[00:00:00] Brian McGuire: Welcome to the Direct Sourcing Forum Spring Webinar. I know it doesn’t feel like spring everywhere, but hopefully it’s just around the corner. This is our 17th quarterly webinar. We registered 140 attendees today, representing 12 countries. So, I want to say welcome to our international guests, thank you for joining us. If you’re new to the forum, Direct Sourcing is the digital transformation of staffing. It uses your brand to attract talent to your organization, and it leverages AI to match talent to your open jobs, and it helps you build a thriving talent community that’s actually an asset over the long term. The forum itself is a consortium of providers and practitioners, and we came together to help define what we consider to be an exciting and disruptive approach to staffing and talent acquisition. On today’s webinar, we’re going to talk about the outcome of a special project that we all worked on together. Last June, we at TalentBelt invited industry leaders from AMS, Atrium, ICON, Humanforce, Raise, TalentNet, and Tundra to come together to create an RFP template for our industry. We all shared information about RFP templates and RFPs that we had worked on in the past and we said, you know what? We think there’s an opportunity to do better here. We worked on this for the better part of six months and today we’ve come together to share some key insights from our recent work together in collaboration. As a special bonus for folks who joined the webinar today, we will share a copy of that template with you so that you’d be able to use it for future RFPs if you choose to do so. Before we get going here, I do want to mention we are going to be recording the webinar so links will be available on demand. Also, audience members will be able to chat with our panelists. And finally, we do plan to launch a poll about halfway through the webinar today, so please take a minute to respond to those questions. It helps us determine what we would cover in the future. Now let’s go ahead and meet our guests. Let’s start with Mark today.
[00:02:35] Mark Jones: Thank you, Brian. I’m glad to be here. My name is Mark Jones, and I lead AMS’s contingent labor business across North America. AMS is one of the world’s leading talent providers, focusing on providing great talent across a range of services, MSP, Direct Sourcing, RPO and consulting. I’m glad to be here.
[00:02:54] Brian McGuire: Many thanks, Mark. Thanks for joining us. Jessica?
[00:02:58] Jessica Malachowski: Hello, Jessica Malachowski here, VP of Direct Sourcing at Atrium. Atrium is a woman owned, WBENC-certified company celebrating 30 years this year. I have almost that many years of total experience, half of it on the agency side, the other half on the corporate side, leading global talent acquisition teams across a variety of companies, including some Fortune 500 companies. Excited to be here. A unique perspective, maybe from both sides of the RFP experience.
[00:03:31] Brian McGuire: Thank you for joining us, Jessica. Appreciate it. Patrick?
[00:03:35] Patrick Aubry: Thanks, Brian. Patrick Aubrey, I am the Director of Client Engagement at ICON. We are also a WBENC and WeConnect certified women owned business based down in Houston, Texas. We’ve been around for 27 years and do a little bit of everything when it comes to contingent labor. I’ll be speaking specifically about EOR and payroll today as part of this group. It’s good to be here.
[00:04:02] Brian McGuire: Thanks for joining us, Patrick. Appreciate it. Tim?
[00:04:05] Tim Rhodes: Hey, everybody. Tim Rhodes. I lead sales for Raise in the U. S., based out of Houston. Really happy to be here. Good to see my colleagues here today and look forward to a great discussion.
[00:04:17] Brian McGuire: Thanks for joining us, Tim. And last but not least, John?
[00:04:21] John Poore: Hi, I’m John Poore. I’m the Vice President of Enterprise Solutions for Tundra. We’re a 20-year-old, staffing, direct source curation, and RPO provider based out of Toronto, Canada, and Austin, Texas. Like everybody else, excited to spend some time with my peer group today.
[00:04:40] Brian McGuire: Welcome, John. Thanks for being here. And my name is Brian McGuire. I lead sales at Talent Belt. We help businesses plan, roll out, and optimize best-in-class Direct Sourcing programs. Let’s go ahead and get started with our discussion today. First, what basics do buyers need to plan a successful RFP? Who wants to take that?
[00:05:05] Jessica Malachowski: I’ll take that one. It’s a nice, easy one, Brian – soft pitch. First off, what you need is a best-in-class RFP template designed by maybe some of the brightest within the market in the industry – maybe some of the people on this call. As an added bonus, you might look at a readiness checklist, which is also part of our template. That checklist covers things and reminds people about the basics, such as making sure you’ve got objectives. What are the expected outcomes of the RFP? What are the program benefits? The why – why are we doing this? Those are some of the things that it really covers. It also gets into scope. What are the business units that are going to be covered and included? What are the locations? The titles? Making sure that we don’t have scope “creep”, as we like to talk about that. We want to stay away from that wherever possible. You need to make sure you’ve got the right stakeholders involved. That means you need an executive sponsor, someone that has influence, decision, authority. You need to include HR, TA, IT, compliance, procurement, touches of a variety of areas. You need to get the right people involved, stakeholders, and keep their engagement. And then one other big thing is data, and I really think that this is important. You need to have at least one good year of robust data, spend headcount, so you can start thinking about things like SLAs and KPIs, making sure that everybody is on the same page and knows what “good” looks like. I think those are some of the basics, but the template in the checklist is neat.
[00:06:48] Brian McGuire: Yeah, great job teeing up the work that we did. I appreciate that. And for the folks out there listening, Jessica, you spent the bulk of your career on the buy side, so you have been the person as an executive sponsor or even working on the RFPs and pulling this information together. We appreciate hearing really from both sides of the table in one answer. So, thank you for that. Let’s take another question here. How does an RFP contribute to the overall success of a program? Patrick?
