Christopher Dwyer: 

Good morning or good afternoon to everyone out there. Thrilled to join you all this morning. I think one of the first major events in our industry in the new year of 2025. And really excited to present not only some very interesting 2025 trends in talent technology and the contingent workforce ecosystem, as well as the future of work, but also dive deeper into the MSP 2025 playbook.

You guys can all see Mr. Brad Martin smiling there along with me. I’ll give him a chance in a second to introduce himself, but just wanted to kick things off and welcome everyone and thank you for joining us.

My name is Christopher Dwyer. I’m the SVP of Research here at Ardent Partners. I’ve been an analyst and researcher and thought leader in the human capital, contingent workforce, talent acquisition and HR tech future of workspaces for almost 20 years now. Ardent Partners is your next-gen analyst and research firm. Also, the Managing Director of something we call the Future of Work Exchange, which is a multimedia destination site for HR procurement, TA and contingent workforce professionals.

More importantly though, thrilled to be joined by Mr. Brad Martin, someone who I’ve known for a very long time and who I haven’t presented alongside with in a number of years. Brad, welcome.

Brad Martin:

Thanks Chris, appreciate that. Yes. So, in way of intro, my name is Brad Martin, Chief Revenue Officer at Atrium. For those who aren’t familiar with Atrium, we are a leading extended workforce management solutions provider. Through our Atrium Works division, we offer everything from MSP, to payrolling, 1099 compliance, suite of direct sourcing solutions, early talent and then through our Talent Solutions division, we offer a suite of solutions around temp, temp–to–hire, firm placement, talent programs, etc.

I have personally been in the industry over 20 years and spent good portions of my career in staffing in workforce tech, specifically VMS as well as Managed Service Provider and all the solutions that kind of follow up underneath that. So, very excited to be with you here today, Chris, and looking forward to the conversation.

Christopher Dwyer:

Awesome. Thank you, Brad. Really excited to have you alongside me. So, I wanted to start things off here by – Honestly, let me take a step back. I think conversations between Brad and I over the past couple of months about what this event would look like, so many different avenues for us to explore. I know sometimes I take it for granted that in our industry when you’re dealing with talent or workforce management or the talent technology ecosystem, I do think we sometimes take it for granted that there’s so much change, evolution and transformation happening.

There’s so many different avenues we can explore, but I thought it’d be really interesting to look at the “Story of 2024” and utilize that as a way to sort of set the stage for what else we’re going to be talking about today.

The year that was, it was pretty interesting. I mean, a lot of folks at the end of 2023, going into 2024, thought we were heading for some economic crisis. There was sort of like this post pandemic hangover I think for a lot of organizations and the idea that 2024 could be a struggle for some organizations. But you take the more optimistic viewpoint, and you see some of the major shifts that happened in the year that was. And so, what you see here on your screen right now are the transformations that happened within the larger world of work. This is very straightforward. We asked our community, “What were the biggest shifts or the biggest experiences that your organization had over the past year”? And this is where for me, and I’m sure for Brad as well, a lot of the excitement is when we look forward to 2025.

But number one, prioritize skills in candidate communities. I’ve long been a proponent of the idea of a candidate or talent centric organization that prioritizes skill sets and expertise over anything else, and so, to see that come out on top, I thought was pretty incredible.

Utilize more non-employee contingents and freelance talent. We are at that point where we’re just a couple hundreds of a percentage point away from the average organization’s total workforce being comprised of 50% non-employee contingent external talent. Something that I remember way back in 2014, I remember coming out with a stat that said by the latter half of this century, this decade, we’d be at 50%. So, we got there a little bit faster, and I think the pandemic was a big reason why.

But you see here, obviously focus on leveraging AI, more tech and automation. The story of 2024 was very multifaceted.  Brad, want to bring you in here. A lot of really cool stuff here that happened to organizations in 2024.

Brad Martin:

Yeah, for sure, Chris. And you know, it’s fun to do this exercise. I remember last year around this time talking about what the trends for 2024 are going to be or were going to be and then kind of pausing after in retrospect looking back and saying, “Okay, what panned out? What of those actually really took form the way we thought they would”?

And there’s certainly a lot on this list that we anticipated, and it’s interesting to see that these made the top five in terms of the story of 2024. Certainly, the ongoing story as you mentioned, of utilizing more non-employee, contingent, freelance, independent talent.

Massive growth in the freelance sector alone since 2020, I think north of 85% growth just in freelancing alone to fill skills gaps. Certainly, as we talk about things like AI, machine learning, these are skills that, freelance is really being leveraged to help fill some of those gaps.

Investing more in internal capabilities for data driven talent decisions – this is bubbling to the top here over the last couple of years. It’s not just reporting analytics – it’s the capabilities to do all these things, and that means integrating systems, so the data is flowing in the right place. You’re capturing the data. You have visualization tools to be able to look at this data and do something with it and surface actionable data insights. And then you have, you know, partners who can actually interpret that data and turn that into something that’s beneficial in terms of optimization or forecasting or ways to go forward with your talent strategy. So that’s a big one, and we’re certainly going to talk more about that on this call.

