MSP stands for Managed Service Provider. We take over the management of your entire contingent workforce, from sourcing to compliance, using one seamless solution that saves you time and headaches.

"Contingent worker" is a catch-all term used to describe people who are doing work for your organisation but who aren't employed by you. It covers workers like independent contractors, PAYG contractors, temporary workers, labour hire staff, consultants and even resources who are supplied through a services provider. Therefore, a contractor is a type of contingent worker. You might also see "contingent worker" or "contingent workforce" used interchangeably with "external workforce" or "extended workforce".

If you’re struggling with the burden of trying to manage many recruitment suppliers and many contingent workers, then an MSP could be right for your organisation. We’ve seen organisations deploy an MSP model for a couple dozen contractors all the way up to thousands of contingent workers distributed globally. If you can’t confidently answer “yes” all the following example questions, it is worth exploring our MSP solutions: • Do you know how many contingent workers are in your company right now? • Do you have transparency of all supplier, statutory and contingent worker costs and that they’re being applied as you expect them to be? • Do you have visibility that contingent workers are compliantly onboarded, paid and offboarded? • Do you know you’re paying competitive market rates for every contingent worker? • Can you validate that all your contingent workers are top quality and represent value for money? • Are you satisfied with the time it takes to find, assess, select and engage contingent workers?

MSP focuses on managing your contingent workforce—those who aren’t employees, but still work for you. It covers things like multiple supplier relationships, complex billing, payroll, and ensuring compliance with regulations. RPO, on the other hand, is all about hiring employees, acting as an extension of your internal talent team. Sometimes, these models can be blended into what's called Total Talent Acquisition (TTA), where one partner manages both contingent and permanent recruitment. For example, that’s how we work with Yahoo.

Yes, absolutely. In fact, in the spirit of our #OneTeam mantra, an MSP often becomes an embedded extension of our client’s TA team. While your internal team focuses on their core priorities, we’ll take care of the contingent workforce. The contingent workforce can sometimes struggle to find a natural home – sitting across Procurement, HR and TA all at once. Therefore, newfound ownership accountability and expertise in this key area is usually welcomed with open arms!

Yes. In fact, an MSP will bring centralised governance and process consistency to the way your panel is utilised. Your MSP is a one-stop-shop conduit between the business and your supply chain, facilitating meaningful interactions and sparing managers the burden of liaising with multiple suppliers at a time. You’ll benefit from detailed reporting and analysis of which suppliers are being used, where and by whom, and who your top performing agencies really are. We’ll objectively validate that the service and financial commitments made in your supplier contracts are being adhered to in practice.

An MSP can generate cost savings of 5-20% of contingent workforce spend. This is achieved through a variety of means: from traditional initiatives like benchmarking more competitive supplier and worker pay rates, and implementing tenure or volume-based discount structures, through to more modern and future-focused strategies like demand planning, direct sourcing and increasing the use of lower-cost sourcing channels.