[00:07:25] Patrick Aubry: I’ll take that. If you think about an RFP, an RFP is really the chance for buyers to really engage in, granted, they’re usually written, but it allows the buyers and all of us providers to really engage in a really meaningful conversation about what they’re looking to achieve. If you think about, and this is a little tongue in cheek, but if you think about generic questions really will get you generic answers. The goal of an RFP is to really be as transparent as you possibly can, like Jessica had mentioned. What are you looking to accomplish with this? What are your goals and your strategy for this? Hopefully you’ve had a chance to engage with a lot of us ahead of going out to RFP. So, you really understand what success is going to look like for this RFP. But really giving everyone a chance to engage, like I said, in a conversation that allows the buyer to ask really thoughtful questions, but also the providers to be able to provide really thoughtful answers around scope, around what is going to be important to the program and how can we, as providers, deliver a slam dunk program for them.
[00:08:56] Brian McGuire: So really, you seem to be saying that the RFP itself opens up a line of communication between buyers and providers. It can be considered an opening salvo if you will and a way to go back and forth on an ongoing basis. Communication is key. Would you say that?
[00:09:16] Patrick Aubry: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:09:18] Brian McGuire: Okay. Now I know that a lot of us in the industry have been working with various forms of RFP templates, some of them came out of staffing, some of them came out of MSP VMS. A question that I have here, is a Direct Sourcing RFP specifically different than an MSP and staffing RFP? Mark? It looks like you want to take that.
[00:09:45] Mark Jones: I’ll take that one, Brian. Yes, I think a pure Direct Sourcing RFP is different because ultimately Direct Sourcing is different than MSP. When you think about it from a purist perspective and the definition, an MSP program is designed to manage vendors and to manage the entire end-to-end process of engaging a worker, whereas a Direct Sourcing program on the other hand is normally where a client, and you mentioned it earlier on, leverages their brand to attract contingent workers directly for their organization, so they are two different things. I would argue that there’s a broad understanding across the ecosystem when it comes to MSP. If you took a poll, probably nine out of ten times you’d get a common answer in terms of what people would define as an MSP, program leaders will come back. On the other hand, there’s much more confusion and different meanings swirling across the industry when it comes to Direct Sourcing, and I suspect it would be more like two to four out of ten will come back with the same answer. Direct Sourcing means different things to different people. It could be a pre-ID only solution. It could be a nice to have, bolt onto the MSP, but isn’t really strategically part of the MSP program. Or it could be a program that’s totally dedicated towards curation. I still think that Direct Sourcing is still looking to gain that common adoption. An attraction versus a very mature and understood MSP model. So for me, when a client starts to think about running an MSP RFP, it’s very different to Direct Sourcing. The skills you need, Brian, to run an MSP program are very different to the skills that you need to run Direct Sourcing. You need to have the ability to recruit. You need to be able to leverage the brand, need to help them know how to fill jobs quickly in short timescales. You need an entirely different set of skills and infrastructure for MSP. They’re both equally as important, but nonetheless, I think they are different. And perhaps the last element I’ll just touch on there is that it’s interesting that you can get a combination of the two, where you have an MSP RFP that includes Direct Sourcing. It’s something that we do see in the market a fair amount, and Direct Sourcing could definitely be part of an MSP RFP, but only in my opinion, if a client is genuinely interested in exploring Direct Sourcing from a program success perspective. I do worry sometimes that MSP RFPs include one or two questions on Direct Sourcing, which is almost a tick the box exercise, sort of check what vendors can do. That doesn’t necessarily mean that an organization has the right mindset, sort of really focused and drive the success of a Direct Sourcing program.
[00:12:46] Brian McGuire: Great answer. And you’re making me wonder, is it possible that using RFP templates in the past that were not specific to Direct Sourcing may in fact be confusing buyers about what Direct Sourcing actually is. In other words, trying to fit that round peg into a square hole. Yet another reason why we’re doing what we’re doing here. I have a question. What are the biggest missed opportunities in a typical RFP? Maybe a more general question, but, John, why don’t you go ahead and take that for us?
[00:13:24] John Poore: Yeah, and I think building off of what Mark was saying there, Direct Sourcing can mean different things to different organizations. When I tend to think about what’s missing in that, it really comes down to two categories: value and values. And what I mean by that is, when we think about what a Direct Sourcing program can bring to an organization, the outcomes are pretty straightforward. It’s cost savings, it’s talent access, but how that’s going to be perceived internally at an organization is really important. What does value look like? And more importantly, what additional value can a Direct Sourcing partner, technology. or curation bring to an organization? And I think as part of that, the “values” portion is important as well. When we think about what a Direct Sourcing program is going to do, it’s going to tell the story of your brand. You’re going to build communities based on broad engagement towards not just the brand, but the concept of your talent communities and how they’ll be deployed within an organization. How are you going to tell that story? Give some white space in that RFP to a partner to show that they align to your cultural North stars, that they can articulate those value propositions appropriately, and I think within that, how you’re going to employ Direct Sourcing best practices in a way that’s understandable, acceptable, meaningful to an organization. You don’t find that many in RFPs because they tend to be very binary questions. Yes, no, tell us about what you’ve done, but really the secret is, hey, you’re going to do some storytelling for me, give me a concept of what that storytelling is going to sound like and how you expect the market to adopt it, so that you can help me define what the value of that engagement is going to be within my organization.
