Key takeaways
Contingent hiring infrastructure was built for traditional staffing models and struggles to support today’s fast-moving, global, and flexible talent demands.
Legacy systems like VMS platforms and MSP programs often create delays when managing independent contractors, cross-border hiring, and niche skill requirements.
These gaps lead to slower hiring, compliance risks, shadow spend, and poor experiences for both hiring managers and contingent workers.
Modern programs succeed by adding live talent access, integrated engagement workflows, and flexible solutions that work alongside existing infrastructure rather than replacing it entirely.
Enterprise companies spend millions building out contingent workforce programs. VMS platforms. MSP relationships. Preferred supplier lists. Compliance frameworks. And yet, most of them still can't reliably fill a critical role in under two weeks.
The contingent hiring infrastructure looks solid on paper. In practice, it's running on a set of assumptions about how talent works that stopped being true years ago.
Ernesto Lamaina, GM at Lifted, has spent more than a decade in this space, building contingent programs, and talking to the people responsible for external workforce at some of the world's largest companies. His take on why the infrastructure gap persists:
“Contingent workforce programs, like any people-driven function, are constantly evolving. Talent expectations and hiring manager needs have shifted significantly over the past three, five, and ten years. The real challenge is balancing two priorities: delivering the right talent quickly and cost-effectively today, while also adapting to how the business continues to change.”
That tension between running today's program and building tomorrow's is where most contingent programs get stuck. Contingent workforce program leaders, global procurement managers, and the HR stakeholders who support them are most likely to feel the friction this infrastructure gap creates.
What are the key aspects of contingent hiring infrastructure?
Before diagnosing what's broken, it helps to be precise about what contingent hiring infrastructure is. It isn't a single system or a single decision. It's a layered set of components that were built, procured, and connected over years, each one addressing a specific operational need at the time it was introduced.
Understanding those components is the first step toward understanding where the gaps appear.
The Vendor Management System (VMS)
The VMS is typically the operational backbone of a contingent workforce program. It manages the requisition process, how hiring managers request external talent, how suppliers submit candidates, how contracts are tracked, and how spend is reported. Most VMS platforms were built with staff augmentation as the primary use case. They track time and materials workers engaged through approved staffing agencies, and they do that well. Where they struggle is with independent contractors, pre-identified talent, and any worker type that doesn't fit the standard agency-to-worker model.
The Managed Service Provider (MSP)
The MSP sits above the supplier panel and manages the relationship between the enterprise and its staffing vendors. An MSP handles supplier performance management, rate compliance, SLA enforcement, and often the day-to-day administration of the program. The MSP model creates valuable structure and oversight, but it's only as capable as the supplier panel it manages. If the approved suppliers can't cover a specific skill set, geography, or worker type, the MSP can't fill the gap.
The Suppliers
The preferred supplier list is the set of staffing agencies and vendors approved to provide talent through the program. Suppliers are typically approved by category, IT, finance, engineering, and so on, and by geography. The panel creates commercial predictability through negotiated rate cards and volume agreements. It also creates coverage gaps when new skill categories or geographies emerge that no approved supplier serves well.
Worker Classification and Compliance Infrastructure
This covers the processes and tools used to determine how workers should be legally engaged, as employees or independent contractors – through what engagement models e.g., – e.g., direct contracts, employer of record or agent of record arrangements, and to ensure those decisions are defensible under local employment law. In many programs, this infrastructure is underdeveloped relative to the risk it's meant to manage. Classification is often manual, jurisdiction-specific expertise is limited, and the IC population receives significantly less oversight than the staff augmentation or other contingent populations.
Sourcing Capability
Sourcing infrastructure is how the program finds and accesses talent. For most contingent programs, this means the databases and networks maintained by approved staffing agencies. The quality and speed of sourcing depends entirely on the quality of those databases, how current the profiles are, how broad the geographic coverage is, and whether the system tracks live availability or simply stores historical records.
Engagement and Onboarding Workflows
Once a worker is identified, the engagement infrastructure handles everything from contract issuance through identity verification, background screening, onboarding documentation, and IT provisioning. In programs running manual workflows across these steps, the cumulative delay can add two to three weeks to the time between a hiring decision and a contractor actually starting work.
