Sourcing Industry Group (SIG) recently wrapped up its 2021 Technology Procurement Summit, a digital event from May 4-6th. Utmost’s Head of Client Services, Erika Novak, sat down with Associate Director, Talent Acquisition at Sage Therapeutics, Jessica Wall, for a lively discussion about “Why a Traditional VMS Just Wasn’t Enough.”
Jessica has a lot of experience in talent acquisition. She’s been on various sides of the business -- client, agency, MSP, and RPO -- giving her a unique perspective on how she’s reimagining the future of work at Sage. In the discussion, she highlighted the need for all human capital to be considered to revolutionize how companies view their workforce and take advantage of the increase in new, flexible talent.
When asked why total talent management makes sense for their growing workforce, Jessica said her vision “is to create an ecosystem for an extended workforce that gives us a competitive advantage,” which is “not possible without looking at the entire workforce.”
For the team at Sage, all human capital must be taken into consideration -- permanent employees, service providers, interns, gig workers, 1099s, contractors, and others. The goal of talent acquisition is to work with their business leaders to identify a need, and then they can decide what lever to pull to do the work.
Several pain points needed to be addressed in terms of their lack of access to data, analytics, and reporting not being enabled in other systems causing a lack of visibility into the total workforce. They also needed to improve how they engage and communicate with their suppliers. Ideally, we needed to focus on the worker, supplier, and enterprise at the same time,” she said. “Once that house and foundation are set, it makes everything else achievable.”
Why Utmost?
In addition to a technology that can truly manage across the entire workforce, risk mitigation and user experience were also important to Sage. Cost savings, visibility, data and analytics, and efficiency are high on the list as well, but Jessica said it was their desire to revolutionize how they view their workforce that was a top priority. “We want to take advantage of the increase in new flexible talent (nearly half of the total workforce), evolve our program, and do so in a scalable way.
The guiding principles of Jessica’s group are to create a high-touch, high-quality experience for all stakeholders that was efficient, agile, and innovative, and “Utmost did that for us,” she said. “We believe it was fit for purpose.”
“At Sage, we engage innovative partners to create a holistic model and lean on expertise in the market to help us with our internally managed program.” To do that, having access to accurate data to drive decision-making was also critical. “Otherwise it’s not scalable,” Jesscia continued. “We need something to compel the business. We’re doing a ton of hiring, and the workforce is changing. We need to know how we can attract and retain new types of talent. To do so, innovation is key.”
Utmost also solved the problem of access to analytics via the dashboarding functionality and real-time access to reporting. “Worker centric-enterprise, workers themselves, suppliers, they all matter,” said Jessica. “Better outcomes will happen if everyone is happy.”
Why Workday?
When looking at partners and what is on the forefront in the next five years, “If systems aren’t integrated, it’s going to cause big challenges,” she said. “Disparate systems are not conducive to growing our business.”
She also mentioned that they had to think purposefully about the gaps that existed within the organization today. For them, plug-ins and third-party integrations would not work. Utmost made the most sense as a Workday customer because it’s the only platform with a native Workday integration.
“Do big”
When asked what excited Jessica about emerging technologies, she answered with a definitive: “Do big.” For her, these technologies allow Sage to be more innovative, take risks, and offer them what we need in a way they didn’t expect.
For example, Sage wanted to bring suppliers into their operational reality, which will enable them to succeed when sourcing talent. “Invest in them and they will invest in you,” she said. “It impacts relationships, candidate equality, quality, retention, and overall program success.”
One way to do this is to remove barriers and offer transparency. Measuring KPIs, SLAs, and other key measures is important but so is “being able to see things in real-time.” For Sage, transparency is critical, and having full visibility across the entire workforce and providing that to their suppliers allows them to be forward-thinking, not reactive. “We want to create an environment of excitement,” Jessica said.
We’re thrilled to partner with Sage and forward-thinking companies on how to create visibility across the entire workforce, provide a better user experience and integrations, and make it easy to engage all types of workers to bring in top talent from around the globe.
If you want more information on how Utmost helps companies like Sage, consider attending a live 30 min demo. Save your spot here.
