Rolodex to Algorithm: Your Talent Platform Wont Save Your Workforce Strategy
Who Does Your Platform Know?
Welcome to this issue of The Contingent Compass. Each week, I send two essays to help you navigate the complex world of the Contingent Workforce. If you need support on your journey, upgrade to a paid subscription where you’ll instantly be able to interact with the community through group chat, live Q&A’s, gain access practical program tools and useful how-to guides.
Remember when hiring was about who you knew? These days, it’s about who your platform knows - and whether they’ll still be around next quarter.
Talent platforms promise speed, scale, and precision. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of what they enable. But there’s a growing problem: too many companies are treating open talent like fast food.
Quick match. Quick result. Quick forget.
If your strategy ends when the assignment starts, you're not managing a workforce. You’re managing a revolving door.
Let’s dig into what’s really happening and what leading organizations are doing differently.
🚀 Open Talent Is Here, But Open Eyes Need to Follow
We’ve entered an age where contingent labor is sourced faster than most companies can update their org chart. Platforms now deliver AI-matched professionals in days (sometimes hours), complete with assessments, credentials, and compliance wrappers.
It’s slick. But here’s the catch:
Speed is only an advantage when the direction is right.
Reflective check-in:
Are you tracking talent redeployment and satisfaction, or just time-to-fill?
Do you know what happens to high performers after the assignment ends?
Are vendors and platforms held accountable for talent experience?
If your answers are vague, your strategy probably is too.
🧠 The Talent Community Myth (and How to Fix It)
Having a database is not the same as having a community.
A database holds résumés.
A community fosters relationships, growth, and two-way value.
Want to build one? You’ll need:
Real communication (not just project updates, but engagement)
Upskilling opportunities (certifications, microlearning, challenges)
Peer connection (Slack groups, mentorship, internal gigs)
Redeployment design (plan how to reuse, not just replace)
Contingent talent wants to belong, not just deliver.
Thought experiment:
Would you recommend your company’s contingent experience to a friend?
🤝 From Matching to Mentoring: Why Talent Advisors Win
The most overlooked part of platform evolution is the human behind the hire.
Recruiters are becoming Talent Advisors. That’s a good thing. Platforms handle matching. Humans handle the messy middle - coaching, feedback, cross-cultural nuance, emotional intelligence, and career navigation.
Some talent needs help asking for a day off. Others want to know what skill to develop next. Either way, someone needs to be there to answer.
The algorithm gets them in. The human gets them to stay.
📌 Bonus stat:
SIA research shows 47% of temp workers rate training opportunities a “6/6” in importance, yet most platforms stop after placement. That’s a missed opportunity.
🧩 Integration vs. Innovation
Too many companies bolt on tech like holiday decorations - shiny, but disconnected.
Mini Audit:
Can your hiring managers source, assess, engage, and onboard from one place?
Are talent experience metrics connected to platform data?
Is your VMS aligned with platform workflows, or working against them?
Pro tip:
If you're still emailing résumés out of the platform you paid six figures for, it’s not integrated. It’s cosmetic.
🛑 Not Every Role Belongs on a Platform
Let’s be real: platforms aren't a silver bullet for every workforce challenge. Sometimes, human judgment, internal knowledge, or regulatory complexity trumps automation.
Use a platform when:
✅ Skills are well-defined and verifiable
✅ The task is project-based or time-bound
✅ There’s a robust vetting or assessment layer
✅ Speed and access outweigh deep cultural alignment
Stick to traditional vendors or internal benches when:
🚫 IP sensitivity or confidentiality is high
🚫 Long-term organizational knowledge is critical
🚫 The role is highly ambiguous or stakeholder-heavy
🚫 You're navigating complex cross-border regulations
Just because you can automate a match doesn’t mean you should.
⚖️ The Compliance Wake-Up Call
Some companies assume platforms absolve them of risk. They’re wrong.
