Contingent Workforce Leaders: Stop Being Buyers, Start Leading

Joel Kammeyer shares what 300+ contingent workforce leaders are actually worried about, from 14 years running programs at Epiq and Cerner and his new seat at Direct Collective.

Contingent Workforce Leaders Are Not Buyers

Ask most contingent workforce leaders what they do and they will describe a process. Requisitions, VMS, supplier scorecards, rate cards. In the industry's own vocabulary they are "buyers," and the people they hire from are "sellers."

Joel Kammeyer thinks that word is the problem. He ran the contingent program at Epiq for seven years and built one from scratch at Cerner before joining Direct Collective in June 2026. His view from both seats is the same: the program is now the strategic arm of finding talent, and the person running it should be at the table, not processing tickets for it.

"We're contingent workforce leaders. When we're talking in the contingent space, it's buyer and seller, and at the end of the day, we don't want to be known as buyers. We're leaders." - Joel Kammeyer

The gap between the two is not budget or headcount. It is information. A leader can walk into the CTO's office with five perspectives on a problem. A buyer walks in with one.

What Keeps 300+ Contingent Workforce Leaders Up at Night

Direct Collective is a curated community of more than 300 program leaders across the Fortune 500, private and public. Joel reads what they ask each other every day. Three themes dominate.

Agentic AI inside the program. Not Copilot for emails. A hiring manager who says "I need a contractor" and gets one sourced without opening a VMS form. "It should be able to see that I'm Joel. The last five recs I filled were for an automation engineer in Kansas City. All it has to ask me is, are we looking for someone similar? Boom." The blocker is getting VMS and technology partners to ship it.

Candidate fraud across the full lifecycle. Remote work made it worse, and it no longer stops at onboarding.

"We saw bad actors that looked great on paper, showed up, did the job for three months. And then all of a sudden there was a switch that flipped and they were going and being fraudulent." - Joel Kammeyer

The spend still outside the program. Freelancers, independent contractors, SOW. Even gen-three programs have a slice of the workforce they are not strategically managing. Human Cloud's number for this is that roughly 60% of flexible talent spend is rogue: not planned for, not accounted for, not understood. You may know you spent $500 million on contractors. That is not the same as managing it.

Why AI Cannot Replace a Peer Network in This Industry

Joel is not anti-AI. He used it to build his son's soccer schedule. But he draws a line that most industries do not have to draw.

"Contingent workforce data isn't prevalent out there. Public companies, private companies, they don't have to report on what their program is doing. Those playbooks don't really exist out there, other than in people's brains, a lot of cases." - Joel Kammeyer

A bank or a Big Four firm will never publish how it implemented its VMS or which identity verification vendor caught its last bad actor. Nor should it. That means an AI trained on the public web has nothing to say about the questions that matter most. The human in the loop is not a safeguard here. The human in the loop is the dataset.

That is why Direct Collective is built the way it is. Ask the Community sends one question to 300+ peers and gets five to ten answers back. City chapters in Atlanta, Chicago, the Bay Area, and New York meet monthly. Every member gets two algorithmic member matches a month. Peer pods of five to ten leaders form around whatever question is hot, from contractor NDAs to AI in the program. And New Era, a no-fee network for leaders caught in a reduction, exists because it is the right thing to do.

Community Is the Infrastructure the Flexible Workforce Was Missing

Here is the part that should sound familiar to anyone who has tried to scale a flexible workforce program. The biggest barrier was never technology. It was "nobody I know is doing this." And the fix was never an ad or a demo. It was an introduction to someone who looked like you and had already done it.

Direct Collective solves that on the demand side. Human Cloud is solving it on the supply side. When a leader in a peer pod asks "who are you using for identity verification, and did it actually work," the answer today is hearsay in a Slack thread. The answer should be a verified profile, a business case from a client who looks like you, and kudos from people who actually engaged the solution. That is what we are building: discovery across 1,000+ flexible workforce solutions, with the proof attached, so "who is everyone using" stops requiring a conference badge.

The two fit together. The community surfaces the question. The platform surfaces the answer. Neither replaces the human deciding what to do with it.

The Bottom Line

The hiring manager already knows that going through procurement is slow. What changed is that they now have alternatives, and they are using them, on corporate cards and unapproved POs. Contingent workforce leaders who step up get the seat at the table. Those who do not will be the ones explaining the misclassification lawsuit.

The carrot is knowing what best in class looks like before your boss asks. The stick is having nothing to say when they do. Either way, you cannot get there alone.

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About Joel Kammeyer

Joel Kammeyer is Head of Community and Contingent Workforce Programs at Direct Collective, a curated peer community of 300+ contingent workforce leaders. He previously ran the contingent program at Epiq for seven years and built the program and internal MSP at Cerner from the ground up.

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.