MSP), digital staffing marketplaces, direct sourcing automation, etc. has undergone a seismic revolution alongside a shifting global talent economy. Throw in the major workforce management shifts accelerated due to a global pandemic and its economic, digital, and staffing ramifications, and, well, the position is clear: workforce management technology has to evolve just as quickly as the world around it.

Last year, veteran VMS/MSP hybrid PRO Unlimited announced that Kevin Akeroyd would join the solution as its new CEO, who immediately touted a transformative approach to the provider’s future: become a de-facto “platform” for contingent and agile workforce management.

“This workforce segment is becoming a large spend category and is now an enterprise valuation driver. Over the past 30 years, the industry has transformed from a small temp-staffing niche to a C-suite strategic priority. This shift not only includes changes within HR, talent acquisition and strategic procurement programs, but also highlights an explosion of innovation and new technology platforms like we have never seen before,” Akeroyd said. “Unfortunately, the established procurement/spend management and HCM platforms have not addressed the full contingent workforce management lifecycle. Furthermore, they are not capable of managing its complexity or harnessing the data to provide analytics and intelligence on companies’ contingent workforce segments that executives demand. The industry requires a comprehensive platform that can deliver the technology, data/analytics and managed services to optimize the full contingent workforce program. This is going to help organizations exceed both their contingent workforce goals and their broader organizational objectives. Being the platform that seamlessly interoperates with ERP, HCM, HRIS, P2P, and data and analytics systems will be paramount, and PRO Unlimited is uniquely positioned to become that holistic platform for the industry.”

Shortly after Kevin dropped by the Contingent Workforce Weekly podcast and spoke to us as part of our Future of Work Influencer series, PRO announced that it acquired rate management solution PeopleTicker, a global provider of comprehensive compensation data that relies on crowdsourced intelligent, machine learning, and data science resources. This acquisition helped burgeon PRO’s commitment to helping its users manage its workforce with a data-driven approach, allowing customers to tap into an “ocean of data.”

“To use an age-old analogy, even the best motorcycle, car, plane, rocket ship… simply is not effective if you don’t “fuel” it. And the higher quality, higher octane the fuel is, the better performing the vehicle is. Data is today’s “fuel,” said Akeroyd. “Having the highest quality, highest coverage, most up-to-date data is a mission-critical component of the platform. It fuels the software, service, and analytics/intelligence offering the Enterprise relies on today. PRO not only has the largest, broadest, most accurate first-party asset in the world, we have augmented this with third-party data partnerships, including our acquisition of data assets like PeopleTicker, the industry’s one true provider of global contingent rate data for over 160 markets across thousands of job titles. Having exclusive data, packaged with PRO’s solutions and comprehensive platform, will enable and benefit our clients immensely. And competitively, it will further differentiate PRO from our point solution competitors. Finally, data is the fundamental underpinning of all machine-based learning (MBL) and artificial intelligence (AI). We are very excited to deliver MBL/AI applications in the near future as a result of having the best, most accurate and largest training data sets on the planet.”

And, PRO Unlimited’s transformation continues today with an announcement that it has secured an exclusive partnership with Eightfold, an artificial intelligence solution that offers a multifaceted blend of technology, including talent experience management, candidate comparison and evaluation, bias prevention, and deep employee lifecycle management support via AI-led neural networks.

The new partnership has massive implications for the workforce management solutions landscape, as PRO’s exclusive union with Eightfold will allow the veteran provider the ability to “lift and shift” comprehensive total talent intelligence into its existing and forthcoming offerings. For example, Eightfold’s unique neural network-led skills data could be applied to direct sourcing initiatives to better target specific, high-expertise candidates for enterprise talent pools.

“Many organizations around the world will be hiring contingent workers ahead of the economic recovery while prioritizing areas within hiring, such as retention and D&I initiatives. However, many of these same companies do not have the technology and data in place to identify, engage and secure the best contingent talent in the world, while attaining diversity goals,” said Akeroyd. “This exclusive partnership with Eightfold aims to solve this problem with their advanced talent intelligence and our contingent workforce management platform, which also includes the world’s largest global market rate data repository. This partnership is truly a game changer for the industry as it will transform how our customers, which include some of the largest brands globally, source, develop, and redeploy their workforces while lowering costs as well as offer an unparalleled suite of diversity offerings for the contingent workforce.”

