[Nikki Williams: 00:04.4] Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for What We’re Watching – Contingent Workforce Trends in 2025. Before we get started today, a couple of housekeeping items to run through. Today’s presentation is being recorded and in listen- only mode. A copy of the recording and the slides will be sent to everyone who registered within a few days or of this event. If you have any questions throughout the session, please do use the Questions Panel of GoTo Webinar to submit them and we’ll try to answer as many of them as we can during the discussion in the allotted time that we have. If we’re unable to answer any of your questions during this time, we’ll follow up with you via email to get you an answer to the question. And when you exit today’s webinar, you’ll see a brief three question survey pop up. We appreciate you just taking a couple minutes to give us some feedback on how you thought the session went. Now it is my pleasure to introduce you to our speakers for today, starting with our panelists. Julie O’Keefe, Chief Executive Officer with Adaptive Workforce Solutions. She’s a highly accomplished leader with 20 years of expertise in healthcare workforce management. She has collaborated with some of the nation’s most prominent healthcare institutions successfully integrating third party software technologies and workforce management tools to drive operational excellence. Next, we have Nichole Flamm, Senior HR Technology Consultant, Project Management with Atrium. She serves as the Senior HR Technology Consultant and leads Atrium’s Talent Technology team with a focus on building strategic partnerships with leading talent technology providers. She guides clients and prospects through the critical process of technology vetting and selection. Nichole is dedicated to driving continuous improvement by identifying and implementing technology enhancements that streamline processes and boost efficiencies for both internal and external teams. Cindy Sullivan, Executive Director, Public Sector of CAI. Cindy has 30 years’ experience in service delivery primarily to public sector clients and over 15 years’ experience in implementing and managing complex enterprise workforce management programs, including full-service MSP programs. Cindy’s areas of expertise span public sector workforce management, project services and solution delivery, and procurement services. And finally, our moderator for today, Dawn Kasab, Director of VMS Partnerships with VectorVMS. She has over 20 years in the industry including a background in technology with global experience in setting up and managing partner programs. She’s applying that expertise to her role of growing and expanding partnerships at VectorVMS, and with that I’m going to pass it over to Dawn to get our discussion started for today.
[Dawn Kasab: 03:07.4] Great. Thank you, Nikki. Appreciate it and thank you all for attending today. We are super excited to have this amazing group of partners with us to join us in this roundtable discussion. So, we have a series of questions, as Nikki mentioned. Please feel free to pop some questions in there if you have specifics. But to start, how is your organization using Direct Sourcing in their program today? There are many different scenarios to this question. It seems like everyone has a unique approach. Julie, starting with you, how are you guys using this today?
[Julie O’Keefe: 03:46.5] Hi everybody. Well, I think Adaptive leverages Direct Sourcing to enhance workforce flexibility. Particularly where we’re seeing some interest is in the per diem assignments, shift based type work and then internal float pools with our healthcare customers. By utilizing a shared platform, our hospitals and healthcare customers are looking at Direct Sourcing to streamline staffing, ensuring that they can fill quick critical roles while reducing dependency on third party staffing agencies. And to your point, Dawn, yes, Direct Sourcing is a fairly new approach in our healthcare industry. And I think in our industry as a whole, there’s definitely different types of models out there. And also, I’m finding some challenges in implementing such a platform as it relates to sharing staff across multiple entities that are not associated with another. We have a lot of hospital staffing associations, state associations that are looking to try and pull together hospitals that could build a shared resource pool where they’re attracting talent directly versus going through an outside entity. Some of the challenges that we’re seeing in that model is there’s a lot of misclassification of 1099 contractors. So that’s definitely something that you need to be careful about how you approach that. Also, overtime – when you’re sharing a pool of people and that person goes into overtime, how does that affect your rates? But I definitely see it being a very valuable tool in 2025.
[Dawn Kasab: 05:22.3] Great, thank you so much for that perspective. Nichole, how are you using this today?