AI this year – you hit on that, Chris. I think for me, my perspective over the last couple years around AI is getting away from just chatbots, although chatbots have gotten extremely good. But it’s that next level of what do we do with this technology and these capabilities? Where do we plug this in the right place? And certainly, in a very people–driven industry and environment, how do we use these in a human way that doesn’t sacrifice that element of that?

And then, we talk about candid experience every year and I’m really glad to see that continues to be a trend over 2024. Again, we’re going to talk about that again in a moment here in 2025. Atrium, we consider ourselves experience obsessed and we partner with our clients on every level.

So, Chris, very interesting look back on 2024. Look at these trends, the ones that played out and excited to look at the 2025’s. 

Christopher Dwyer:

Yeah. And before I flip to the next slide, I think you and I could just sit here and just talk about this slide just for an hour or probably longer. There’s a lot here, but we got a lot to cover.  So, Brad, appreciate your insights there.

The story of 2024 helps us understand what is to come in 2025. These are the expected shifts that companies plan to undergo, to experience as part of their workforce management, their talent acquisition strategies and so on and so forth in the year ahead.

So obviously, first thing, increased reliance on contingent workers. We know certain sectors experienced a boom in the utilization of non-employee talent. I was on the phone recently with a private equity company and we were looking together, looking at the light industrial space. I mean that space has exploded in terms of using non-employee talent, and that’s just me cherry picking one industry. You’re seeing that really across the board. It’s encouraging to see that the realm of the contingent workforce is going to continue to have a big impact in 2025.

AI of course, Brad mentioned chatbots and other avenues of AI, but generative AI, other forms of AI technology, whether it’s AI job descriptions, AI skills matching, anything to boost a candidate or the hiring manager experience. Businesses are laser focused on increasing and expanding their utilization of AI. What that looks like it’s very generalized to say just increase utilization of artificial intelligence, but we’ll talk more about that across the course of the webcast today.

I want to leave a lot of meat here for Brad, so I’ll just say before I hand it over – direct sourcing and talent orientation. I love direct sourcing. I’m a direct sourcing nerd. I’ve been covering it for seven or eight years now, and I’m just amazed and my eyes are filled with wonder in terms of where direct sourcing has gone and where it will go. It’s not just standing up your own internal recruitment agency, it’s so much more than that, and I think that businesses are starting to get over what I would call that hump of education. They don’t really know what a direct sourcing is, they don’t know how to put it in place. And I think now the challenge is how do we drive adoption and how do we continue to see and drive value from direct sourcing? But there’s again, so much more here. 

Brad, I could talk for hours, but you need to interrupt me here.

Brad Martin:

Yeah, Chris. Just stepping back a moment, all of these 2025 trends, they’re interconnected in so many different ways. So, focus on building a more strategic contingent workforce program. What’s one of the ways you’d be more strategic about finding the best talent, building diverse talent pools?

Well, direct sourcing is right there in the top of the list of things you can do from a strategic perspective to drive optimizations, drive benefits within a contingent workforce management program. So, when we talk about direct sourcing, and you hit the nail on the head, that there is this moment where the common understanding of direct sourcing is starting to be out there. For years, various interpretations, definitions of what direct sourcing was, a lot of times that was componentized. People would say, well, this one piece of this is direct sourcing. 

But now there’s a common understanding and definition that direct sourcing really is a combination of multiple things within the program working in concert. It’s technology, it’s curation, it’s payrolling, it’s leveraging data. It’s all these different things that have to go in from tip to tail to create an effective direct sourcing program. And it’s creating brand advocates. Everybody spends a lot of time talking about the idea of leveraging the power of your brand to attract talent, to create talent pools, right? But not so much time is spent on talking about what the result of that is.

When you have a great direct sourcing program, that the experience is fantastic, workers come on, they absorb your brand, they work under your brand, you have a curation partner who represents your brand well as a brand advocate. These people come to work for you, and then they go back out into the marketplace saying great things about your company, which then fuels the whole cycle again.

So, there’s so much to be said about direct sourcing and so many conversations that need to be had to continue to evolve this area. But certainly, it’s the combination of all those things I talked about and having a curation partner who understands how to take this and someone who can manage the program to help take these things, combine them, integrate them, and deploy a fully realized direct sourcing program.

Christopher Dwyer:

And I will just say there’s more to come on direct sourcing, not to give away some other pieces of the event later on, but I’ll just wrap up here before we head into the next section of the webcast. One thing I do want to point out is that 62 or 63% of organizations plan on building a more strategic contingent workforce program.

And I think that’s, Brad, something you and I talked about, yesterday or the day before, moving away from tactical contingent workforce to more strategic. That’s where companies can drive more value. I understood the idea of tactical contingent workforce management when it was 15, 20, even 25% of the workforce, but now you’re hitting that 50% threshold. Your contingent workforce, your extended workforce isn’t just augmentative, right? It’s truly powerful and it can really drive value. So, more to come there.

What we’ve done here is we’ve put together a handful of major innovations and trends and we’re going to link them back to the idea of the MSP 2025 playbook. I imagine many of you today are leveraging an MSP, you’re looking at an MSP, you leveraged one in the past, or you’re looking to do so in 2025, but I think this is an interesting spin on some of these trends and some of these innovations.