Payment Infrastructure
Global payment infrastructure covers how contingent workers are paid, currency, payment method, frequency, and compliance with local payroll regulations. For programs with cross-border engagement, this becomes complex quickly. Without integrated payment infrastructure, each new geography can require a separate arrangement.
Together, these components form the hiring infrastructure that most large contingent programs rely on. Each one has a specific function. Each one also has specific limits, and those limits become visible as the workforce evolves beyond what the infrastructure was originally designed to manage.
"When you think about large enterprise companies and they need this massive access to talent, without the talent, they cannot achieve their growth expectations. Second, they need to provide that talent with a great experience because otherwise they end up having a lot of churn. And three, there are a lot of cost, control and visibility expectations that those companies have."
Ernesto Lamaina
GM at Lifted
The infrastructure exists to serve those three requirements, access, experience, and visibility. When it falls short on any of them, the program feels it immediately.
The expectation gap nobody talks about
There is a gap that shows up in almost every contingent program. On one side: hiring managers who want talent available within days, in any country, in any engagement type. On the other: a program that was built around staff augmentation, runs through a VMS that went live six years ago, and was never designed to handle independent contractors, EOR workers, or pre-identified talent at scale.
The program isn't broken. It's just operating well inside a box that no longer covers the full perimeter of how enterprises actually use contingent talent.
Ernesto Lamaina comments:
“Consumers have grown accustomed to instant, seamless, and beautifully designed experiences. Yet at work, those same people often face clunky systems that lack speed and usability. There’s a persistent gap between personal and professional experiences—and in contingent workforce programs, that gap is even wider. These programs span countries, work types, and complex regulations, making simplicity much harder to achieve.”
The hiring manager who books a flight through an app in 90 seconds is also the person waiting three weeks for a sourcing cycle to complete on a contractor role. That experience gap drives shadow spend, maverick hiring, and program abandonment, not because people are trying to cause problems, but because the official channel is slower than the workaround.
Why legacy infrastructure falls short
Traditional staffing agencies weren't built for speed at global scale. They were built around recruiters working networks and databases, which works adequately for common roles in established markets. The model starts to fracture when:
The role requires a niche skill set not well-represented locally
The engagement needs to happen across multiple countries simultaneously
The worker needs to be engaged as an independent contractor, not a temp employee
The hiring manager already knows who they want and just needs to get the contract done
Each of these scenarios exposes a different gap. Niche skills require a broader, more dynamic talent pool than most agencies maintain. Multi-country engagements require compliance infrastructure that varies by jurisdiction. IC engagements require classification expertise that most staff augmentation providers don't have. Pre-identified talent doesn't need sourcing at all, it needs fast, compliant onboarding.
Here's where the gaps typically live:
Infrastructure Element | What It Was Built For | Where It Falls Short |
VMS platform | Tracking staff aug requisitions and spend | IC management, pre-identified talent, global engagement |
Staffing agency ATS | Storing candidate profiles | Live availability data, cross-border sourcing |
MSP program | Managing agency relationships | Direct sourcing, tech-enabled workflows |
Internal compliance team | Policy enforcement | Real-time classification across jurisdictions |
SOW modules | Managing project-based spend | Preventing staff aug being hidden in project contracts |
None of these elements are failures on their own. Together, they leave significant portions of the workforce outside proper management.
The real cost of not keeping up with talent demand
When infrastructure can't keep pace with talent demand, the cost doesn't show up on one line item. It shows up everywhere.
Here's a practical checklist of what slow, disconnected contingent hiring infrastructure costs you:
Project start dates slip because a critical role takes 25 days to fill instead of three
High-quality contractors accept competing offers before your process completes
Hiring managers build direct relationships with contractors outside the program, creating hidden headcount and compliance exposure
Redeployment of pre-identified talent is impossible without live availability data, so you restart the sourcing cycle from scratch every time
Maverick spend accumulates in the IC and SOW categories that the VMS was never set up to capture
Compliance gaps in the IC population build quietly over months and only become visible during an audit
Ernesto Lamaina shares the reality for the people running these programs:
“Leading a contingent workforce program is inherently complex. You’re serving multiple stakeholders at once—hiring managers who need talent immediately, procurement and senior leaders who expect speed and cost discipline, and the talent itself, with rising expectations around experience, role quality, and pay. Balancing all of that simultaneously is what makes the role so challenging.”
