Procurement has grown into a strategic sourcing organization for many businesses, handling complex and high-risk purchases as well as invoicing. As procurement has moved toward taking on operations efforts and a more strategic role, HR services are often purchased with procurement as an envoy. At the same time, many organizations have found that the services that were once primarily held in procurement, such as the hiring and management of the external workforce, are now requiring more HR involvement.
With HR and procurement growing closer, it’s difficult to reconcile the vast budget that HR needs for acquiring top talent with procurement’s emphasis on reducing costs. Bridging these departments is something that managed service providers (MSPs) such as KellyOCG do every day. “The balancing of the cost-effectiveness that procurement craves with the talent quality and worker experience that HR champions is not mutually exclusive, and achievable to foster a win-win for the business and the workforce,” said Basant Abraham, VP MSP, KellyOCG. By creating a solid partnership between HR and procurement, you’re building a functional team to leverage the contingent workforce to meet talent acquisition goals without breaking the bank.
Building the Partnership to Streamline the Management of Your External Workforce
Here are three key strategies for creating a relationship between HR and procurement that benefits both your business and your external workforce.
1. Share the management of contingent workers between HR and procurement.
Contingent workers need more than just basic management. By leveraging the core competencies of both procurement and HR, you’re building a better experience for external workers overall, and dividing the resources needed to support contingent workers among a larger part of your business.
For example, procurement often manages the reconciliation of invoicing, which supports the most important issue for contingent workers: how they get paid. However, procurement doesn’t have the bandwidth to ensure that every new contingent worker has properly filled out their onboarding materials. HR is better suited to attracting and mobilizing external workers, such as contractors, gig workers, or consultants.
Sharing the responsibility of managing contingent workers provides the external workforce with support for their needs across the board. Whether it’s getting paid or slotting them into the right team to fill a much-needed skills gap, contingent workers will reap the rewards of a partnership between HR and procurement, and the business will maintain a more holistic talent strategy.
2. Find common ground and compromise when making decisions that affect contingent workers.