[Nichole Flamm: 05:28.6] Yeah, so a little differently than what Julie had shared. Atrium was an early adopter of Direct Sourcing. Even think back to the days before it was formally called Direct Sourcing- think contingent RPO. And we have several programs ranging from those fully mature and established programs with robust talent communities, as well as some new Gen-1 programs, a few Gen-2 programs, and even some programs that have started in the US and expanded into other regions. With that, we support both vendor-neutral Direct Sourcing programs and some embedded Direct Sourcing programs where Atrium is the MSP and curator. Both of those models, we’ve seen different benefits and again, it really just comes down to what makes sense for the individual client. More recently, what I’m seeing and what our teams are seeing is Direct Sourcing curation being broken out from that EOR service offering, so we can pair and mix and match and develop these truly custom programs, and we’re here to support both of those. Flipping to the program build – With our mature programs, we are continuously optimizing talent pools to ensure they’re made up of quality candidates. We have this philosophy where it’s more quality over quantity. As you ramp up those Direct Sourcing programs, obviously you try to build out your talent communities and talent pools and get to a really great number, but then also once you hit that full program maturity, you need to take a step back and evaluate. Is everyone here making sense? Are they a good fit? Are they still interested? Which is where some of those recruitment marketing initiatives are really important for keeping that talent engaged and also keeping them up to date with the latest and greatest. And even flipping to like a GDPR perspective, making sure that they have the ability to opt out of being in that talent community. Let’s say they joined at a point where they were actively looking for roles and now, they have taken a perm position and they’re not interested in temp anymore. So, just making sure that they have the ability to stay engaged with that talent community and pool.
[Dawn Kasab: 08:06.5] Great, thank you for that. And so again, different perspective, right? And I believe, Cindy, you also have a different perspective on how Direct Sourcing is being managed.
[Cindy Sullivan: 08:18.0] Yes, when I first saw this, and I don’t know what everyone on the call thought, I do see confusion in the marketplace related to Direct Sourcing and its definition, it can mean a few different things. It sounds like if we’re going with the definition of Direct Sourcing being a curated, ready to deploy talent pool where we’re leveraging the client’s brand to have their own private community of curated talent, in that case, we’re using talent marketing, curation, recruiting, payroll, technology. It can be good for companies that can make a commitment to source a certain volume and type of role – Good for repeat hires. I do think that companies are looking at omnichannel talent acquisition strategies. They’re asking for next generation MSPs. And of course, these are all things that our contingent workforce practice is also interested in.
[Dawn Kasab: 09:29.8] Great, thank you all.
[Nikki Williams: 09:31.7] And Dawn, we did have a question from the audience related to Direct Sourcing here. It seemed that AI, Direct Sourcing were all the rage at the beginning of 2024, but there’s also been a hesitancy to actually implement these in contingent labor programs. Panelists, have you seen a similar trend, or do you anticipate that this may change this year?
[Julie O’Keefe:09:55.7] Well, I’ll start. I would agree with that challenge. Because as we’re all saying, it’s kind of defined a little differently. You have to get engagement across these hospitals. A lot of it, like Cindy was saying, is how do we make sure that we’re building these talent pools where we’re engaging people and we’re keeping people and it’s a collaborative effort. And so, we are seeing some things out in the market where they start to launch, but then they don’t have the customers really engaging in the program or they don’t have the tools that are going out and aggregating and pulling those candidate engagements into the right platform.
[Cindy Sullivan: 10:37.3] Yeah, I think what we’ve been seeing is about 30% company adoption, some flavor of Direct Sourcing. We’re also seeing that approximately 40% of companies in 2025 are considering it or thinking about it or looking at it for their roadmap. So, I think we’ll have to wait and see. We’ll just see next year. I’ll have to come back and take a look at our predictions and see where we land.
[Nichole Flamm: 11:08.9] Yeah, and to jump off of what Cindy’s shared and what Julie had referenced earlier, is you need to find those champions of Direct Sourcing at your company if you feel it’s something that could be beneficial to your contingent workforce program. Going out and finding SMEs and business leaders and really sharing the benefits of a Direct Sourcing model and also having the curation team there to support with change management. But again, it really comes down to finding your champions to back up the start of a Direct Sourcing program. And even if it’s a Gen-2 program, those ones that didn’t launch, looking at, where do you need program buy in? Because without that, Direct Sourcing is ultimately not going to be successful.
[Julie O’Keefe: 12:01.0] And if I could just add, one of the concerns from our customers is one of the reasons they want to implement a Direct Sourcing platform is to get away from agency placements, depending on agencies. But what you’re finding in some of these platforms is they’re actually owned by a staffing company. So, our customers are concerned that here they are building this database of these people that they’re actually curating for themselves, but the technology that they’re using is owned by a staffing company, and that staffing company is coming in and now posting other positions. So, it’s really about how to really control that talent pool.
[Dawn Kasab: 12:44.1] Thank you all again, great perspectives. All a little bit different, but that just is kind of the nature of what we’re seeing in Direct Sourcing today. I think our next question is talking about AI. This is the hot topic, right? I feel like this has been the hot topic, but definitely the one that everyone is talking about. How are you approaching it in your organization and with your client program? Nichole, how is Atrium today embracing this new concept of AI?