I’ll start here and talk about, Brad was actually just talking about this, the brand champions. Application of talent communities, talent pools and direct sourcing. The idea of direct sourcing today isn’t, like we’ve both been saying, stand up the program, create your own internal recruitment agency, build a talent pool, build a talent community. I mean, even a few years ago I was saying things like maybe more “advanced capabilities” for direct sourcing would be talent pool segmentation, talent community segmentation. But it goes so much more beyond that – It traverses into boosting candidate experience, it’s collaboration with your candidates, reaching out to them with value, and it even goes beyond just using the colors of your brand and your job portal pages. It’s taking the next level, the next phase approach to leveraging your brand and your direct sourcing strategy.

So again, not to steal any fire away from you, Brad, but you see here, and this is again another one of those slides where there’s a lot to unpack, but these are the major shifts in contingent workforce programs over the past 18 months.

The third level right there is integration of direct sourcing-led capabilities. The idea is, you see the vast majority of contingent workforce programs shift to integrating direct sourcing within their larger contingent workforce programs and not necessarily 80–something–percent building full on direct sourcing programs but starting to bring those specific capabilities into their program.

So, Brad, let’s chat about this.

Brad Martin:

Yeah, so you mentioned an interesting point there, and it is that the complexity of the program should be aligned with where the client or where the company is in terms of its maturity life cycle of deploying a contingent workforce program. You may not go full bore with this enormous integrated, all these systems involved right at first. As a first-generation program, you have to kind of lead into that. Part of it’s meeting and building a program that’s custom designed to achieve the goals of the client for the moment where they are in time in terms of maturity life cycle of their contingent workforce program at large. And one of the key components to that is, they’re the standard pillars we always talk about. It’s leveraging your brand; it’s building a private talent pool. It’s some of these kind of key components of curating and leveraging your direct sourcing program.

But one of the most important things that we’ve seen is really around adoption. Adoption internally is such a key part of actually getting the program off the ground. There is certainly the building of the private talent pool. There is the moment where there’s enough talent in that pool so that it becomes useful and you have that kind of “light switch moment” where now you can have managers engage with that talent pool to find talent. But in order to get them in there, there’s a lot of things that your MSP partner needs to do internally within the company to help drive awareness of the direct sourcing program.

What is it? What is the benefit of it? So, everybody understands why do I go to a direct sourcing program? Well, there’s cost optimization. There’s also talent quality considerations because you’re curating this many times private, invite–only talent pool of curated talent.

And so, with that the time to fill goes down, the talent quality goes up. There’s all these great reasons why to use direct sourcing and helping to educate the company and helping educate your managers and everybody will touch that program on the why, the systems to go to use it, make sure that it’s a good experience for them. These are all things that are really, really critical to ensuring that the program actually takes off beyond just the, like you said, putting on your website, hanging off there and having applicants come in. So much to do here and so much to talk about, but in 2025 we certainly anticipate to see people really dig into this area even more so than they did in 2024.

Christopher Dwyer: 

Awesome, Brad. Before we move on to the into the next section, let me ask you – I think the number one question I get about direct sourcing is sort of independent of what type of solution that a company is using, but if a company’s struggling with direct sourcing, like if gun to your head, what’s your biggest piece of advice? You’re one of the few people that have seen the direct sourcing journey when people didn’t even know what it was to now where it’s just commonplace. What would be your number one piece of advice?

Brad Martin:

Define what the program needs to accomplish for where you are at that moment in time. Again, I think that and we see this with deploying other technologies that manage various verticals within contingent workforce classification like staff augmentation, SOW, and so on and so forth. A lot of times companies will put the cart ahead of the horse and try to deploy all of this stuff and it’s just too much. It’s too much at that moment in time. And so, work with your MSP partner to define what it is that you’re trying to achieve at that moment in time with direct sourcing programming and build a program that’s sized appropriately for that.

Also make sure that your partner that’s going to help to manage and to curate this talent pool is fully versed and understands your brand. They need to live and breathe your brand. They’re going to be going to market, talking to candidates, helping to curate the talent pool, helping to onboard this whole life cycle. They need to understand your brand, be an extension of that brand and, and faithfully represent it. It’s just such a critical component.

So those two things I think and then we talked about adoption a moment ago are really the critical things to making sure that a program succeeds and takes those baby steps into delivering value and then ultimately compounding that value as it goes.

Christopher Dwyer: 

Good answer, Brad. I appreciate that. I know questions are slated for the end, but that one’s been burning on my mind, so wanted to ask you. 

All right, so trend number two is innovation around talent technology tech stacks.

You should get the tagline there. Efficiency and agility with cutting edge tools and platforms. Brad just alluded to that, talking about direct sourcing. And we talked a lot about tech in our 2024 into 2025 story slides there.

But the idea here is that it’s very commonplace in our industry today where your MSP partner leverages the best of the best in terms of new platforms and new technology as well as their own proprietary tech to drive value for your program. And I think that where we are today, these are not the tech stacks of even five, six years ago. Direct sourcing tech, AI, compliance and risk mitigation technology, other tools and platforms that are not just driving innovation, but they’re really driving value around a company’s total workforce.

Brad, no research here, but this is more conversational – Your thoughts on the innovations around technology tech stacks?