[00:15:18] Brian McGuire: Co-creating, you get to get out your crayons and make something new. And it seems like, as an industry, I hate to use the word inflection point because it’s overused, but we really are. The technology has arrived to a point where we can do things that we’ve never done in the past, so, I think communication is as important as it’s ever been, and the opportunity to do something interesting, I don’t think it’s ever been greater. Good answer. Definitely food for thought there. Here’s a question that for those of us who spent a lot of time in sales in our lives, I think this will make sense. When does it make sense to choose a provider without running an RFP? Are RFPs necessary all the time? Tim Rhodes, we haven’t heard from you. I’d love for you to take a cut at that.
[00:16:15] Tim Rhodes: Thank you. Yeah, patiently waiting for time to talk here, but all great points by everybody beforehand. I’ll probably just make a statement a little bit in jest, but sometimes it can be taken seriously, and I think all of us would say the same thing in that if we’re the provider that’s on the inside, you don’t need to go to market, we’ll just go through the process. All kidding aside, there’s a few reasons why you might want to, or a buyer would want to, push through to selecting somebody without running the official RFP. I will say just from my perspective, I think the RFP is an important part of the process, particularly, to go in line with Mark and John’s points before, it helps you create something that hasn’t really been created before. You want to have that exercise to go through. But in cases where it’s just an urgency, there’s a time sensitivity, you have to get it in before a deadline, or there’s a budget restraint, or it falls within the roadmap, whatever it might be, you may want to go with a trusted provider to say, okay, we’re going to get this up and going and then see what happens with it, and then at a later time, make a data driven decision on whether we keep this or we go to market again or whatever it might be. But time sensitivity and urgency is a key part of that. That also kind of falls under the category of established or proven relationships, so who we work with, do we have a partner that’s ready state to implement something of this nature with us, and those who would be in a ready state probably have a highly specialized experience. It could be within a niche of sourcing, of engagement, of geographic markets, or even a specific technology integration that integrates with your tools and systems to maximize program efficiency and experience and that type of thing. A few other reasons might fall under sort of the categories of pilot or trial programming. If there’s a vendor consolidation or integration needs. We’re trimming back the supply base, but we’ve identified one partner that could take on some of this work that would fall under the traditional Direct Sourcing categories. I think the final part would be if the team has already done a ton of work, we’ve worked with partners and we’ve seen partners in the industry for years, sourcing, attending webinars, downloading case studies and interviewing other peers and really understanding who does what in this space, and they’ve already really crafted a solution, and it’s like, “Hey, let’s go with provider A to fill in that gap, and we’ll do a limited term contract for two, maybe three years, and then see where we are at the end of this”. But I can’t think of too many reasons outside of that, Brian, as to why you would want to go direct and not have an RFP. I would just repeat, and others have said it before, the RFP is a creative process at this point, and it’s a really important part to getting the right provider and the right solution in a success ready state.
[00:19:40] Brian McGuire: I appreciate the candor of the answer. I think it’s easy to say, everybody wants to go win a program without a competitive bid, but I think the RFP process itself provides the information that buyers need about what’s possible, who’s out there, what are they working on. It would seem to avoid the RFP, you’re sort of short circuiting that creative process by not knowing what possible is. I appreciate your answer, it was great, thank you. What critical inputs are needed to define scope in an RFP? Getting more granular than our first question, what do you need to define scope? What makes good scope? Patrick, I see you nodding.
[00:20:28] Patrick Aubry: Yeah. I hit on this a little bit in my first answer, and I think transparency is key because understanding what the scope of the program is going to be for the organization, and Jessica, you mentioned this, having the data. Understanding what the spend volume is looking like for the group that you’re looking at. What are the job categories that you’re looking for in the region of the location that you’re looking at? Jessica, you said, and it’s in our readiness portion of the RFP template, having 12 to 18 months’ worth of data from your entire contingent labor program, we as providers can really help you identify what’s going to be a really good area to start. If you’re looking for a big bang, obviously you want all of it, but if you want a specific location, a specific job category, having that data will help us as providers really provide you with a more bespoke answer to your questions. On the flip side of that, if you’re not being transparent and you are looking for knife jugglers in outer Mongolia, the providers here might not be the ideal group of suppliers for a program like that. So, I think transparency is key and really understanding what you have today, so that we can provide you with a very bespoke and specific answers to your questions, so that we can provide a solution through our RFP, because at the end of the day, you’re looking for a solution to a problem. If we have all of the details to your problems, or as much as you can possibly find, all of those key points are going to be really critical for us as providers to provide the best answers and strategy to help you put together a program.
[00:22:45] Brian McGuire: For you guys as providers, in your experience, what most often is missing from an RFP? You guys are getting RFPs regularly. What is typically missing? What would you change?