[Nichole Flamm: 13:18.7] Yeah, AI is super exciting. You cannot go very far without hearing about AI in your day-to-day life. Atrium, however, is taking a people-first, technology-enabled stance across all of our programs just to support our applicant and client-centric philosophies that Atrium was founded on. We know that technology is critical to running a successful and modern program, and tech is changing so fast. So, we look to our in-house automation and development teams and to our tech partners to ensure that that we have partners like Vector to support our programs in the tech space. Our in-house team has developed our own ask Atrium AI that operates similarly to ChatGPT, and that’ll support our recruitment and operation teams. We also have found AI to be a force multiplier for our staffing team by engaging partner techs like conversational AI to help with high volume and repeatable roles. And then on the contingent workforce side, our CWS division, we look to AI to support job posting optimization, ensuring that job descriptions are robust and not too wordy, just for optimization and SEO, but also making sure that they’re phrased in an inclusive manner because we look to be compliant in everything that we’re doing. The team also uses AI matching for candidate curation in the Direct Sourcing space, inviting those top talent matches to apply for new roles, and we’re also starting to see that in the VMS space. So, to help our MSP program leads go through and sort through candidates and see those top matches and obviously all of this is kept in mind with compliance as the focus of what we’re doing here at Atrium, and we need to make sure that what we’re doing is staying compliant with each individual region. We see places like New York and California are extremely stringent. EMEA has very strict AI laws. So, we look to our HR and compliance teams to help support that.
[Dawn Kasab: 15:51.6] Great, thank you. So again, I’m sure there’s lots of different perspectives on how each organization is embracing this topic. Cindy, what are you guys doing today?
[Cindy Sullivan: 16:04.4] Yeah. Similar to Nichole, CAI was an early adopter of AI. We have an AI dedicated team that sits within our IT organization. We have functioning AI data and applications that are in production now. We’re using it really at an initial operational level within our workforce practice for things like job description creation, concept explanation, learning resources, information extraction and summary. So, there’s functionality within Vector VMS. We’re piloting, which I’m super excited about, a couple of use cases around project services and that rapid candidate review, and I have a very lengthy backlog of ideas that are in prioritization status that I’m just waiting for the team to get to. We are seeing AI in every RFP response and we’re including it in our client program roadmaps. All of the trend reports have AI focused themes. There’s heavy talk and interest and I think programs in 2025 are going to figure out how AI can be used to reduce costs and help with legal and regulatory compliance. I think that’ll be kind of an easy focus area.
[Dawn Kasab: 17:37.5] Great, thank you.
[Julie O’Keefe: 17:38.0] At Adaptive, one of the things I think we’re most noted for with our customer base is our customer service and our high touch. We probably didn’t adopt it as quickly as Cindy and Nichole, but we do use it internally and externally with our customers. We use AI driven efficiency tools like ChatGPT to assist in drafting our bids, improving client communications, streamlining marketing efforts, and allowing for more strategic and personalized communication. So, that’s been very, very beneficial. I’m sure we’ve all been sitting there going, how do we say this? And then all of a sudden you just put it into a technology tool and you’re like, wow, that’s way better than how I could have done it. So, I’m definitely seeing some improvements there. On our client programs, AI is starting to play a very pivotal tool in our Direct Sourcing platforms. We actually engage with other Direct Sourcing technology platforms that actually can integrate with VectorVMS. VectorVMS has been a great partner for us on the VMS side, but when we’re looking at building talent pools that require scheduling in healthcare it’s all about speed to delivery, right? I mean, you’ve got to have a nurse, you’ve got to have a nurse tomorrow. And so, I think some of the vital roles that AI is playing in that platform is intelligent candidate matching. AI helps with analyzing resumes, matching candidates quickly to job descriptions and improving placement accuracy and efficiency. And some of the tools that we utilize, when that person applies for that position or they want to join this particular talent pool, the AI will go out and start interacting directly with that candidate. It’s holding that engagement until we can get them fully processed and into that talent pool. So very, very promising.
[Dawn Kasab: 19:49.7] Great. Thank you. Great discussion. And as we can see, everybody uses it and is managing it a little bit differently within their organizations. Technology as a whole – We’ve been talking about Direct Sourcing, AI, and it’s going to continue to evolve. And I know some of you have already mentioned how you’re managing it within, but it’s a huge chunk of time and effort. What is your approach to adopting it or how are you implementing, not just maybe the two things we’ve talked about, but really any technology? There’s so much out there today and it’s a lot on organizations. Cindy, how are you guys managing this today?