With PRO’s new Direct Sourcing and SOW Management tools on the horizon for later this quarter, the solution’s recent, aggressive moves prove that the provider is truly committed not only to its goal of being a centralized talent management platform, but also meeting the evolving requirements of the ever-changing world of talent and work.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) Lessons That We Can Learn from Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Business Leadership Talent by Christopher J. Dwyer on 04/07/2021

In early December, my wife asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Being an avid gamer, I have had my share of the “typical” games on PlayStation or Xbox, like first-person shooters or open-world role-playing adventures, so I was looking for something different. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I said, which elicited a “Isn’t that a kids game?” response from my wife.

It took a couple of months, but in due time, I was sucked into its laid back, island-living, sunny, and, most of all, relaxing, video game journeys. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a different game than what most kids or adults would play: there’s no “end boss,” no quests to fulfill, no objects or treasures to hunt, no grinding for experience points, and no enemies to shoot. It’s a spirited adventure on a tropical island that puts you, as a getaway ambassador, in control of how your island looks and feels.

Naturally, with most things in life when you’re passionate about your career, the worlds of Animal Crossing and business collided. Tom Nook (your island’s head honcho), an anthropomorphic raccoon, meets the Future of Work. Sounds weird, right? Well, after months of obsessively playing this game and, during the day (and most nights!) research and analyzing the evolving world of talent and work, I’ve found that there are major lessons to learned from Animal Crossing regarding a key Future of Work tenet: diversity, equity, and inclusion:

Your main character (which is YOU) isn’t tied down by gender or appearance. In the game, your initial setup involves picking a gender, hairstyle, facial features, clothing, etc. In most games, these initial character settings set the stage for how you build experience points, which tools you have access to, and how the game ultimately is framed from a story perspective. In Animal Crossing, your appearance or gender has no ramifications on gameplay, story, or access to in-story objectives or items. As in the real world (aka business world), no talented individual should lose access or consideration to a job role due to anything besides their skillsets and expertise.
The game encourages equity-minded collaboration with all of the island’s residents. Part of the game’s achievement center, “Nook Miles” can be used to purchase new clothes, decorations, furniture, tools, etc. Players earn miles by completing tasks, much like other video games. However, one key component in earning Nook Miles is collaborating with all of the island’s residents, including anthropomorphic camels, monkeys, cows, chickens, lizards, and more. Animal Crossing wants its players to chat with other island residents and help everyone with their tasks, missing items, etc. It’s a perfect representation of how businesses should look at the composition of its workforce: equity abound that drives collaboration between diverse groups of talent to spark innovation, growth, and discovery.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons promotes empathy-led interactions that take into account each island resident’s emotions and character-specific traits. If a character is sad, frustrated, or confused, they are marked with a specific emoji-like icon. Your character can discuss what’s wrong, help with their issues, and, most importantly, show emotional reactions that can help other island residents feel like they are heard and seen.
The game’s island ambassadorship goals are centered on building an inclusive environment. Your character’s main objective is to invite other residents to the island. You have the option to travel to various other islands, meet diverse characters, and invite them to experience your locale. There are no limitations on the types of characters that can be invited, nor are there restrictions on the “character makeup” that leader Tom Nook wants your character to build and develop. The main focus is creating an inclusive environment in which all feel welcome and at home, and, new characters often unlock new ideas, new ways of building the island, and assist your character in many modes of play. This mirrors business thinking in that leaders that promote inclusivity are more likely to build deeper teams of top-tier talent that can showcase their specialized expertise and skillsets. Inclusivity benefits the business.
The game’s foundation was borne of diversity, as its predecessor entry, New Leaf, was designed by a diverse team. Animal Crossing: New Leaf, the prequel to New Horizons, was developed by a diverse team of video game engineers. At a video game conference in 2014, game producer Katsuya Eguchi stated that the diverse team behind the entry “had an effect…communication was smoother, and the team was more social, more collaborative, more creative, and less stressed out.” Eguchi also said that having younger designers, as well as more female voices, contributed to more innovation and helping the larger team learn and realize how to make a game that would appeal to more people. This is a pure representation of why DE&I need to be core Future of Work tenets: the end result, the end business outcome, and the ultimate products and results all benefit from having deeper and more expansive voices from different cultures, genders, and backgrounds.