Managing all of those stakeholders simultaneously, while also trying to modernize the infrastructure that serves them, is genuinely difficult. The people in this role are not failing to see the problems. They're dealing with structural constraints that make it hard to fix them.
What "keeping up" actually requires
Modernizing contingent workforce infrastructure doesn't require replacing everything. Most contingent programs have built real value in their existing VMS, MSP relationships, and supplier panels. The goal isn't to rebuild from scratch. It's to fill the gaps that the original infrastructure wasn't designed for.
There are three capabilities that consistently separate programs that are keeping up from those that aren't.
Live talent access. Not a database of profiles. A pool of people where you know who is available now, what they can do, and what they want. The difference in time-to-fill is measured in weeks, not days.
End-to-end engagement infrastructure. The ability to take a worker from identification through classification, contract, onboarding, and payment, regardless of whether they're an IC, AOR worker, EOR worker, or temporary employee, in one workflow. Not five different tools.
Non-disruptive integration. New capabilities that plug into the existing VMS and MSP program as a supplier would, without requiring workflow changes or platform migrations. The right solution should be additive, not disruptive.
Ernesto Lamaina shares why the third point matters as much as the first two:
“Our thinking behind Lifted was simple: meet large enterprises where they are. Whether you engage us as just another supplier or take a broader approach, we make it easy to get started. We’re faster, deliver a better user experience, and operate more efficiently because everything we do is powered by technology. The goal is straightforward—remove friction and start delivering value immediately.”
That philosophy matters because the biggest barrier to modernisation isn't budget or intent. It's the perception that improving things requires a painful, multi-year infrastructure overhaul. When the better option just slots into what already exists, the calculus changes entirely.
What the next 12 months should look like
Programs that close the infrastructure gap tend to start with one clear use case rather than trying to overhaul everything at once. That might be the contingent population that isn't currently being classified compliantly. Or a sourcing gap in a specific region or skill category. Or redeployment workflows that currently require restarting the full sourcing cycle.
One well-executed improvement, in one region or one worker type, demonstrates what's possible. The expansion follows naturally once the results are visible to hiring managers, procurement, and compliance.
The talent market won't slow down while enterprises wait for the infrastructure to catch up. The programs that move now, even incrementally, build a real advantage over those that keep running on the same assumptions.
Frequently asked questions
Why hasn't contingent hiring infrastructure kept pace with talent demand?
Most contingent programs were built around staff augmentation managed through VMS and MSP models. As the workforce diversified to include independent contractors, EOR workers, and global talent, those systems weren't updated to cover the new reality.
What is the difference between a VMS and a tech-enabled supplier?
A VMS manages requisition workflows and spend data. A tech-enabled supplier provides actual talent access, engagement, compliance, and payment infrastructure. They serve different functions and can work together within the same program.
How do you modernise a contingent workforce program without disrupting it?
Start with one specific gap: an underserved worker type, a geography with slow fill times, or a compliance exposure in the IC population. Fix that one thing with the right provider, demonstrate results, and expand from there.
What is redeployment in contingent workforce terms?
Re-engaging a contractor who has previously worked with the organisation. Without live availability data, this requires restarting the full sourcing cycle. With it, redeployment can happen in minutes.
What should a modern contingent workforce supplier be able to do?
Source and engage any worker type, IC, AOR, EOR, staff augmentation, across global markets, within existing program infrastructure, with integrated compliance and payment capabilities.
Author
Ernesto Lamaina
GM at Lifted
Ernesto Lamaina is the General Manager of Lifted, an Upwork company dedicated to helping enterprises source, engage, and manage contingent talent across every contract type—independent contractors, staff augmentation, employer of record, and managed services.