[Cindy Sullivan: 20:36.4] Yeah, technology is evolving, and we’ve been meeting with our tech partners to lean in to their 2025 roadmaps. And technology needs to evolve because workforce management is becoming more complex. As companies expand the usage of temporary laborers, they’re having varying approaches to workforce strategic management and contracts. I think it’s ideal if the tech platform can be the single source of truth for all the workforce data to be able to produce accurate, reliable, advanced analytics and reporting. To that point, we’re seeing more reporting capabilities and investments made for ease of integration. I think the integration piece, we’re going to see more of that this year. We’re being asked for more of that this year. I’m also seeing this increase in building tailored user experience, which is exciting. Simplicity, streamlined processes, promotion of self service, we’re empowering those stakeholders. We need quick and nimble workflow builds so that we can do this and still support agility within the programs. I think in 2025, CAI is looking to incorporate complementary processes, agents, accelerators into our core solution framework where it adds value to the clients.
[Dawn Kasab: 22:16.0] Great, thank you for that. Appreciate all that detail. Julie, what about Adaptive? How are you guys managing this today?
[Julie O’Keefe: 22:23.5] Well, we’re not a technology company. We really operate more as a consultant to our customers. So, it’s very difficult to manage multiple technologies. We take a very structured and strategic approach to adopting new technology in our company. We need to make sure that it aligns well with our goals and will ultimately enhance workforce efficiency. Our primary goal on the technologies is the ability to streamline recruitment, optimize candidate sourcing and screening, and integrate seamlessly with existing tools, whether that be our existing tools or our customers’ existing tools because every customer is different. And what we’re seeing is that our customers really kind of want something that’s either going to integrate seamlessly with the tools that they’re already using, albeit a timekeeping system like UKG, or it could be a Workday system that they’re utilizing. We’re about trying to bring the right technology to the table, and some of the key considerations in adopting certain technologies is again, looking at efficiency and integration, user experience like Cindy just mentioned, and accessibility, making sure that, we’re evaluating the mobile capabilities and ease of use for both the clients, the workers and us, and then also looking at cost and support structures, which are very, very important, reviewing the pricing structure, making sure that that makes sense for our customers as well as it makes sense for us. The ongoing support that each technology platform is going to offer and then the customer service to ensure a seamless adoption and experience. So, that’s how we approach it.
[Dawn Kasab: 24:07.8] Thank you. And as we can see it’s different for everybody and it’s a lot to take on as an organization. Nichole, how’s Atrium managing this?
[Nichole Flamm: 24:19.0] Yeah, so echoing Julie’s sentiments on everything that Atrium is doing is focused on optimization and enhancements to the program. Obviously, it doesn’t make sense to switch out tech all the time, but when we do, we want to be mindful about it. Which is exactly why my Talent Technology team is here to support Atrium and all of our clients. We have monthly sessions with our tech partners to ensure that we know the latest and greatest of the enhancements they’re making to their individual tech, and then once we decide to enable any of those enhancements, we’ll partner with Atrium’s Strategic Initiatives Team to look at developed testing processes and customized change management strategies and communication plans to make sure that we have the buy-in and support of our individual teams. Obviously, none of this can happen without their support. We want to make sure they have all of the background and materials they need to make sure that each of those updates are beneficial for their team. And if they are, great! How? Are there any additional pieces that might be needed to make something beneficial? And if not now, then when or what would you need to make this a benefit to your team? Outside of our current tech partners, we’re also just staying up to date with the up-and-coming technologies. Looking to our partners and conferences to have collaboration moments to see what changes should we be looking forward to – “Hey, we heard of this really great startup. Have you heard of them?” And just trying to stay up to date because tech changes so fast. But we want to be very mindful about how we are making those changes, if any.
[Dawn Kasab: 26:21.8] Great, thank you again. Sorry, go ahead, Nikki.
[Nikki Williams: 26:26.8] I was just going to say, we did have another question from the audience here. It really ties back more to AI, but I’m hearing a lot of things from all of you that kind of speaks to this a little bit. Have you had any difficulties figuring out ways to leverage AI in your programs or for clients that doesn’t seem like a replacement for the human touch that an MSP offers? This person who submitted the question says they’ve seen others struggle with the overall messaging and rollout due to that.
[Dawn Kasab: 27:05.7] Great, thank you. Cindy, Julie, Nichole, any thoughts on that?
[Nichole Flamm: 27:11.9] Yeah, I can jump in. I think it is a challenge because at the end of the day it’s a balance, which is why we feel so strong, and I think Cindy and Julie and most people would agree tech is here to support and obviously that comes with slow rolling certain features like that matching of your submitted candidates from your suppliers in a program. Obviously, that could have legal consequences, and it could not have legal consequences today, but it might have tomorrow, so it has to be something that you are committed to staying current on and thinking on your toes and just being really adaptive.
[Cindy Sullivan: 27:59.9] You know, I paused because I was trying to understand the question. Was the question “How are we seeing AI where it is or is not replacing someone?”