[00:22:59] Tim Rhodes: I’ll jump on that one Brian. Yeah, we’ve seen it on both sides, and I’ll try to speak from our side as a provider responder to these, but also from what we see, receiving from the buyers in terms of what could be missing. Because a lot of times what happens, we’ll get an RFP, we’ll skim through it, the team will get together, we’ll start looking and then the questions come, and there’s been responses where we’ve submitted 25 questions back of, “Hey, well, what about this? What about this information?” We talked earlier about setting this whole thing up for a successful outcome, but an engaged conversation, creative process. I think if we can agree as an industry standpoint on what information should go out and then what information should come back, it’ll just accelerate that process and experience as well. Commonly missed, would be workforce analytics and reporting requirements. I think we’ve already heard that a couple times, but what’s the depth of the data that you can provide as a buyer to solve the problem you’re trying to solve? That would be my second point – let’s be very clear about what problem we’re trying to solve or what are you trying to achieve with this RFP or this program initiative. That really helps the response, the details that go into it, the theme of the response, what tools and services can be added into it from a provider perspective, we can understand what exactly it is you’re trying to solve for. And shockingly, that’s something that is probably one of the rarest things that comes into the RFPs. It’s all sorts of binary information requests there. The integration of technology, and I know some of the partners on this who are on the technology side will probably see this more often, but what can you integrate with already? Or what are the existing VMS, ATS, HRIS platforms? If you envision technology integration, what tech is already there? So we can help understand that and offer the solutions that fit within that. I really like this one because it goes to the whole theme of the Direct Sourcing model, but what are the strategies – this is for both sides, for the buyer and for the provider responding – but what are the strategies, current and future, for talent attraction and sourcing? What’s the engagement experience? How much do you value that? What do candidates already say about working for your organization, going through these processes? How do you plan to enhance that? These are critical questions that are directly related to the Direct Sourcing model as a whole. And I would just round it out – I know we’re pressed for time here, but success metrics and performance guarantees, what are you as a buyer willing to hold yourself accountable to?And likewise, we know we often respond with what are standard metrics and that type of thing, but knowing that there’s another side to that partnership, and that there are some level of expectations of performance, response times, communication timelines, whatever it might be, on the buy side, makes for a much more engaged process overall, and will ultimately be more successful with the program rollout. Last one here is just innovation. Where are you on the roadmap? What does it look like? Where do you want to go? And again, this is for both sides, but we see now that the whole workforce management industry is evolving really fast. There’s AI, talent marketplaces, the skills-based hiring – all that stuff wasn’t in an RFP two years ago. So now we have to start to integrate that and really build out here’s today’s point of view, but three years from now is where we want to be, and how are we going to get there together?
[00:27:10] Brian McGuire: Great answers. Appreciate that. This is a kind of a natural follow up to the question, for the entire panel here, what percentage of RFPs do you no bid on an annual basis and why? What are the typical reasons? Mark, you want to take cut of that?
[00:27:29] Mark Jones: Yeah, I’ll be interested to see other panelist views in this, but it’s an interesting question actually, and I think when we do the stats and review it, it’s pretty high – 50 percent. And that may seem like a pretty high number. I have to say it’s not easy to say no, there’s always a reason that somebody would argue that we should pursue it. But, I can completely agree with what Tim was just saying in terms of some of the things that have been missing in RFP processes. But the main reason for not pursuing it, is based on the information provided or information not provided in the RFP, maybe that’s also included information that’s gathered during the pre-RFP stage. We feel that perhaps we wouldn’t be a good match. It costs time, money and effort to apply to an RFP, and one of the things that we operate with is fairly strict qualification criteria. So, each pursuit needs to be approved by a member of our executive team. We go through a formal process to review the opportunity, and this ensures when we do commit, that we are all in, that we are able to not submit a sub-par or standard response, that we really adapt, understanding what the problem is that’s being identified in the RFP. We engage solutions, architects and pricing experts and SMEs. All of that takes them away from other activities, so when we do commit, we do expect a reasonably higher success rate because we have strong qualification criteria, and we feel like it’s a good match. Just some other factors that I think are worth taking into consideration in terms of, we might not be able to create a real differentiation in our response. It might not really have good case studies. It might be the types of roles of the sectors or indeed you might lack the information in the RFP. And one thing that I think specifically associated to Direct Sourcing is that where Direct Sourcing is seen as a bit of an afterthought, and there isn’t a real clear strategy around Direct Sourcing being a key element, to what Tim was saying in terms of a strategic initiative, in terms of how you want talent to see your organization. I completely agree with what was said in terms of having good RFP criteria, it does drive a high performing culture. And then it makes sure that there’s real clear answers to the problem statements that are being generated.
[00:30:14] Brian McGuire: So as providers, what percentage of programs aren’t awarded at all? I mean, you guys all respond to a certain number of RFPs every year. How many of them just sort of go into a black hole or you get feedback? I’m just curious, how many are not being awarded and what reasons are you getting for that? Jessica, you want to take a cut at that? We haven’t heard from you in a few minutes.
[00:30:36] Jessica Malachowski: Sure. Absolutely. Thank you for that. It’s hard to say. You can talk to a variety of people; I think some studies and independent consultants would say it’s pretty significant. In fact, up to maybe 40 percent in some cases, it’s a lot. And mostly, going back to what everyone here has been saying, it’s because there’s not enough information or because it hasn’t been properly prepared for. Did I mention the readiness checklist? I think I did in my first answer, but that will really help, not to keep repeating myself, but ultimately, it’s really critical. You need to make sure that you’ve got all the right things in place. If I think back to my corporate TA days, much like a lot of things, not just exclusive to corporate, but everybody gets really excited about our RFP, and so then you want to rush to get it out right away because you know that it takes a while to go through each of the steps before you actually get to the date of go live. Ultimately, sometimes because everyone’s in such a hurry to move forward, you miss some critical steps. The reasons for it, mismatched requirements, quality of the process. Some of these have been mentioned before, lack of internal alignment, internally from the stakeholders, and what good looks like, and what they’re really looking for. Unclear business case, as simple as that sounds, a lot of times that is part of what happens and then sometimes it gets pulled back. We’re not quite ready. We need to realign our strategy a bit. Budget constraints, I think everyone’s heard that from time to time. Maybe the proposals are coming back higher than what they anticipated the cost to be. Maybe the budget constraint is just on this side, the corporation just doesn’t have the time. It could be things outside of our control too, on the corporate side. Maybe it’s a change in market. The labor market is constantly changing. It’s part of what keeps us all on our toes, but sometimes that can really creep in and all of a sudden, it’s a no go, everyone just sort of stops. I think sometimes, and what I’d be curious to really lean into, is how often those come back to life. So maybe it’s a new RFP, but maybe it’s the same company for the same solution that maybe they considered one, two years ago, and that can happen too. Maybe it’s a false start as I would call it, good intentions, but for whatever reason not able to get through to actually awarding it to a particular partner.
