Flexible talent is being led outside HR and procurement

The chapter in brief

Through our executive network, we sit down with the buyers actually implementing flexible talent. Most of them work in innovation or strategy, deliberately outside the traditional parts of HR and procurement. At one of our dinners, none of the eight enterprise buyers in the room had an HR title.

Split ownership has a cost. When strategy sits in one place and hiring in another, work slips outside the program, and many companies have limited visibility into it.

The program leaders we spoke with say the answer is a program that is easier to use than to avoid. A company can block and restrict, and the business will find its way around it, or it can build a solution that lets business users do what they do, with compliance threaded through it. At Snowflake, Natalie Javid measures her program partly by whether managers keep using it, and it has doubled in size every year.

John Healy, who ran the Office of the Future of Work at Kelly Services, saw what happens when the end users design the process. Given free rein by the CEO of a high-tech company of about 30,000 workers, he left HR and procurement out of the room, brought in the managers responsible for getting the work done, and set two ground rules: no technology gets swapped out, and no policy gets changed. Every hiring manager started from one place: do we already know someone? And if not, what is the quickest path to finding someone we can trust?

For HR, there are two paths: lead the change and own a more agile organization, or fade into the background while someone else solves the talent problem. The job may already belong to whoever pays for the outcome, because that is the person who feels the delay.