Brad Martin:

Well, there’s a lot of it. There is a lot of tech in our space right now and good tech and it’s getting better. With technology in general, it seems that we go through these cycles of the one platform that will do it all, and then we go through a cycle where you go into specific solutions purposely built to capture or to address one component of the overall life cycle. And it feels like at the moment we’re in one of those cycles where there’s all this great tech out there. They’re purpose built for different things. We talked about direct sourcing tech, incredible VMS tech, ATS tech, FMS. There’s a lot of great FMS solutions coming out right now and again, purpose built for that specific use case.

And so, it really becomes now a matter of selecting the right tech for your particular needs and then understanding how to integrate those solutions so that you drive things like data flow, so you drive process, make it smooth, make it a good experience.

It feels like we’re in one of those moments now where it’s about integrating tech versus the all–in–one solution. Certainly, there’s very capable stuff out there that does all of it. But as you look at the ebbs and flows of just technology, that’s a moment from my perspective. It feels like we’re in a moment.

Christopher Dwyer:

Brad, maybe take a look back. I mean we’re old, right? We’ve seen the industry change. I mean, biggest differences in tech stacks from 10-15 years ago to today. I mean the fact is that businesses have the ability to manage so much more, and I think that that’s something that’s often understated. Where it’s sort of an expansion of your program, it’s not just manage managing staffing suppliers or temp workers. Like you said, FMS can assist in gaining control of your contractors and your freelancers. Obviously direct sourcing tech can take your MSP solution for direct sourcing to another level.

More a commentary than less a question, we’ve just seen tech stacks evolve so much, what do companies have to look forward to as these continue to evolve?

Brad Martin:

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think that the continued consumerization of this technology is going to be something we’re continuing to see. The idea that some of this legacy software we’re talking about back in the day, is very enterprise focused technology. It’s about just getting specific things done. Less of a focus about the actual user experience and how you progress through and the intuitiveness of the use of that software.

Over the last several years, we’ve seen a real shift in this consumerization of software, this consumerization of the user experience where it feels like the type of software you use every day, just in your day to day life, not necessarily your professional life, and what that does is it puts a focus on intuitiveness, it puts a focus on less friction when I use this software. We’re seeing that across all, whether it’s any of those kinds of verticals we talked about, whether that’s VMS, whether that’s direct sourcing tools, whether that’s ATS or FMS, we can go on and on with our acronyms, we’re seeing that actually really start to catch.

And it’s a great thing, it’s a great thing for the users, it’s a great thing for driving efficiencies because people know how to use the software intuitively. They don’t have to figure it out and read massive manuals or get lost and quit that process and go somewhere else or do it manually.

I anticipate we’ll probably continue to see a lot more of that, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Christopher Dwyer:

Awesome. Yeah. And one thing I’ll add here, I mean Brad, again, this probably could have been like a three-hour webcast that’s just sitting by a fireplace chatting. But the idea of consumerization, I really think to expand on something you said really drives adoption?

I think that’s been a struggle for a lot of organizations. I’m not saying talent technology was never critical. It’s always been critical. But in the face of ERP and finance and accounting software, we’ve entered this age over the past 10 years where MSP and VMS are more commonplace and more enterprise–friendly than in any other period in our industry before. Consumerization is comfortable, it feels good, it looks good, drives adoption. Good points there.

Shifting here to achieving diversity goals. I know that outside of the business realm here, we’re talking about politics and an incoming presidential administration that may be doing a little bit of work to trim down on government diversity goals and DEI legislature. But you’re seeing some very big brands strip down their DEI initiatives, and I know it’s disheartening to people that are very passionate about it. But I for one don’t think that DEI I is going anywhere. The mark of a great organization is being very diverse, and it’s not just diverse suppliers.

The more diverse your talent pool, the better and deeper access you have to other outlets of innovation. The more diversity, the more equitable your organization is, the more inclusive your workforce is of genders, race, culture, backgrounds, the better off your organization is going to be from a skills perspective, and I think that that’s something that a lot of organizations seem to forget. 

So quick, Brad, before I hand it back over to you because we want to link it back to this theme of your MSP 2025 playbook, I thought it’d be interesting to take a cross section of data and Ardent Future of Work Exchange research, and I basically plugged in these four cross sections of data, not using any type of MSP or contingent workforce solution, that does include VMS as well, Gen 1 programs that are MSP led, Gen 2 programs that are MSP led and Gen 3 or later. 

And so obviously the very easy correlation is the more mature the program leveraging MSP, the more likely that organization is to have proper DEI principles, meaning that they’re standardized, they’ve been put in place, they’re adopted, and they’re actively leveraged and utilized. The simple correlation here is that the MSP model combined with the maturity of our program results in DEI becoming a foundational piece of their talent and hiring strategies. Brad, I know this data shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s good as a bedrock of what we’re talking about in terms of DEI.

Brad Martin:

Yeah, it is actually, and it draws a really clear picture. When MSPs are involved, whether it’s Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3 or later program, increasingly as you go down that path, there’s a greater focus and greater achievement towards goals of DEI within the contingent workforce management program. I mean, the data says it right here. I think this will continue to be important, to your point, and even more so as we approach that 50% threshold of your workforce, almost 50% is non-FTE. You need to have your DEI strategy built into that as well. An MSP can help with that, certainly.

