Earlier this year, we initiated the first of our planned 20 for 2020 series’ as an echo to the 10 for 2010 series that we used to launch this site. That first 2020 series focused on the key themes and ideas that Chief Procurement Officers should have on their agenda this decade. This second series focuses on “Key Providers in the 2020s” which you can think of as (borrowing from Supply and Demand Chain Executive and countless others), the 20 “Solution Providers to Know” this decade. Today we focus on Beeline.
Key Provider in the 2020s – Beeline
Founded in 1999, Beeline is a cloud-based Vendor Management System (VMS) solution headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, with United States offices in Chicago, Troy (Michigan), and Parsippany (New Jersey). The solution also has global offices in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Once a strategic business unit of Adecco (its original parent company), one of the world’s largest staffing suppliers and providers of human capital automation, Beeline went through a transformational merger with fellow VMS giant IQNavigator in December 2016. In the summer of 2018, New York-based investment firm New Mountain Capital acquired the solution in yet another major transaction.
Beeline has long been known as a market leader and trusted provider in the VMS space, owing its longtime success to a firm commitment to contingent workforce management (CWM) optimization and forward-thinking technology and innovation. Buoyed by an incredibly deep technology partner ecosystem, a longstanding dedication to total workforce management, and a platform that supports the Future of Work movement, Ardent Partners has named Beeline one of its Key Solution Providers in the 2020s.
“Talent-Driven Digital Transformation”
“Gone are the days when we’re considered just a VMS,” Beeline CEO Doug Leeby said at their customer conference last year. “The integrations, the partners, our ecosystem…managing, generating, or sourcing talent, it makes sense for us to be in the middle of it all.”
Beeline has long been a “forward-thinking” VMS that thinks of itself as not just a central system of record for non-employee talent, but one that can facilitate many key processes within talent acquisition and workforce management beyond creating requisitions and ably filling them. During the first decade or so of the VMS model, it was often considered little more than “eProcurement for contingent staffing”; over the past several years, however, the Vendor Management System realm is actively offering enterprise-scale digital transformation that starts with how businesses optimize their talent mix.
Conversations around the Future of Work often revolve around artificial intelligence (AI), which Beeline actively integrates into core VMS functionality. Last year, the solution introduced the Beeline Knowledge Graph, which assist users in building deeper and more effective job descriptions, significantly augments job- and skillset-matching, and allows its clients to harness the incredible power of vast workforce data to execute superior decision-making when it comes to talent and work.
The Ecosystem Effect
Perhaps the most representative reason for Beeline’s “talent-led” philosophy is its robust partner ecosystem, which, once a strength of the IQNavigator network, has now coalesced into the market’s deepest under the Beeline brand. The contingent workforce management arena was once a simple structure: businesses turned to VMS automation, augmented their CWM operations with Managed Serviced Providers (MSPs), and filled in program gaps in an ad-hoc manner. Today, hiring managers, procurement leaders, and human capital executives need so much more; background screening is critical in a remote-first business world, services procurement and SOW management is required as professional services-bases spend continues to grow, and talent pools are required to expand a company’s overall depth of skillsets and expertise.
Beeline counts many of the world’s leading MSPs as part of its partner ecosystem, as well as independent contractor compliance platforms and services, human capital management systems (such as Workday), background and drug screening technology, and, perhaps most importantly, digital and on-demand staffing solutions. The company understands that, in order for businesses to effectively manage a growing and evolving non-employee workforce, “peripheral” augmentation is often required for the myriad attributes of talent management,
Beeline frequently adds new partners to its ecosystem and, in the coming months, will introduce a new API portal to facilitate even more innovative platforms into its already robust mix of partner solutions.
A Focus on Direct Sourcing
Ardent’s annual State of Contingent Workforce Management research study pegged direct sourcing and talent pool development as the top two priorities for businesses in 2020, a finding that proved, above all else, businesses are operating in a “talent-first” environment. And, as the highly anticipated Direct Sourcing Toolkit study (publishing this month) highlights: “Direct sourcing, also known as “self-sourcing,” has emerged over the past several years as a powerful instrument in the talent acquisition toolbox. Direct sourcing entails a business, in essence, acting as its own recruitment firm. By building “pools” of talent from curated sources and channels (i.e. referral programs, organizational alumni, silver medalists, job board postings, etc.), businesses can bypass traditional talent acquisition options (such as staffing suppliers and other third-party sources) when seeking the best-aligned talent for a particular job, role, or project.”
One of the core strengths of the Beeline VMS platform is its Talent Cloud Ecosystem, which includes direct sourcing technology and access to both private and public talent pools, which enables its users to directly-integrate enterprise talent pool candidates directly into organizational recruitment streams. Not only does this functionality reduce time-to-fill rates and overall recruitment costs, it also better matches open jobs, roles, and requisitions with the best-aligned skillsets and workers. Beeline has long been a pioneer in the direct sourcing technology space and, through its partnership with TalentNet and other direct sourcing solutions, will continue to help its clients optimize its total talent base.
From one of the early VMS providers and now one of the primary market leaders in the contingent workforce solutions industry, Beeline has evolved to become much more than a Vendor Management System. With a focus on talent-led digital transformation, commitment to innovation, and a firm alignment with the Future of Work movement, Beeline is positioned for even bigger things in the years ahead, and is one of Ardent Partners’ Key Providers in the 2020s.
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