[00:33:23] Brian McGuire: Do you think it’s wise to communicate with the providers? Do you see more often, that people are following through with an RFP that sort of dies along the way, and they see it through out of some sense of decorum? Do you think it would be better to just kill it and say we’re going to revisit this?
[00:33:38] Jessica Malachowski: I think so. It’s better to always cut your losses, communicate early. It builds that trust and partnership too. Sometimes there’s a misunderstanding or like I said, a misalignment If the providers that you’re reaching out to are able to give you some additional insight, why not take it? They’re willing and ready to help.
[00:33:58] Brian McGuire: I want to go back to something – John, you mentioned earlier, I think you alluded to the cost of responding, so out of curiosity, and I hope it was John that mentioned it, but what does it cost you guys? John, I don’t want to ask you to speak for the group, but I’d like to get some insight here. What does it cost to respond to an RFP on average? What are the cost drivers?
[00:34:18] John Poore: Yeah, I think it varies quite a bit, Brian. There’s a couple of different ways I think you have to look at costs. As Mark said, we’re going to walk away from 50, 60 percent of the RFPs that we see, and there’s usually no cost involved other than some time to really look at what somebody’s trying to achieve and determine quickly whether or not there’s a solid alignment to pursue forward. But depending on the quality of the RFP, that cost can then balloon up, and it’s not just cost on our side, but it’s cost on the client’s side, and it can be intellectual capital costs. So, consider it from this lens. If we don’t have great data, that means we’ve got to go back and forth with the person who’s generating the RFP. That means that they’re spending time and capital getting those responses, get you a protracted RFP timeline, and the cost starts to increase up from there. We’re also going to spend a fair amount of time doing due diligence. What, beyond the RFP, do we know about the organization? Where are they going? Where do they want to be? It’s a very common thing to give, this is what last year’s data was. We’re going to add 10 percent to that for what we’re looking to fulfill, but realistically, that may not be the case. How much work may be offshore, nearshore, moving to managed service. Is that really going to be appropriate? And so, qualifying that data, making sure that we’ve done a fair amount of internal research, so that we can provide those case studies, and the right story takes time. You’re engaging your RFP writers, you’re engaging your team, you’re reaching out to your clients who may provide references and getting some data, So, it can be really anything from a zero-dollar cost, it can be significant intellectual and political capital costs and hard dollars – anywhere from zero to, if you’re traveling to do down selection meetings, ten, fifteen, upwards of twenty thousand dollars, but I’d hate that to come off as a “woe is me”. We think of that through the lens of our clients as well. A well-constructed RFP can save a lot of time, a lot of back and forth, and a lot of thought, which saves them time, money, intellectual and political capital as well.
[00:36:38] Brian McGuire: Great answer. Appreciate it. And diplomatic as well, nicely done. We’re about halfway through our questions right now or our time. I’m going to go ahead and launch a quick poll. If the folks in the audience wouldn’t mind just to take a second and respond to give us a little bit of insight, we would appreciate that. And then I’ll also mention, I can see quite a bit of chat going on, so thank you for the folks in the audience. If we don’t respond during the webinar, we are recording chats, so we can get back to you with any questions that you might have. I want to make sure that we realize that, so let’s go ahead and get started here with the latter part of our webinar. My first question, I’m going to go ahead and just give this to Jessica because of her experience on the buy side. I know it’s something we’ve covered in the past, but it’s important so I want to bring it up again, who are the key stakeholders buyers need to involve in an RFP?
[00:37:41] Jessica Malachowski: Thanks, Brian. Short answer is it takes a village. Direct Sourcing is a solution that touches a variety of departments and areas, and when you think about experience, experience for the hiring managers, experience for the candidates, you want to include everyone. That includes TA and HR, talent acquisition and human resources. Oftentimes, you’ll want to make sure you’re including somebody from procurement, perhaps finance even, very important to have their alignment and input in there. Sometimes there’s a contingent workforce manager or category manager from that standpoint. Some hiring managers that are going to be heavy users of the program, you want to make sure you engage them. Compliance is key and critical, especially in this day and age. You want to involve anyone, again, that might have an another tentacle into this experience. The long story sort of it, though, we’ve got this laundry list of all these people part of the “village”, if you will – they’re going to come in and participate in this process. I think something that can be really helpful is to work with the provider that you’re working with and make sure that you share up front with them. What’s the time required? For example, you’re pulling in somebody from marketing, which I didn’t even mention, my goodness, marketing or branding from the corporate side, pulling them in, you want to make sure that they know how much time is going to be required of them. What’s their role and responsibility? A good old RACI is always helpful just to lay some expectations because sometimes people get pulled in and they’re like this is contingent labor, or this is temp recruiting, or this is TA related, or this is HR related, what do you need me for? So really setting some expectations and making sure that they understand what the program is and then what their role and why it’s important that they’re part of it. Setting some expectations, how much time is going to be required of them.