And it goes well beyond, as you mentioned, working with diverse suppliers and achieving diverse spin. Atrium is woman–owned. We are WBENC-certified, MSDUK–certified, that’s very important. But what that also does is that helps when we work with our clients, diversity is in our DNA, and working with partners where that’s the case, it can really help to ensure that we have an understanding what these programs should look like. We can help you set clear DEI goals, work with the clients. MSP partners will work with their clients to help establish clear DEI goals within the contingent program, help to obviously engage other diverse suppliers, create diverse talent pools and workforce, and then ultimately, have responsibility for helping to measure that under the MSP program, ensure that goals are being hit and adjust as necessary if for whatever reason they’re not. It needs to be a component.

We talked about one of the 2025 trends being more strategic with your contingent workforce. Well, this is a component of that without question. And so having a partner where diversity is in their DNA, where there’s a common understanding of what needs to be achieved within the organization from a diversity perspective, measure into those and then taking action upon that to ensure optimization. It’s critically important. It will continue to be important, and it should be, as 50% of workforce should be considered as one of the top strategic components of a program.

Christopher Dwyer:

And the other thing too, that I’m thinking about now, and Brad, curious to get your thoughts on this – We talk so much about the candidate experience, and I’m not saying it’s an overused phrase, I think sometimes it’s not used enough. But the idea is that at the end of the day, what powers your organization to thrive and be successful is the talent that you have, especially in 2025.

It’s 2025. We’re literally living in the future. And the idea is that you need skill sets that you probably couldn’t even dream existed five or six or seven years ago. Expanding your talent pool to be more diverse and inclusive is probably one of the top two or three ways you find that next level talent that you need. I mean, Brad, I’m sure you’d agree with that.

Brad Martin:

You do, and it’s a great way to drive innovation too. You have a diverse workforce, in this case, contingent workforce. You get a diverse group of opinions and different ways to approach programs and skill sets, as you mentioned. So, it certainly becomes a competitive advantage as you build your workforce in that way.

Christopher Dwyer:

And Brad, I forgot a housekeeping item at the very beginning. I’ll make my apologies to John and your team. Yes, everyone will receive a copy of the slides and an access to the recording too. So, if you’re late and you missed Brad and I’s long, rambling discussions here over the course of the past 35 minutes or so, don’t worry, you’ll have access.

Okay, so wrapping up the conversation around DEI. And again, this is another one of those topics I think that we could talk about a lot more, but we’ll go into more nerd territory because both Brad and I are talent intelligence and data nerds. You don’t mind me calling you a nerd?

Brad Martin:  

Oh, hey, I own that. I own that.

Christopher Dwyer:

Awesome. But again, it’s not just data anymore. It’s not just reporting or analytics. I’ve often said that talent intelligence is really the lifeblood of any hiring, recruitment or talent acquisition initiative and it should be the foundation for your contingent workforce program. And what we see here is again, literally speaking of being a data nerd, this is literally a cross section of data where we looked at companies that have an MSP in place regardless of maturity or generation, but just clean-cut MSP versus not using MSP.

And there’s a lot of many different flavors of data here that the MSP has been able to drive versus companies that don’t have an MSP in place today. Not saying that they don’t have access to this data, the data is sitting there, but they may not have the right tools and procedures and processes to actually mine that data and find the gold within it.

But you know, I really love how I’m realizing this now, weeks after putting it together, but it’s again like a rainbow of different aspects of our industry – Cost data, planning data, diversity data, intelligence data, skills data. The MSP really supports sort of that full boat of true end to end workforce and talent intelligence. And again, Brad, I’m sure you will not disagree with that.

Brad Martin:

I will not disagree with that; I’ll double down on it. Your MSP partner, it’s how we do it at Atrium, any next generation MSP not only can help you with data, analytics, data insights, they should. It is table stakes. We are at the moment now where this is table stakes for anybody who considers themselves a modern MSP or even next generation MSP.

There’s a lot of different types of data that will accompany a contingent workforce program. There’s the transactional reporting, there’s the stuff you get out of the day-to-day systems you use that will help you understand at that granular level, that very tactical level, what’s happening every day and make sure that things are flowing correctly. There’s the taking a step back, a bigger kind of wider view.

There’s the dashboard view which takes all program data, all your contingent workforce data from various systems that manage different pieces of contingent workforce puzzle, puts it in these dashboards where you can actually take a historical look at what’s happening within our program – Where can we drive optimizations? Where do we have opportunities to make improvements? And that’s done through suites that present these executive dashboards and so forth. Extremely important, extremely helpful to have those and get a view over. It’s like this again. It’s that “light switch moment” of everything was dark. Well, I have this reporting suite now that shows me everything that’s going on and I have visibility, visibility is key.

But then there’s the next step beyond that, which is this strategic workforce planning that can happen. This is the look forward, it’s the leveraging rate data. It’s compiling not only your contingent workforce data, but also then bringing in your full-time data to view it side by side to make future workforce decisions.

If we know we have jobs or projects coming up, where should we deploy those? What’s that going to cost me? Where have we had success in the past that will help to dictate future success? It’s even leveraging AI and it will be more leveraging AI in some of these cases to help with some of these predictive analytics, this predictive workforce planning.

