"Everyone in the contingent workforce says they are tech enabled. The real question is simpler. What is the DNA of the supplier you are about to hire?"
When I say tech enabled versus non tech enabled supplier, I really mean one thing. What is the DNA of that company. Not whether they have a portal or a dashboard, but how they actually do the work when a job comes in.
So let's walk through it, because you can hear the difference the moment a supplier describes their own process.
Follow one job rec
Your hiring manager posts a job. What happens on the supplier's end?
Say you have a VMS in place. The requisition opens and goes out to all the suppliers in it. On their end, they look at the recs by hand. They go into their ATS. They search a database where people registered years ago, and they start contacting those people just to find out who is even still looking, whether their skills still match, whether they are still in the market at all. Eventually they find a few profiles.
Then they go back into the VMS and submit them by hand. And only then can the hiring manager look. There are many, many steps in between.
Every one of those steps is a person doing manual work. And people work a certain number of hours in a day. There is only so much you can do in parallel. That is your ceiling on speed and volume, and it is built into the model.
Now do it with a tech enabled supplier. The hiring managers post on the VMS the same way. But then the rec goes into the system. The system matches it automatically, against people we already know are actually looking for work right now. So the right profiles come back way, way faster than they would by hand. That is a different DNA.
A stale database is not a talent pool
This is the difference that decides everything downstream, and it is worth being precise about it.
A database is huge, but most of it is people who signed up years ago. They may not be looking. Their skills may have moved on. Some do not even live where the record says anymore. I still get an email every so often from a staffing agency I signed up with more than ten years ago, asking if I want some junior role in a country I do not live in. That is a database.
It looks enormous, and only a tiny fraction of it is useful today.
A talent pool is alive. It evolves all the time. You know who is looking for a job right now, you know their current skills, what they just learned, what they are looking for. So instead of contacting hundreds of people and hoping someone bites, you reach the few who are qualified and interested today.
At Lifted, an Upwork Company, that live pool is 18M+ active profiles, and the average time-to-fill is under three days. That number is not a target on a slide. It is what happens when a live pool meets technology built for this work.
Why the DNA shows up in your rate
There is a cost side too, and it is direct. A supplier that runs on manual effort carries a big operating overhead, all those recruiters doing all those steps, and that overhead ends up in your rate.
A supplier built around technology does not carry that same overhead, so the cost to serve is lower, and those savings can be passed back to you. That is why a genuinely tech enabled supplier can be faster and lower cost at the same time, often 10 to 30 percent below a legacy supplier.
It is not a discount someone decided to give you. It is what is left when you take the manual labor out of the process.
And the important part for a program leader: none of this asks you to change. You are not changing your workflows. Your hiring managers post the same way, in the same VMS. You are just getting higher quality talent faster, and at a better rate, because the supplier behind it runs on technology.
So the next time a supplier tells you they are tech enabled, do not take the word for it. Ask them to walk you through what happens to one job rec from the second it lands. Where is the person, and where is the technology? That is the DNA, and that is what you are actually buying.
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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.
