LiveHire wins US direct sourcing contract, reports changing approach to staffing needs during COVID-19

Australian talent acquisition, mobility and engagement platform LiveHire (ASX: LVH) has won a $400,000 direct sourcing contract in the United States, which will add more than half a million candidate profiles to its regional ecosystem.

US engineering firm Ian Martin Group will implement the LiveHire platform throughout North America, hiring mostly information technology, technical and engineering professionals over an initial three-year period.

The arrangement will be invoiced pro-rata monthly in line with contractor invoices and bill rates for the total number of monthly hires, with the full annual revenue run rate expected to be reached by July.

Direct sourcing market

The US$130 billion (A$201 billion) direct sourcing market is a recent evolution in the contingent workforce management market involving “clouds” of contractor talent, which can be directly sourced and hired.

The recruitment model helps reduce the salary mark-up that organisations typically pay to staffing suppliers and can provide significant savings in a company’s total contractor program spend (salaries plus mark-ups).

“The model is based on a percentage of contractor salary, which is smaller than the percentage imposed by staffing suppliers, though delivered at scale with a goal to manage the majority of contractor hires into an organisation,” LiveHire said.

“The management of the talent cloud is often outsourced to one of the organisation’s preferred top tier staffing suppliers, certified by and partnered with LiveHire,” it added.

The company believes its technology is “uniquely placed” to deliver a high return on investment to organisations looking to implement direct sourcing.

It claims its differentiated architecture such as federated and live candidate data, two-way SMS (messaging), and private cloud connections, makes it “ideal to source a high percentage of total contract hires on-demand”.

Volatile economy

In its March quarterly report, LiveHire reported an acceleration of organisational workforce strategies such as internal redeployment and mobility, rapid hiring, alumni curation and outplacement in the wake of COVID-19.

LiveHire chief executive officer Christy Forest said the volatile economic environment has forced companies to rethink the way they manage staffing requirements.

“This quarter was a watershed moment for organisations in their need to establish a better way to communicate with, re-deploy and flex up and down their workforces on-demand,” she said.

“We have seen government organisations, which previously took years to navigate a procurement process, now require new technology deployments in days; we have seen private companies quickly ‘bank’ their talent into a private talent cloud environment, then begin to talent pool and plan ahead for future hiring requirements, while freeing up the flow of talent that needs to be remobilised internally or outplaced into other organisations,” Ms Forest added.

A unified approach to live talent data, flow, reporting, and analytics is critical to economic recovery and growth.

“It has taken a crisis to bring this to life. Organisations and employees will come through this with a vital focus on increased optionality and agility,” Ms Forest said.

“LiveHire has built an advanced architecture to fully support this vision of companies improving their competitiveness and survival through a unique solution that can help them move talent into, through and out of their businesses at speed,” she added.

The company also made its first move into the New Zealand market during the quarter, with two client wins, which have already gone live, and a further two signed up.

At mid-morning, shares in LiveHire were trading 34.09% higher at $0.295.