And it’s really that area where you’re driving a lot of the value of the contingent workforce program. Again, consuming some of the FTE data then as well is really helping to drive decisions that you just couldn’t do years ago, and it’s table stakes now. It needs to be something that everybody’s doing. And all this of course leads down the path, when I talk about bringing FTE data in side by side, leads down the path of a trend that we’ve heard for several years of Total Talent Management.

I tend to think Total Talent Management is a journey. It’s not necessarily a destination. It’s something that everybody’s building to. Companies do it. MSPs that are working with companies do it to varying degrees. Certainly, the further you get down that line, the better. We’re not at a moment yet where anybody can put a stake in the ground and claim, “I have Total Talent Management within my organization, full 100% tip to tail”. It’s still a journey to get there because there’s so many components, there’s so much technology we’re plugging into it now that will help enable that. But these are the different types of reporting that are absolutely just table stakes for how an MSP should be engaging as a partner today.

Christopher Dwyer:

Love it, Brad. And again, I love that you bring up Total Talent. I think that would have been, if we had more time, probably one of the MSP Playbook 2025 Trends here. And I’m going to ask you one more question about Total Talent in a second again, because, like me, you’ve spent many a year in our space and for all of the conversation around Total Talent, but I remember back in 2011, 2012, working with another analyst in the HR tech space at a prior organization, writing the industry’s very first report on Total Talent Management. And I remember saying something like, and I will fully own up to it, within four or five years, we’d see the vast majority of businesses adopting a Total Talent Management strategy. Well, I’m wrong. I was wrong.

This is one of the very divisive topics in our space. Some folks think that it’s mired in theory, but, with the right tools and processes, it maybe could happen. I look at it, and I’m sure Brad does too. You look at it strategically, it’s procurement, HR and TA being on the same page, but there are groups like Governance and Compliance and your recruitment teams and your hiring managers that need to be part of the program, mixing of services and also convergence and integrations of technologies as well.

And there’s a point here to all of this rambling story – I think several years ago, definitely in the midst of the pandemic, when it became really critical for businesses to understand the totality of their talent, I remember talking to a Talent Acquisition VP who worked for an organization that owned and operated maybe like 14 warehouses right across the country. A COVID outbreak happens, and this is like August 2020, right in the thick of it, a COVID outbreak happens. You know, isn’t it really beneficial for you to know what skill sets am I losing? Like if we get to shut down the factory, the warehouse or whatever type of workplace for a week or three days, what skill sets am I missing? Where can I shift things around? It’s like a slinky rolling down the stairs. Like one problem begets another. Like, okay, what happens then?

But I think one thing that sparked my thought process back then was Total Talent Management, like Brad said, it’s not a destination, it’s definitely a journey. Total Talent Intelligence needs to be the goal for businesses. You need to be able to see and feel, embrace, understand, actually be able to leverage data from your traditional workforce as well as your external workforce as well.

Brad, I kind of rambled there, not really a question for you.

Brad Martin:

Yeah, it’s your contingent workforce, it’s your FTE workforce, but it’s also data, the other data sources, third party data sources, industry benchmarks, these types of things. The more you can pull in, it gives you a more clear view of things like where skill surges are, what costs would be for X, Y and Z in this region. The more that that these programs grow globally, these are all things that are going to be decisions, workforce decisions that will need to be made, and having that Total Talent Intelligence like you mentioned is a key component of it.

Christopher Dwyer:

Awesome. Brad, we probably need a podcast on Total Talent between you and I.

Brad Martin:

We need a podcast on all of these.

Christopher Dwyer: 

So that was our final MSP playbook item for the webinar, and I know we’ve got some time left, but more of an open discussion here. These are some other trends, some of them we talked about, some of them we alluded to, and some of them we didn’t talk about at all, but certain components of it we kind of hit on very, very quickly.

These are trends that I thought would be a bigger piece of the modern contemporary business in 2025.

First one is data driven everything. Brad, that’s one of the many themes today, right? Data driven everything. But there’s other things as well. The idea of human centered digital design, and one slide that we didn’t have room to put in the webcast today because I didn’t want to bombard people with too much data because it can be overwhelming, but we asked, “How you expect your workforce, how do you expect your business to change over the next three to five years”? And the number one answer was free up, leverage digitization to help humans be more creative and collaborative, and that was above things like remote work and other things we’ve talked about today. And it sort of sparked this conversation around human centered digital design, where the idea of digitization or the digital enterprise should be and can be a goal, but it needs to be human centered and human driven because, at the end of the day, we are humans.

And on that note, the idea of humanity, and I put that in quotations, but I remember writing something for the Future of Work Exchange site a few years ago, and I said the future of work needs to be more human. And I even said that at our annual event back in Boston in the summer of 2024, and my major takeaway, and I said this to everyone in the room, my major takeaway today is that the future of work is human. We are all human. We are people. We are the ones driving the bus, and things like human emotions and empathy and the evolution of business leadership, I always say, is one of the more critical avenues of the future of work and has nothing to do with technology whatsoever. It’s just thinking differently and embracing new concepts and new ideas, but humanity is a big piece of it.