[00:39:43] Brian McGuire: I like what you’re saying, but then there’s a part of me that also says less is more. I know for anybody who’s a software developer out there in the audience, there’s a thing called Brooks’ Law that says the more people you involve in a project, the more the budget and timeline go out the window. So, I like your idea of using a RACI. And making it one hundred percent clear up front, this is what I need from you. I’m only going to bother you when I need you, here’s a rough timeline, here are the responsibilities. I think that’s great advice, and I certainly don’t suppose to know much about this, but just looking at it, it seems like getting key stakeholders involved early and then let the snowball grow organically rather than mashing it all together up front. I think that’s what it seems like.
[00:40:32] Jessica Malachowski: You’re right, Brian. Everybody doesn’t need to be invited to every meeting, right? It’s a sign-up appropriately as needed, but some good expectations up front is best.
[00:40:44] Brian McGuire: Thank you, appreciate it. What stakeholders, this is the converse of the last question, who should be involved on the provider side? Who wants to speak on behalf of the providers? Patrick?
[00:40:58] Patrick Aubry: I can do that. And because I think what Jessica just said really highlights on the provider side as well. And what I mean by that is us providers should be held accountable as well – Jessica, you said it takes a village. It should take the whole entire organization from the supplier side, too. And it goes into what John was saying about the cost involved because you’ve got a lot of people. I said this before – a generic question gets a generic answer. What we should be held accountable for is not providing cut and paste answers. If you’re asking questions about the specifics around implementation, wouldn’t it be really helpful to have your implementation team helping craft the answers to that? When you’ve got questions about invoicing, you should have your accounting team a part of how you are crafting those answers. Like I said, we need to be held accountable to providing answers that fit the questions being asked. And as much as there’s a sense of control in answering RFPs and having a consistent voice, and you can still achieve that, right? But I think having the right people from the buyer side involved, we need to be held accountable on the supplier side or the provider side of providing the right answers to those questions of the people that are intricately involved in those processes.
[00:42:34] Brian McGuire: Great. So, it’s like managing a shared service approach, bringing your subject matter experts from in house.
[00:42:40] Patrick Aubry: That’s how we do it at ICON, and I’m just a sales guy, right? I don’t know what our accounting and, and people would, you, you all know me pretty well that I should not be handling any questions about account. So, I think it helps everyone when it comes down to it, like I said, but having the right people answering the right questions, you get better data, you get better answers.
[00:43:07] Brian McGuire: Who should perform the role of solution architect for the ultimate solution?
[00:43:13] Tim Rhodes: I think it ties well into the last three questions. It’s an important piece to the equation, and this is assuming after win, but I think should be clearly defined and determined on both sides before the RFP even goes out as to who on the buy side is going to be the internal strategic lead or program manager to execute the things that need to be executed on our side as a business and has the authority to do so, or at least the executive sponsorship to do so, and then the solution architect, in my opinion, should come from a solution provider. But the role itself, it’s a collection of responsibilities that are shared between the two organizations, in my opinion, and I think the solution architect from a provider side would be somebody who comes with a deep knowledge of product or solution and services, has a wide understanding of industry best practices, they can bring that into the broader solution to help with best practices, set the solution up for success there, but more importantly, understands what good implementation or seamless implementation looks like, given all the other criteria and program experience that they have, but that individual on the product side can effectively be rendered ineffective if there isn’t a project or program manager on the client side assisting that and working hand in hand with them because they bring organizational context, they understand how work gets done, they understand the company structure and culture, processes, how to approach certain people with certain asks. That can actually change the course of an implementation, if you go to somebody with the incorrect approach, there’s asking and there’s telling, or sticks and carrots, right? But you have to be able to know what motivates people to get tasks done. Also, stakeholder alignment – They have direct lines in the organization to bring the right people and bridge communication between different departments within the organization. And I think the final part is they should just own the change management because we know, just like integrating an MSP or a VMS, or even new staffing programs and staffing partners, there is an element of change required. Direct Sourcing does come with a ground level change management. I think the primary one is convincing your business to use the talent community first. That’s the place you should go to source for talent that’s identified under the program before you go anywhere else. And we know business users have preferences. Some of them want to use the person they’ve used for the last 10, 15 years. Some of them don’t want to go outside of the existing process. So, you know, there’s that element there. You combine those two together, you’re going to have a good solution architect strategy and team, but not one side can do it on their own.
[00:46:30] Brian McGuire: Good answer. I have kind of a natural follow up. You mentioned program manager and project manager in your response. I want to make a distinction about the role of project manager, and who should perform the role of project manager for an implementation? Who wants to talk about that and why? Because it’s kind of a distinct thing.