[Nikki Williams: 28:14.0] How are you figuring out ways to leverage it without replacing the human touch?
[Cindy Sullivan: 28:19.6] Oh, the human touch. I was thinking actually people. Yeah, I think we’re using it now, and even the things that we’re piloting – it’s operational in nature. We still have the client facing touch. We still have the candidate. I’m seeing a lot of AI, I’m seeing demos around recruiting, and I can see that replacing human interaction, the sourcing. I think where we’ve been successful is just being able to get clear information faster and then trying to analyze data sets very quickly also, so that we can make decisions off of it. And then again, some of the things we’re piloting right now would take that a step further, again taking data sets, and then a way to organize those and then serve those up to our teams or even take it a step further out to the client to support some of the self-service initiatives we’re doing this year.
[Julie O’Keefe: 29:46.0] I would say that in the healthcare space it’s critical that we have a clear separation from the human touch and what technology is providing. For example, it’s a highly competitive industry, healthcare, we have a nursing shortage that’s been going on since I started back in 2008 in the healthcare industry. I think to Cindy’s point, it does help us engage faster. But then you still need that human touch to make sure that you’re connecting with that person, you’re connecting with your managers. And also, on the compliance side is critical because anyone can upload a document, but are you really going to have somebody making sure that they’re verifying that that document, that credential is actually accurate? There’s only so much that technology can do, and so we’re really great about creating workflows so that we know when the technology stops and then when the human interaction needs to begin and making sure that we’re ahead of that curve, so we don’t lose the talent that we’re trying to curate.
[Nichole Flamm: 30:52.5] Yeah. I think something unique to what Julie and Cindy had shared is, hesitantly, Atrium has decided to engage a conversational AI for those high-volume roles. When you get 200 to 300 applicants on a position, having a conversational AI is able to help a recruiter filter through all of those candidates at a faster rate. And also, that person feels that they were engaged with, and it also gives them that level of, “I didn’t submit a resume and it fell into a complete black hole”. So, while at its core it might seem like this is something that is taking away the human touch, it’s actually letting our team expand the reach that they have and then they have a little bit of an opportunity to go back and re-engage with those candidates in another way.
[Dawn Kasab: 31:56.7] Great, thank you Nichole. That’s a very interesting perspective and just understanding how to make it work day-to-day and high volume. Appreciate everyone’s answer on that one. I think the next one is associated with data and making decisions rooted in data and analytics. It continues to be an important trend. Again, all of these are a little bit technology related but data is huge to everybody. So, what data will you be watching closely to help optimize your programs? And I feel like this one’s going to be a little bit different for everybody too because you’re all in a different area. So Julie, with your organization in healthcare, how are you seeing this?
[Julie O’Keefe: 32:45.1] Well, we utilize a lot of data. It’s one of the reasons why we really value the partnership with VectorVMS. They have great business analytics. We do a lot of customized reporting for our customers. We have a guaranteed savings program that we currently roll out with some large organizations where we’re constantly sending them data on their cost savings. And that’s probably the number one concern I think for most hospital and healthcare organizations right now is, “How do we save money on labor”? Some of the data points that we are carefully monitoring is our rate, our fill rates and our time to fill. How quickly are we filling the orders? It helps optimize staffing efficiency and workforce planning. Credentialing and compliance matrix are very important, ensuring that healthcare professionals meet licensing, certification and regulatory requirements. We also look at clinician engagement and satisfaction. We’re always looking at feedback from our healthcare providers. How can we utilize that data to improve patient care outcomes or how that impacts patient care? We look at how do we reduce burnout through these data analytics. Cost and overtime analysis, we do executive monthly reports with all of our customers that show their trends and spend, how much they’re spending per job title, per job type and then what is the overall cost savings that we’re delivering to our customers every month? And then also just AI-powered workforce insight tools that are using predictive analytics to forecast staffing trends and demands and then leveraging these insights so we can refine our strategies with our customers to deliver more effective staffing solutions. And I apologize if I jump off because it’s kicking me on and off.
[Dawn Kasab: 34:53.4] Cindy, from your perspective, how is CAI managing this?
[Cindy Sullivan: 34:57.9] Yeah, I have some crossover with Julie that was really interesting actually for me to listen to. We are watching all of these executive orders that are coming out and how they’re going to impact DEI and federal funded engagements, how those changes impact our programs, the field creations, the reporting needs. We’re watching return to office requests, which roles are going to be impacted, how we’re going to manage that, make sure we can deliver on what’s needed. They’re all different, all the clients are different. The skills and roles requested so that we can understand the skill base of workers and how to reutilize those. That’s something that I’m really paying attention to this year. Maybe I can use AI for that, we’ll see. But in this continuing challenging labor market, that’s something I’d like to us to focus on this year. And then like Julie said, just the skills utilized so we can track all of the trending needs, labor spend predictions, skill gaps, usage of niche and exception roles so that we can determine if we need to formally categorize any of those things.