Brad, I’m trying to think like a cross section of these three – data, humanity and digital design. Any commentary before I just shift over to the second half of these?

Brad Martin:

Yeah, I think that in the second half, but I’ll pull it into the first half here, AI, going back to that topic, intersects with humanity in terms of how we leverage it. No question. And so, I think what’s going to be very interesting to see is as we all start to come to grips with the various things that AI can do beyond just what we’ve kind of traditionally done with it in our industry, we are a people industry and humanity needs to be the core component of every interaction we have because it drives all of the other stuff we’re talking about. We are a people industry, and so, when you talk about something like AI, which has the potential to temporarily remove people from some of these flows and replace with AI or augment the way that we interact with people, it has to be done with the view of “How can I do this in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the humanity of these interactions?”

And so, I think that’s going to be a really interesting balancing act in our industry specifically, as we go forward in 2025 and beyond. I’m excited to see how that that plays out and next year this time have some conversations about what our observations there were.

Christopher Dwyer:

Yeah, love it. And the other thing we’ll maybe wrap up on this slide is the idea around skills. I’ve got two ideas here – You have the skills-based enterprise and something I call skills tribes or the skills revolution. Take the left side first, skills-based enterprise. We all have heard of skills-based hiring, right? That’s not a new concept. But the idea is that you’re hiring for skills rather than around a job rate or a role or a very antiquated, archaic list of prerequisites. You’re hiring for skills, and the idea is if you hire for skills, you’re obviously sparking innovation, you’re driving value. It‘s a higher quality hire if you’re hiring for skills. And to me the idea of the skills–based enterprise is one that just prioritizes skills–based hiring. I don’t think there’s anything fancy around that.

The idea of skills tribes – I see this as not something that companies are going to put in place tomorrow, but maybe throughout the year we’ll start to see some instances of businesses being more deliberate around segregating their talent communities into more, I call them skills tribes, you can call them whatever you want, but the idea that our hiring strategies are based on skills and our data behind that, the way that we look at our internal talent communities, our FTEs, our contingent workers is all based on skills. So rather than geography or region or location or something like that, the focus for Talent Community Management is more on skills tribes and this is what I call the skills revolution.

So, Brad, any final comments before we move to Q&A?

Brad Martin:

No, I mean I just second what you just said on skills-based hiring. I think that getting outside the confines of specific job requirements and hiring based on skill set, it frees you up, creates more innovative workforce with broader skill set that isn’t constrained by specific job requirements. So, it’s seeing more of that – certainly is an interesting trend.

Christopher Dwyer: 

Great. All right, so we are going to shift to Q&A.

Now, we’ve got plenty of time here, so if you have any other questions, get them in. I’m going to introduce John on the Atrium team to ask any of the questions.

But John, I saw one come in, before you ask the other questions, around mid-market contingent labor. And I’ll answer that one first and then Brad, you can chime in if you’d like. The mid-market, and I think there’s different ways to define it, whether you’re defining it by number of employees, number of workers or by contingent workforce spend, that’s another way, but I think the mid-market as a whole is going through a sort of extended workforce renaissance. You saw larger organizations be more strategic around contingent workforce management. I think you’re seeing that age for the mid-market. In the past, they didn’t really have access to the bigger tools, technologies and solutions that their larger peers did.

Now that the Talent Technology ecosystem is more accessible and it’s very accessible to pretty much even the smallest of organizations, you’re seeing the mid-market being more deliberate, more strategic around their contingent workforce programs even if it’s only 25 or 30 million in spend. For those organizations, like any other, this type of talent is sometimes what determines whether they’ll be successful or not in a highly globalized, highly competitive world.

I’m sure there’s more thoughts that I’m missing just off the cuff here, but Brad, thoughts on the mid-market? 

Brad Martin:

Yeah, you talked about technology. I completely agree. I think that there is certainly a push from the technology perspective. This idea of mid-market renaissance, by the way, I love that as well because it really is this kind of catching up of mid–markets now embracing more contingent workforces as part of the workforce as well. 

Technology companies we’re seeing are certainly taking a notice to that. There are new technology companies coming out that have workforce solutions that are targeted to the mid-market specifically, and then some of the bigger players have begun to create solutions that are more custom designed to service that specific market.

And so, as an MSP partner we do have a lot of mid-market clients. Technology agnostic is certainly a very important component of that, making sure that you can grab as an MSP partner for your client, help them understand what their technology ecosystem should look like, grab the right solutions for them at the moment where they’re at. Not designing them like an enormous program, but one that will function for the goals that they need to achieve with the right technologies integrated and set up in the right way. And just designing the program overall to fit them is certainly something from a service perspective and a management perspective that we’re seeing a lot of.

But yeah, the technology is very, very interesting right now. It’s not a shift, it’s an additive, it’s an addition to. So, there’s a lot more happening there. 

Christopher Dwyer: 

Yeah, I love that. I mean again, I think that really plays along with the idea of just being more accessible to a sector that for years just was sort of on the outside looking in. Love that, Brad. Love it. 

John, sorry, I know I stole one of the questions there, but any others in the queue? 

John:

No worries. Yes, we have a question on AI. I know you guys touched on it, but question was, “With AI being the most hyped tech that everyone will be talking about this year, what are some additional implications for our industry”?