[00:46:53] John Poore: Yeah, I think I can take that on, Brian. I talked a lot in my previous responses about value, and it’s a drum that I’ll beat all the time because to some degree, you can deliver all the KPIs and SLAs you want in a Direct Sourcing program, but value is going to be interpreted differently throughout the organization. From my perspective, it’s going to be the person who is most responsible for delivering value from a Direct Sourcing implementation across the organization. Tim brought up a lot of great points. There is an element of change management, and that change management is going to inform enablement, program communication, governance, which is something that we tend to overlook a little bit, but you can’t optimize what you don’t measure. Governance is a key component to that. It’s going to be the individual that’s really running the program and promising value back to the organization, partially because they can translate the cultural elements, the data that you’re receiving, the path forward and timelines, as well as knowing who the key stakeholders may be within their org to unblock the small things that come up. Usage of brand or legal approving, some best practice or another, but again, because they can most importantly articulate the value proposition back to the business of a Direct Sourcing implementation, they’re going to be the person that can really quarterback the project management of it, help prioritize. I’d say the key to it all, though, is partnering well with your providers, and having appropriate data to be able to stage which of those swim lanes are going to be prioritized, which can work concurrently and then again, very importantly, sort of plan out what the change management strategy and delivery cadence is going to be.
[00:48:51] Brian McGuire: You may have delivered the quote of the webinar there- That you can’t optimize what you can’t measure. So, very good. I have a natural follow up, and I’ve been kind of going there for both Tim and John’s answers, but would it be simpler for the curation partner to step up and take a lead, hold contracts with the other providers, maybe take the role of solution architect with help from an engineer, from a tech provider? I don’t want to over speak here. I’ll make my question. Let me get to the point. Should curation hold the contract, contracts with the providers? Mark, go ahead. I see you nodding.
[00:49:36] Mark Jones: I would argue our experience supports that buyers want a process that’s simple and sort of easy to understand, and they want simplicity to contract and get on with it. And so generally speaking, we find that having the curation provider own the contract with other providers makes it easier to buy, makes things get done quicker, as we just heard previously in terms of making sure that all of the architects and the project managers are all aligned, and it creates an environment where the client only has to contract once. It doesn’t mean though that there’s a lack of transparency. I think everyone should be very clear in who’s involved in the process, and we typically find it easier for clients to understand the model with total costs, so they can then include all of the costs in the pricing. We’ve had situations where the pricing has been separated, and at the end of the day, it’s just been easier for the client to understand and pick up what’s that one overarching cost over one overarching umbrella? And particularly when it becomes Direct Sourcing, Direct Sourcing can be perceived as complex and having lots of separate price points and lots of separate vendors can fuel sort of that perception, but if you bring it under one umbrella with inclusive pricing, then I think it makes it easier to digest, to hold that master contract. And it’s important to ensure that all the partners in the process are engaged and on board with that. And it doesn’t mean that they don’t have a voice because they do. It just very much makes it easier to contract from an overarching perspective.
[00:51:23] Brian McGuire: It makes sense to me. I’ve been thinking that for four and a half years, so thank you for elaborating it. I appreciate it. I have another question here that maybe should go naturally to Jessica again because of her buy side experience and her overall experience, but what’s a reasonable timeline for an RFP?
[00:51:42] Jessica Malachowski: It varies, is a generic way to look at it. I see some notes in the chat, and it depends on the complexity of the program, the types of roles, the appetite for adapting change within the particular organization, the size of the program, the complexity of it, all of those things. The technology that’s going to be used, all of those can be inputs into how long it takes to get the implementation, which in turn should fuel and answer how long it takes for an RFP. Let me explain what I mean. Similarly with recruiting to fill a role that’s open, you want to go back to the start date. Ideally, I want this person to start on May 1st, and then you go backwards and say, okay, well, there’s this many interviews, this is how long the background check takes, this is how long we anticipate the role to be posted and open. And so, you sort of work backwards. I would encourage you to do the same thing with an RFP. When’s your ideal go live date? Not your start date for the recruiting standpoint, but starting with your go live date and actually working backwards from that. You need to think about all the things involved in that, including your implementation timeline. It could be as short as six weeks, I think Tim had responded to one of the questions in the chat about that, but we’ve seen them go longer for a variety of reasons, sometimes maybe up to 12 weeks. It depends on all of those things. Beyond the implementation though, and some of the things maybe that you’ve got a little more control of would be when do you actually set the release? Here’s the release of the RFP, giving the opportunity for the bidder to respond and notice that they are likely going to respond to this RFP and they want to participate, notice of participation. It takes less than a week, a few days generally. Then there’s oftentimes some questions that come in, then there’s, “Hey bidders, let us know your questions”. Usually, a week to release those questions and maybe about a week to respond to those questions is a regular amount of time. Then oftentimes there’s a conversation about should we have published answers, or should we have a call together? And there’s a variety of ways and approaches on that. Also, proposals then are due. How long for the proposals? Could be two weeks is sort of a dart in the dark sort of average, I would say. Sometimes it’s a little longer, sometimes a little shorter. Notice of the finalists, that it takes longer to review the proposals than most people realize. I think generally it’s 2 to 3 weeks to actually review the proposals and then notify those that are going to be the finalists, giving them an opportunity, maybe for final presentation. I saw a question about when is it the right time to talk about negotiation? I would be upfront. Hey, we’d like to notify you as a finalist, but we do want to talk about the pricing. Let them know upfront, be open and make it more of a business communication. Take some of the formality and scariness out of it, and just make it humans to humans trying to create a solution together. So, end to end, start backwards with when you want your go live and build in with the proper planning, some of these steps along the way allowing sufficient time, but not dragging it out.
