"Every contingent workforce leader is juggling time, money, and risk. The mistake is solving for risk in a way that quietly breaks the other two."
As a contingent workforce program leader, you care about a few things, and it helps to name them plainly.
You care about time, the speed at which your hiring managers and functional leaders can get talent. You care about money, the cost to engage that talent and to provide that flexibility. And for those two, it is what I keep coming back to: maximize the reach, and keep the contract types open and agnostic, so you can move fast and manage cost.
But that is not enough. There is a third thing, and it is the one that trips programs up. Risk.
Risk means compliance
As a large enterprise, you deeply care that everyone you engage, whether a full-time employee or contingent labor, is engaged compliantly, across different countries and different contract types. That is not optional. Nobody is arguing with it.
Here is the mistake
The mistake is doing compliance at the expense of the user experience. And it is more common than you would think. A program focuses so hard on compliance that it builds something slow and heavy, with too many steps. And then the hiring managers and functional leaders, the people the program exists to serve, quietly stop using it. They say, "I cannot do this; it takes too long, so I will just use a random tool, click two buttons, and get somebody."
Think about what that actually does. It does not just lower adoption. It creates the exact risk you were trying to avoid. Now you have engagements happening outside the program, with new exposure, no cost control, and no visibility. So the heavy compliance process did not make you safer. It pushed the risk into the shadows, where you cannot see it.
Compliance and experience are not a trade-off
That is the whole point. The programs that get this right do not choose between compliance and experience. They deliver compliance, 100 percent, through an experience that is actually good, so good that going through the program is easier than going around it. When that is true, compliance takes care of itself, because everything flows through the place where it is handled.
When it is not true, you have a program that looks compliant on paper and is leaking risk in practice.
So look at your program honestly. Is your compliance so heavy that people are routing around it? Because a program people avoid is not a compliant program. It is an invisible one, and invisible is where the real risk lives.
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This content is for general informational purposes only, and is not intended to be and should not be viewed as legal or tax advice. Readers should contact their attorney or tax professional to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal or tax matter. Information discussed can change frequently, and Lifted cannot guarantee that all information is current at all times.
Author
Ernesto Lamaina
GM, 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.