Whether you engage a worker through a sleek UI or a dusty spreadsheet, you’re still on the hook for misclassification, labor law violations, co-employment risk, and cross-border compliance.
If your platform promises to “take care of everything,” ask them to show you the legal opinion that backs it up. Spoiler: it probably doesn’t exist.
Quick Tip:
If your platform is operating in 20 or more countries, do they have local entity capability, GDPR protocols, tax withholding mechanisms, and worker protections per region? If not, your legal team will want a word.
🔁 Redeployment Is the Hidden Goldmine
Want better ROI from your program? Start measuring how often talent comes back.
Every contractor you treat well becomes a:
Future hire
Brand ambassador
Referral engine
Competitive advantage
Every one you treat like a line item becomes your competitor’s next star.
Reflective check-in:
What percentage of your contingent workforce is redeployed or referred?
If you don’t know, start there.
🔎 Red Flags You're Running a Platform-Led Mess
You can’t name your top 10 redeployable contingent performers
Hiring managers are bypassing the platform due to speed or trust issues
There's no single point of ownership for talent experience
Compliance, experience, and cost data all live in different systems
You hear “we don’t really have visibility into that” more than once a week
🧭 The 4 Pillars of a Modern Contingent Talent Strategy
Introducing a simple framework to evaluate and optimize your contingent ecosystem:
Match: Use technology to ensure fast, precise, and skills-based placement
Engage: Assign advisors or checkpoints to support talent during delivery
Develop: Offer upskilling, assessments, and feedback loops to grow talent value
Redeploy: Build mechanisms to track, re-engage, and retain high-performing workers
Use these four pillars to assess whether your strategy is truly modern, or just modern-looking.
🧠 Quick Case Study
One global pharma company I worked with implemented a sleek talent platform expecting faster delivery and lower rates. What they got was a flood of mismatched profiles, disjointed onboarding, and frustrated hiring managers - all because they never defined who owned talent experience after the match.
Contrast that with a mid-sized tech firm that restructured their contingent process around a single talent community. Time-to-fill dropped 40%, redeployment hit 33%, and their best contractors now refer new ones. The difference? They invested in all four pillars - not just the first.
💬 Team Challenge: Ask These at Your Next Leadership Meeting
What’s the actual experience like for a contractor on Day 1?
Are we tracking vendor performance based on outcomes, or just volume?
If our platform vanished tomorrow, what would break? What would improve?
Who owns the end-to-end journey for contingent workers here?
(Warning: these questions may cause awkward silences. That’s a good thing.)
🤖 Agentic AI on the Horizon
While this article focuses on platforms, let’s not ignore what’s around the corner. Agentic AI is already creeping into talent systems - handling intake calls, drafting onboarding comms, summarizing interviews, and nudging talent to reapply or upskill.
Just remember, AI might automate the check-in, but it won’t replace the “how are you really doing?” that builds workforce loyalty.
🧭 So, What Should You Do Next?
Let’s make this tangible. Here are your next steps:
✅ Shift your metrics
From “how fast can we hire?” to “how well do we engage, redeploy, and retain?”
✅ Appoint a Talent Experience Owner
Someone (not your MSP, not your platform provider) needs to own the full journey.
✅ Redesign your tech with talent in mind
Map out the journey - not just for hiring managers, but for the actual humans doing the work.
✅ Unbundle the work
Not every project needs a full 40 hour week. Can you create sprint-based gigs? Weekend-only roles? Cross-functional trial tasks?
🎯 Final Word: Self-Serve Isn’t the Goal. Self-Aware Is.
You don’t win the future of work by adding tech.
You win it by understanding what work - and talent - really need.
The most resilient workforce strategies will be platform-enabled and people-powered. That’s not just the next trend. That’s the new standard.
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If you need support on your journey, upgrade to a paid subscription where you’ll instantly be able to interact with the community through group chat, live Q&A’s, gain access practical program tools and useful how-to guides.