[00:55:21] Brian McGuire: I’m going to scatter some questions. I want to see if we can get through a few more. And I do have a follow up question on this. You know, it makes sense to ask, how long is it taking a provider to respond to an RFP on average? You might take that, Tim.
[00:55:38] Tim Rhodes: I’ll jump on it. I think Jessica covered a lot of the points that extend the overall timeline, but in general, it depends. I hate the term, it depends, but it really does. Who do you have on your team? How many people are responding? What’s the current load of RFPs? What are the projects you’re working on? There are variables there. But assuming everybody has appropriate bandwidth, the RFP checks all the boxes of all the things that we would need to respond thoroughly, you’re looking at probably a two-week turnaround is what I would say is a general timeline from reception of RFP to being able to submit a final copy. We’ve had some that have gone longer than that, because there’s been some Q&A that have extended it. I think we try to look at the balance between the two sides. One is – Yeah, okay. We’ve gotten everything done. We’ve submitted it in two weeks, then what happens? Are we waiting another two weeks or three weeks with zero communication as to what’s going on? Or is it highly communicative and we’re getting feedback, and you got to respond here, we want to do this? That process can either speed things up or drastically increase the amount of time that it’s going to take to get this whole thing done.
[00:56:59] Brian McGuire: And then don’t release it on Christmas Eve.
[00:57:02] Tim Rhodes: Yeah, or Friday at 6 p. m.
[00:57:05] Brian McGuire: That happens a lot. Yes, that’s a great Christmas gift. How frequently should buyers communicate during the process? Mark, you want to take a cut?
[00:57:18] Mark Jones: Yeah, sure. I think running an RFP is a big process for any buyer, but if the communication is good, then I believe you’ll get the best results, which ultimately is what you’re trying to achieve. I’m quite a big believer in terms of running some kind of initial call or briefing before the RFP kicks off. I think it’s a really good way of bringing to life what’s important to the buyer, and sometimes you can get more from that than you can from reading an RFP response on paper. Personally, I think that’s a really good best practice to sort of run that kind of process. Jessica, you said it sometimes takes a bit longer than people think, and that often means that the timelines that were originally submitted tend to slip and that’s okay as long as you communicate it. I’m a believer that best practice should be weekly communication, if not biweekly, even if it has to say, “Hey guys, this is what’s happening. This is where we are. This is the timeline”. And it just creates a little bit of control over the process, and it also stops all of our salespeople calling you and asking you for an update, which I think hopefully will protect your time as well.
[00:58:31] Brian McGuire: Should buyers host a public buyers’ call? Do you think that’s necessary? Patrick, I see you nodding. What are your thoughts?
[00:58:38] Patrick Aubry: Well, I would hit exactly what Mark said. I think you can learn a lot. I think the short answer to your question, Brian, is yes, you should have a supplier call. And, I would caveat that by saying as long as the buyers are willing to be really transparent with the reason for the RFP, really going through and highlighting as many details as they possibly can, really leveraging our readiness assessment of this RFP template and having a clear and concise strategy for the RFP, what they’re looking to achieve, the problems that they’re looking to solve, if you’re looking at a call as a way to start the communication, just like you were saying, Mark, and I mentioned earlier, having open line of communication for an RFP, I think is really important and saying that, but then showing that with a supplier call and answering questions. There shouldn’t be secrets in an RFP, and I feel there’s oftentimes a lot of secrets and it really hinders providers’ ability to answer thoughtfully and understanding what the problem is that they’re trying to solve. So, the more transparency in those calls I think is really important. But I do think that the calls can be extremely valuable, just like you said, Mark. You can probably learn a lot more about the RFP and that call than you can in reading the actual question sometimes. So, yes. I think it’s important.
[01:00:15] Brian McGuire: I want to pivot to John. We haven’t heard from him. It wouldn’t be a webinar if we didn’t talk about AI, right? Do you think AI should be used to run RFPs? I don’t know if we’re there yet or not, but what are your thoughts on that? I think it’s coming. I can tell you, I’ve seen a little bit of it, so I think it’s coming.
[01:00:34] John Poore: I’m going to give a qualified answer to this. Have I mentioned value previously, Brian? From my perspective, I think that AI and RPA definitely have a place in the RFP, right? Who doesn’t run communication through AI to try and get a concise solution. So, I think that utilizing AI, particularly to try take a high concept question, maybe boil it down into something that is going to give respondents an opportunity to be very clear in their responses is huge. I think RPA has got a role. You can certainly look at where answers sort of met out in a heat map, to know where to dig into, that can help inform and shorten the process. But at the end of the day, one thing that I’ve not seen AI do well, and I spent a lot of time in it, is you can get reasoning out of an 01 model, but it’s not going to be able to ascribe value based on what it is that you’re trying to achieve. No prompt is going to get you there. I think utilizing AI and RPA to make sure that you’ve got a very clear approach to your RFP, very clear questioning and potentially even using elements of that to help you know where to dig in is great. Anything that’s efficient helps the process move quickly. It helps respondents be very clear or even determine whether or not they should participate. But to leverage it to run an RFP from start to finish, I think you lose a little bit of what is it that I’m trying to achieve? How do I deliver value back to the organization that I support?
[01:02:14] Brian McGuire: Great answer. I want to say thank you to all of our panelists for a lot of great answers today. I know we’re over time right now. I want to thank our audience also – thank you for spending part of your day with us. We hope you’ll join us again in June for our next webinar. In the meantime, we want to wish you a better, cheaper, faster business quarter. Take care everybody.