[Dawn Kasab: 36:27.5] Great, thank you. And then Nichole, probably a little bit different perspective too in the clients that you work with.
[Nichole Flamm: 36:34.8] Yeah, it is. And to be honest, we’re looking at all of the data. While all of the metrics shared by Julie and Cindy are extremely beneficial, we’re really looking at the combination of data, especially as we go into 2025 to build and measure success and evolution of our programs. Our analytics team is combining our metrics like time to fill, conversion rates, cost savings, rehire rates to really tell a story to our clients in the Direct Sourcing space. We really look at the skills of the workers and talent as we build our talent pools based on what the individual client needs are. Do we need to add more talent in a certain skill area? And also, I’ve heard a lot about skills-based hiring over 2024 and is that a direction that the workforce is going to go maybe in the future? So, capturing those skills and the metrics on where do we need to expand our pools has been extremely important for us. On the MSP side we continuously measure vendor performance, and we look to our technologies to help build those metrics out to make sure that the best suppliers are in each of our programs. And similarly to what Cindy had shared was DEI has historically been a really important metric for our programs and specifically in our early talent space. Companies want to ensure that they have the diversity makeup to ensure they were following what was recommended previously, and obviously that’s something that is going to change as we get further into 2025. So that’s something that we’re on the lookout for, and how do we share that information if our clients still would like to capture it or is it something that we’re going to turn off completely? So, I think that’s something that is still to be determined. We’re using this all together and developing our own predictive analytics and that way we can share back with our individual clients and really have customized data and analytics to individual programs because we support in so many different spaces.
[Dawn Kasab: 39:10.8] Great, thank you so much. I appreciate that perspective. Different industries have different perspectives, but it’s great to hear how everybody is managing the data and the technologies and the AI and all of those things together. The last question we have here is a little bit of a different approach in what we’ve been talking about thus far. It kind of encompasses everything now, everything that you’ve been doing from the technology perspective and just overall, how do we make contingent workforce programs more strategic in 2025? I know that that’s always something I’ve seen in the industry that is sometimes challenging to make sure we’re at the strategic level within our clients. Nichole, starting with you, how is Atrium focusing on this and making sure your programs today stay on the strategic path?
[Nichole Flamm: 40:06.2] At the forefront, we’re listening to our clients because what they share in terms of feedback ultimately helps us determine the route that we are going to take for the year. We also have brought in senior leaders in each of their individual spaces, in the SOW space, in the Direct Sourcing space, and making sure that our teams are up to date with the current knowledge and adept and ready to pivot if necessary. I want to go back to Direct Sourcing, which I know we talked a lot about earlier, but I have to include this as an initiative for Atrium this year. We have seen a lot of benefits for our clients. If they’re not using Direct Sourcing today, how can we bring that to them and offer it as cost savings? If we have someone in an Early Talent space, we can share that Early Talent has been a great feeder to a Direct Sourcing program, especially as we see more Gen-2 programs looking for enhancements in either the tech space or the curation space. We’re also working towards Total Talent Management and helping our clients capture rogue spend in their programs. As we’re seeing these programs mature, we’re finding lots of opportunities to enhance and just continually optimize what we’re doing today.
[Dawn Kasab: 41:45.1] Great, thank you. Cindy, how are you all managing keeping your programs at the strategic level?
[Cindy Sullivan: 41:53.8] Yeah, I was thinking of how I would answer this, and I might give a different twist maybe from the client side, since Nichole gave from our side, the program side, I think if we can harness and move towards business team collaboration within our clients, if we can help promote and drive and support that between HR and procurement and other divisions, so that we can help them align priorities, we can deliver seamlessly at an enterprise level between them and then have consistent policies across the divisions and areas and within the program. I think that’s a nice strategic goal for us to focus on this year. Just trying to eliminate those siloed approaches and really enhance communication within the program, within the clients, in all of the different types of users within the program. That would be my goal.
[Dawn Kasab: 43:15.3] Great, thank you. And Julie, how is your team approaching this, this year?
