A practical look at the missteps that slow down enterprise talent programs, and how to address them
The meeting had been on the calendar for weeks. The agenda: figure out why a workforce expansion into three new markets had stalled.
The VP of Talent Acquisition came prepared. She had data from four vendors. Her procurement lead had data from two others. The CFO’s team was pulling numbers from a VMS that hadn’t been updated since the prior quarter. None of it matched.
Nobody had done anything wrong. The organization had simply grown faster than its procurement infrastructure. What worked in one market had been copied into the next, then the next, until a patchwork of vendor relationships, inconsistent compliance standards, and disconnected data had quietly become the operating model.
That scenario is more common than most organizations want to admit. And recognizing it is the first step toward fixing it.
When Survival Becomes the Strategy
Most contingent workforce programs weren’t designed. They evolved.
A capacity gap opened up, and a staffing vendor filled it. A cost-reduction mandate came down, and a cheaper supplier got added. A new market opened, and someone reused the existing vendor relationships because it was faster than building new ones. A compliance question surfaced, got addressed, and then the process that prompted it went back to running the same way it had before.
Repeat that cycle across several years and several geographies, and you end up with a program that has grown quite large while remaining fundamentally reactive. The vendors are different in each region. The compliance standards vary. The reporting doesn’t connect. And the people managing the program are spending most of their time keeping up rather than getting ahead.
At the SIA Contingent Workforce Strategies Summit in 2026, senior researcher Peter Reagan put it plainly: too many organizations have mistaken the pressure valve for a strategy. The program kept the business running. That’s not the same thing as the program working well.
The global contingent workforce market represents $10.2 trillion in spend, according to figures cited at the SIA CWS Summit, with contingent labor already making up about 21% of the typical organization’s total headcount and expected to grow from there.
At that scale, a program built on reactive improvisation doesn’t just underperform. It creates compounding risk that most organizations don’t fully see until something goes wrong. And by the time it becomes visible, the cost of fixing it is considerably higher than the cost of preventing it would have been.
The first step is understanding the pattern. It tends to unfold the same way across organizations of different sizes, industries, and regions.
Three Missteps That Tend to Show Up Together
When enterprise procurement programs break down, it rarely happens all at once. It unfolds in a sequence. Understanding that sequence makes it much easier to diagnose where your program actually is.
First: a governance gap
Most vendor fragmentation isn’t really a vendor problem. It’s a governance problem.
Deloitte’s Global Outsourcing Survey 2024 found that only 20% of organizations have their vendor management function owning extended workforce strategy. Seven in ten say their vendor management office is not fully mature.
That means the majority of organizations are managing a large, complex, and growing contingent workforce without a clearly defined owner for that strategy. Vendors multiply because no one has both the authority and the visibility to consolidate them. Standards vary by market because no one has set standards that cross markets. Reporting is inconsistent because no one has required it to be consistent.
This isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a failure of design.
Second: reactive procurement cycles
Without consolidated data and clear ownership, proactive workforce planning becomes very difficult. When you can’t see your full vendor landscape, you can’t forecast against it. When you can’t forecast, you respond.
Reactive procurement means hiring in response to demand rather than ahead of it. That pattern drives up costs, limits the quality of available talent, and puts constant pressure on the people managing the program. It also makes every disruption, whether that’s a market shift, a regulatory change, or a talent shortage, harder to absorb.
The Deloitte 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey found that rising cost pressure and regulatory complexity are among the top concerns for procurement leaders globally. Those pressures are easier to manage when procurement is planned. They are much harder to manage when procurement is catching up.
Third: deferred compliance
Under reactive pressure, compliance tends to get treated as something to address when it becomes a problem. Audits happen. Contracts are reviewed. Classification questions get answered when someone raises them.
That approach has a measurable cost. PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025, which gathered responses from 1,802 executives across 63 countries, found that 85% say compliance requirements have become more complex over the last three years. More important, 77% say that complexity has negatively affected five or more areas of their business, including market expansion, business transformation, and profitability.
Compliance complexity is not just a legal risk. It is a growth drag. And it compounds when the underlying procurement structure was never designed to handle it proactively.
How the Three Problems Feed Each Other
Here is the pattern that tends to emerge when all three missteps are present at once.
Fragmented vendors generate inconsistent data. Different vendors classify workers differently, report differently, and follow different compliance practices across markets. That inconsistency makes it nearly impossible to build a reliable picture of the contingent workforce.
Without that picture, strategic planning stalls. Procurement defaults to reacting to demand. Speed becomes the priority, which means compliance questions often get deferred. Pressure to fill roles fast is not an environment where classification review happens carefully.
When compliance issues surface, they surface late, after the workforce relationship is established and unwinding it is costly. According to modeling from Plante Moran, a single misclassified worker at $100,000 in annual wages can generate more than $135,000 in cumulative employment tax liability before interest and penalties over three years.
The three missteps are not independent problems. They are a chain. And the chain tends to tighten as the program grows.
This is also why the SIA 2024 Workforce Solutions Buyers Survey found that roughly 57% of enterprise respondents planned to go out to RFP for at least one technology or service within the following 12 months. Organizations are recognizing that the infrastructure they built under pressure is not the infrastructure they need going forward.
What Smarter Procurement Looks Like
The good news is that fixing this doesn’t require rebuilding everything at once. It requires starting in the right place.
The right place is governance and visibility.
Before a program can become proactive, the people running it need a clear picture of what they’re actually managing. That means consolidated vendor data, defined ownership of extended workforce strategy, and consistent standards that apply across markets rather than varying by region or business unit.
PwC’s research points to something worth noting here. When they surveyed compliance leaders about where technology was making the biggest difference, the top answer was better visibility into risks and risk management activities, cited by 64% of respondents. The second was faster identification and proactive response to compliance issues, at 53%.
Visibility precedes proactivity. That’s the sequence.
Once governance and visibility are in place, proactive planning becomes possible. Procurement cycles can shift from reactive to anticipatory. Compliance can be built into vendor evaluation and onboarding rather than reviewed after the fact. Standards can be set once and applied consistently, whether a worker is in one country or thirty.
That shift also creates a competitive opportunity that is easy to underestimate. PwC found that only 7% of organizations currently consider themselves leaders in compliance. But 38% aim to be within three years. The organizations that close that gap will be moving faster, managing risk better, and attracting stronger talent than the ones still running reactive programs.
Smart talent procurement is not primarily a cost reduction exercise. It is a capability that compounds over time. The organizations building it now are pulling ahead of those who haven’t started yet.
You Don’t Have to Get There All at Once
For most organizations, the path from reactive to strategic procurement is a progression, not a single transformation. A program that spans several countries, multiple regions, and dozens of vendor relationships didn’t become complex overnight. It won’t become simple overnight, either.
What matters is starting with an honest assessment of where the program actually is. Where is ownership unclear? Where is vendor data inconsistent? Where are compliance questions being deferred that shouldn’t be?
Those are the pressure points. Finding them is the first step.
People2.0 works with enterprise organizations and their talent partners around the world to build contingent workforce programs that are structured for scale, not just survival. Whether you’re managing a workforce across a handful of markets or across more than 130 countries, we can help you identify where your program has gaps and what a smarter approach looks like for your specific situation.
Ready to take a closer look? Let’s connect!