Christopher Dwyer: 

Brad, you want to take that now? 

Brad Martin:

Yeah, I think we’re going to see more of and we’ve seen some dabbling in this to varying degrees, but we’re going to see more of enhanced talent screening, leveraging AI in sourcing, using natural language processing, NLP, for analyzing job descriptions, matching that to specific resumes and pulling out data insights from those resumes that may not be apparent to just somebody that’s reading them and helping to create better matches, I think is something we’re going to start seeing a lot more of.

We talked a little bit about in the world of analytics and reporting, how AI can start to be plugged more into that from this predictive analytics perspective to be able to take data that’s in there historically and use that in order to help predict things like skill surges or just as an organization, different parts of the year where we see varying needs for different types of skills that can help us get ahead of sourcing those.

There’s views that AI can give us that that we wouldn’t otherwise have or be very difficult to get to, very time consuming to get to. And then mitigating bias, continuing to help mitigate hiring bias and biases and interviews and so on and so forth. So, I think there’s a lot of areas and a lot more that I didn’t hit on. Some of the really kind of AI leaning forward type stuff. Chris, I’d be interested for your thoughts on that. 

Christopher Dwyer:

Yeah, I’ll echo a lot of what you said there, pretty much everything that you said. I think that AI’s biggest avenue, at least in the shorter term this year is around skills-based hiring. Improving the way that businesses build skills taxonomies, build a foundation of skills intelligence. I think that it’s helpful for businesses, and I know this really wasn’t the question itself, but I think a lot of business leaders are sort of underwater in terms of AI.

Brad, you and I can scroll through LinkedIn and I would say 75% of the posts have something to do with AI, just knowing that you and I have thousands of mutual connections and we’re part of the same industry. It’s like direct sourcing, a couple of years ago you get underwater with trying to figure out what is this all about? What does it mean for my organization?

And AI I think is similar. It’s also a little bit different because we’ve leveraged AI in our consumer lives. There’s that idea of consumerization. But I think the best way to think about it is that AI isn’t robotic and just automation that’s going to replace certain processes, and yeah, that’s one of its main avenues of value, but in terms of augmenting and actually catalyzing some bigger strategies, especially like skills-based hiring, AI, an AI platform, thinking of a company like Opli. There’s a bunch of companies out there that do very, very cool things around AI. Imagine a company coming in a platform building a true skills taxonomy where within seconds you can truly understand what are the depth of skill sets across the entirety of my organization? It‘s stuff like that to me, those are the real big deal implications.

Brad Martin:

Yeah, and just to tack onto that also, there’s so much we can do with AI and there’s so many fantastic ideas and different ways we can plug AI in. And I think that we’re at the beginning of this journey where not everything that we all implement is going to work.

And so that’s part of it, that’s work in terms of, yield the results we’re hoping for. I think there’s going to be a lot of trial and error of, “Let’s try this component of AI within our stack, see if that actually yields the benefits we anticipate”. It’s going to be a little bit of a learning process, but certainly not something that I think anybody’s going to shy away from.

Christopher Dwyer:  

John, maybe take one more before we wrap up?

John:

Yeah, I think we got time. Yes, squeeze in one last question. This is a big one, so I guess try to be quick. Given the major shifts in politics, the economy and so on, where do you see MSPs supporting clients beyond traditional measures?

Christopher Dwyer: 

Brad, I’m going to let you lead this one.

Brad Martin:

Yeah. I don’t know that it necessarily has political implications, so the first part of that question, but I do think that we are entering and, in some way even say, past the moment where the expectation of an MSP and the legacy definition of what MSP has historically done for clients has materially changed. There’s a lot more expectation for the MSP to be a strategic partner. There’s a lot more expectation for the MSP to help problem solve in different areas that historically an MSP would not necessarily be considered.

And certainly, all of these other solutions that we’re talking about that help to drive talent pools, drive diversity, drive cost optimizations, integrate technology, these are all components that fall underneath that MSP umbrella. So, I think that there is an increased understanding what MSP should do and increased expectation of the MSP’s participation in the strategic side of things.

Christopher Dwyer:

And I’ll just add one thing here because I know it’s kind of a loaded question around economy, politics and “beyond business”. But I think Brad nailed it in terms of the “strategic partnership”. An MSP is there for you as an organization to support you. It’s not point and click technology. It’s so much more than an outsourced solution. Whether your company’s having challenges with immigration or tariffs, whatever it is that’s happening out there in the economy, whether it’s a ramification of a new political administration here in the United States, the fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, like Brad said, it’s strategic partnership. They are there for you to help you navigate. I think it’s probably the best answer. Navigate the modern happenings out there in our business landscape. 

So, thank you, John, appreciate you forwarding those questions along.

I want to thank everyone that took the time to spend their morning, or if you’re across the seas, maybe you spent your late afternoon, early evening with us, or in the west coast, you spent your early morning with us. But I know on behalf of Atrium, Arden Partners of Future Work Exchange, we do truly appreciate the time everyone spent with us this morning.

And Brad, I could not think of a better partner to speak with than you today, my friend. So, thank you for joining me.

Brad Martin:

Thank you, everybody.