[Julie O’Keefe: 43:20.9] Well, I’m going to come from the healthcare perspective, and this was a very difficult question. I really had to think about this question because our industry has really changed in the last year. The nursing shortage is still there, but it’s not as big of a concern to our hospitals or our customers anymore, but there will still be a continued pressure on costs for healthcare facilities. Right now, the pendulum is kind of swung the other way, where our hospital customers are able to hire people, where it was during COVID people were leaving their facilities to go join travel and contingent labor. The pendulum swung back a little bit the other way. I think right now for us, our focus is really on ensuring that we’re really delivering quality candidates for our customer because the contingent orders have shrunk so much in our industry, and we’re going to see that it’s going to be the same in 2025, that it’s going to flatten out. For us, I think it becomes more about making sure that we’re providing strong quality candidates to our customers on every order that we’re getting and then also on the Employer of Record side. We do a lot of payroll service or Employee of Record, which is another value add for our customers and helps streamline their process in multiple ways. I think somebody on the panel mentioned returning contingent workers, and that’s adding a lot of value and benefit. It’s still a contingent labor pool, but it’s different than going from an agency and that’s adding a lot of value for our customers. And then our healthcare clients have figured out that technology can help them hire better and manage their own float pools. So really, again, I think the strategic winners and the staffing models will be those that offer MSP services, VMS, float pool management, and then staffing analytics to help the clients manage their budget as it relates to contingent labor – That’s what we’re focused on for 2025.
[Dawn Kasab: 45:38.8] Thank you. Again, all great perspectives. A little bit different in how we approach things, which is awesome to hear how each of you are managing this in 2025. That was our last question. Nikki, I’m not sure if there are any questions out there?
[Nikki Williams: 45:54.6] We do have one question, and I’m hoping that I’m able to convey it properly. What are the thoughts on the domination of the larger organizations like Aya and being able to, as smaller agencies, compete, etc.?
[Julie O’Keefe: 46:16.0] Well, I’ll start on that one. Back in the day, I don’t know if a lot of you remember, when IT started going overseas and call centers started going overseas, well, we’re starting to see how that is changing in the healthcare space as well. A lot of recruitment is going overseas and that’s making it a lot more difficult for these bigger entities to compete because they have these really large salaries that recruiters are getting. Yet now we’re starting to see that these smaller companies are able to better compete because they don’t have these huge overhead costs because the recruiters are coming from overseas. And so that’s creating a major dynamic in our industry right now. I think that’s going to be a challenge for these big, large staffing companies where it’s a lot harder for them to change or adapt to a new scenario as it is for the more smaller agile companies.
[Dawn Kasab: 47:25.0] Thanks, Julie. Cindy, Nichole, I’m not sure if you have anything on that one. It was more towards Julie’s industry. Awesome. Nikki, are we good then with the questions out there?
[Nikki Williams: 47:41.7] We do have another question in here, and just a quick reminder to all of the attendees, you are able to use the questions panel to submit any questions that you’d like our panelists to answer. And this next one, I think is going to be really interesting for all of you here. Panelists, if you had one word to describe the state of contingent labor in your respective industries in 2025, what would you use? One word.
[Cindy Sullivan: 48:12.8] Excited, and then I’ll expand on that. I’m really hopeful for this year. There are so many changes going on. It feels like an exciting, hopeful time. We’ve been talking about AI for a couple years. We’re actually starting to see it and visualize and with these proof of concepts to test out some theories and ideas about how we can use it. Very excited about slowly trying to figure out how that can enhance our programs and our business and our profitability as we continue to navigate contingent labor management.
[Julie O’Keefe: 49:02.6] I would probably describe it as consistent. If I had a dime for every manager or CEO that I met with that tells me that they’re going to get rid of contingent labor in their organization, I would be sitting on a beach sipping margaritas right now and retired. The temporary labor market is never going to go away. We will have ebbs and flows as new technology comes on board, but being able to provide additional resources and talent, we haven’t even touched on the international market, it’s just going to always remain a consistent force for any ecosystem, for any organization. I don’t ever see it going away. So, I would describe it as consistent.
[Nichole Flamm: 49:53.9] I would describe it as personalized. I think as we’ve started to see different trends in contingent workforce, what we’re now realizing is everybody was excited to jump on those trends, and now we’re at the point where we’re personalizing those trends and customizing to an individual client or customer’s needs. What works for Cindy’s team at CAI and Julie’s team at Adaptive and what Atrium is doing is all individually customized to our client basis, even further now we’re separating what we do for each individual client. I think we are really at a point where we know what the industry is looking for, and we know what the trends are. It’s taking it a step further and personalizing it.
[Cindy Sullivan: 50:51.0] How about the Vector team? Any ideas for you?
[Dawn Kasab: 50:57.0] I like excited to be honest, Cindy. I’m new to Vector, and I’m super excited about what we have coming in 2025 and super excited about the partners and our ecosystem overall. So, I kind of agree with your excited. Like I said, I’ve only been here since October, but Vector has a lot of great things coming from AI to a great roadmap for 2025. Super excited to being able to partner with all of you and really kind of make this a great 2025.
