Why Speed to Talent Beats Cost Savings in Contingent Hiring

Colin LaBeau, President of FoxHire, on what actually decides whether flexible talent works, drawn from an employer of record business running since 1992.

Speed to Talent, Not Cost Savings, Is What You Are Actually Buying

Tony Buffum spent two decades as an HR leader buying contingent labor, and he opened this episode with a confession. He started where nearly every buyer starts: rates, payment terms, how much he could shave off the invoice. Cost was the entry point, because cost is the number procurement asks about.

Then he used it, and the real return showed up somewhere else entirely. Speed to talent. The gap between an offer and a start date. The product launch that shipped on schedule instead of slipping a month. The team that stopped absorbing the workload of a seat nobody had filled.

Colin LaBeau sells the thing Tony was buying, and he does not argue. His teams sit in client meetings negotiating over hours, not days, of onboarding time. The reason is simple and slightly brutal: a candidate who does not get their employment agreement quickly takes the job from whoever sent theirs first.

"Why can't somebody accept a job today and start work tomorrow? What's holding that back?" - Colin LaBeau

It reframes the purchase from a rate card into an operating metric.

Multi-State Compliance Turns the US Into Fifty Different Countries

The reason speed is hard is that the rules are not one set of rules.

"It's the fifty countries of the US when it comes to payroll and employment laws." - Colin LaBeau

Some specifics, because the abstraction does not land the way the details do. Massachusetts and California both dictate how quickly a departing worker's final check has to clear, which means you cannot simply hand someone a check on their last day. Chicago has one PTO accrual law, Cook County has another, and Illinois has a third, all potentially stacked on a single worker depending on where they actually sit. Twenty-four states require a healthcare staffing license, each with its own reporting. Some jurisdictions cap bill rates. New York has pursued legislation to cap not just bill rates but margins.

No enterprise talent team is tracking all of that while also doing its actual job. So companies make one of two choices. They restrict hiring to the states where they are already set up to run payroll, quietly shrinking their talent pool. Or they bring in a partner.

FoxHire's answer to the sprawl is the most transferable idea in the episode: stop depending on people to remember.

"Remembering isn't really a thing. The software does the work for us." - Colin LaBeau

FoxHire has employment experts with 10, 20, even 30 years in the business, and Colin's position is that the company should not rest on that. The knowledge gets encoded into a rules engine: location, workers comp code, SOC code and form of engagement go in, and the platform derives the employment contract, the compliant timesheet and the pay timing. The client watches it happen without doing it.

Time to Hire Dies in the Onboarding Handoffs

Ask where the delay actually accumulates and Colin does not say paperwork volume. He says vendor sprawl.

A worker accepts an offer, then gets an email from the background check company. Another from the drug screen vendor. Another from whoever runs skills checklists. Another from the employer of record. Every one of those parties believes they are adding a couple of days. Together they are why a two-week offer-to-start will not compress no matter how hard anyone pushes.

FoxHire's fix is integration. Its partners, KarmaCheck among them, connect on the back end so the worker only ever sees one interface. The candidate works one checklist, and when it says complete, they are genuinely done.

The corollary is the part buyers should internalize: when systems are not integrated, someone is moving that data by hand, and that manual transfer is not just an expense. It is the delay itself.

The Risk You Cannot Price Into a Bill Rate

Colin is careful not to sell fear, which makes the risk argument land harder.

"How would you price the risk of a catastrophic workers comp claim, or a PAGA lawsuit in California, or a misclassification class action in Illinois? Because I don't think you're thinking about that when all you're looking at is bill rates." - Colin LaBeau

His framing is not that disaster is coming for you. It is that the exposure sits in a blind spot, and a good partner's job is to show you where the blind spots are so you can decide which populations to de-risk. That is a materially different conversation than "you will never figure this out."

It also exposes a gap in how most partner decisions get made. Buyers evaluate rate cards precisely and evaluate partner risk on a sales call.

Why Human Cloud Is Solving the Same Problem One Layer Up

The most useful idea in this episode is not about employer of record services at all. Expertise trapped in people's heads is a tax, and encoding it into infrastructure is how you stop paying it. FoxHire did that for employment compliance.

The flexible workforce has the identical problem one layer earlier. There are more than a thousand workforce platforms and providers, and finding the right one, verifying it does what it claims, and engaging it without inheriting a compliance project is knowledge work living in scattered heads, old spreadsheets, and whichever vendor a colleague used once. That is why buyers default to the incumbent they know, and why a better partner never gets seen.

Human Cloud exists to encode that layer. We automate discovery, compliance and orchestration across those platforms so a business team goes from problem to the right partner in minutes rather than months.

Which is where Colin's own metric turns on the category that sells it. If offer-to-start is the number that matters, then sourcing and procuring the partner is inside the clock too. A company that spends four months finding and contracting the right employer of record has already lost more time than any onboarding optimization can return. The compounding delay starts well before the worker exists.

The same logic answers the risk question. If you cannot price a misclassification exposure from a bill rate, you need verified evidence about a partner before you sign, not assurances during a demo. That is what the HC Score, verified business cases, and client kudos on a solution's profile are for. FoxHire's profile carries that record publicly, which is the point.

The Bottom Line

Two predictions closed the episode, and they point the same direction.

Onboarding, Colin thinks, eventually moves to a worker-owned digital wallet holding identity documents, credentials, vaccine records and screening results, with blockchain and AI supplying the trust layer that lets an employer verify rather than re-run the same check through a new vendor every time. Anyone who has watched a travel nurse get screened four times in a year on identical facts understands why that is not a small idea.

His second prediction is less comfortable. Employment is not getting simpler. More regulation is coming, across more jurisdictions, and the gap between what the labor market does and what the rules currently contemplate keeps widening.

Both predictions say the same thing about speed to talent: it will keep getting harder to achieve alone, and it will keep mattering more. The companies that stay fast will be the ones that stopped treating employment infrastructure as something to remember, and started treating it as something to plug in.

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About Colin LaBeau

Colin LaBeau is President of FoxHire, an employer of record serving staffing and recruiting buyers and sellers since 1992, specializing in compliant employment across all 50 states with deep expertise in healthcare staffing and onboarding speed. FoxHire publishes a hiring complexity index ranking which states are hardest to employ in and why.

Listen to the full episode: Human Cloud Podcast on Spotify

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This article was adapted from the Human Cloud Podcast. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.