[Nikki Williams: 51:35.5] Yeah, and I would just add on to that, Dawn. Evolving – I think would be to take from one of the questions from earlier and to your point, we’ve got a lot of exciting things coming with VectorVMS this year, and we truly value our partnerships and still even as a technology keeping it people first. We do have one other question in here that is geared towards Julie. How likely is it to expand business in healthcare through collaborations? Additionally, how challenging is it to become a vendor or supply partner with MSPs for healthcare staffing companies?
[Julie O’Keefe: 52:17.8] Well, we believe in a vendor neutral platform. We believe that when you have more vendors competing for our healthcare customers’ business, it’s going to drive down costs and increase quality. So, that’s just how we approach the market. And I think the collaboration is huge. I mean, to Nichole’s point, I probably should have said adaptable, right? Because it really is all about adapting to our customer needs and being able to customize what they’re looking for. Like I mentioned earlier, they’re figuring out the technology part. It’s now going to be more about how do we adapt to what their goals and business objectives are and then holding ourselves accountable to that. I think that the collaboration is very important, and I think that’s why our customers value our services so much, because they feel very part of it. It’s not like an Aya coming in and saying, boom, here’s how we run our customer, here’s how we run it. There’s not a lot of transparency in their programs. They tout vendor neutrality, but they’re really not vendor neutral when you’re not sharing orders or you have no transparency, or the client has no transparency to what vendors are really even supporting their organization. I think the collaboration piece is very, very key, and I think more and more of our customers in the healthcare space are becoming very, very savvy to these different models and what they’re looking for. And we’re seeing more and more requests for vendor neutral platforms. Did I answer the question? Thanks.
[Nikki Williams: 54:02.9] Yep. And another question that has come through that I think anyone who feels strongly here, I think this would be really interesting from any of your perspectives. Do you think the ongoing trends in the tech industry would help the vendors or make it a tad difficult?
[Nichole Flamm: 54:23.8] I think it’ll help the vendors. From my perspective, we’re looking at more integrated solutions, which allows for faster response times. Even in the VMS, when you have the integration to a client’s HRIS or ATS, and we’re able to get faster feedback or more direct feedback on candidate interviews or when resumes are passed up, I think that can only make a vendor stronger in their program because then they know they’re submitting the right candidates, or they get to learn a manager’s hiring style. I’m hopeful that the tech is really there to enhance and support the vendors.
[Cindy Sullivan: 55:10.5] I agree. I know that sometimes when you’re changing technology or business processes, there’s some change management that comes along with that, and that can be hard and difficult, especially when we’re all moving so quickly. But I think the enhancements that are coming allow us to have more transparency and operate better programs.
[Julie O’Keefe: 55:46.8] Yeah, I would agree. And I think the biggest challenge for our customer is when they implement technology and then they’ve got to change it out. I think one of the reasons why instead of trying to become a technology company, we want to work with our customers so that through VectorVMS we’re really able to customize exactly a VMS that’s really theirs. And it really appeals to our customers because their orders aren’t going in a system where all of their competitors orders are in. And it’s very customizable to their cost centers and their managers, and they really feel like it’s their own VMS and we white label it for our customers. It gives them that flexibility so that if they want to switch out their MSP partner, they can and they don’t have to retrain all of their managers and retrain all their vendors. There’s that kind of ownership that I think creates a lot of sense of security for our customer as it relates to the technology that we’re implementing.
[Nikki Williams: 56:53.0] Wonderful. Thank you so much. And attendees, please feel free to keep submitting your questions. We are at the top of the hour here, so I do want to just throw in a quick poll here for you all and then run through a few housekeeping items here at the end. Let me launch this here. If you would like to hear from any of our panelists today or VectorVMS, we’ll follow up with you and look forward to chatting further, answering any of your additional questions here. Thank you so much for joining us. A couple of things as you’re responding to the poll here, a link to the recorded webinar will be shared with all of you and anyone who registered but wasn’t able to attend will get that as well. When you do close out of the application today, you’ll see a survey pop up. It’s just three questions. We just want to see how we’re doing, how you felt about the webinar and if you have any additional questions or comments, we will have some contact information for you as well. Thank you all so much for joining us, and I want to personally thank all of our panelists today. It’s been wonderful to be working with you on this session. I have found it very valuable, and I hope our audience has found it very valuable. And special thanks to Dawn for moderating today. And with that, we are going to go ahead and close out today. Again, we’ll get back to you with any additional questions. Thanks so much for joining us, everybody.
[Julie O’Keefe: 58:40.7] Thanks, Nikki.
[Dawn Kasab: 58:41.9] Thank you.
[Nichole Flamm: 58:42.8] Thanks for having us.
