The Contingent Workforce Program Maturity Model

Contingent Workforce Program Maturity: Where Do You Stand?

By: Kasey Hadjis

At the recent ProcureCon Contingent Staffing event, the same conversations kept surfacing in panels, roundtables, and hallway discussions. Programs built for a business that no longer looks the same. Stakeholders who can’t agree on what success looks like. Workers sitting outside the program in categories nobody officially owns. The specifics varied by organization, but the underlying pattern didn’t.

That pattern is the contingent workforce program maturity curve. This series, grounded in what practitioners shared at ProcureCon, recent industry research, and what Workwell North America has observed across enterprise programs, is designed to help program leaders identify where they are on it and what the most valuable next step looks like.

Most contingent workforce programs weren’t built wrong. They were built for a different time. The question isn’t whether your program is broken. It’s where on the contingent workforce program maturity curve it actually sits, and what the next step looks like.

What Is a Contingent Workforce Maturity Model?

A contingent workforce maturity model is a framework that maps the evolution of a program from reactive and fragmented to strategic, governed, and scalable. It gives program leaders a way to assess where they are objectively, not against an abstract ideal, but against the specific challenges and capabilities that define each stage of development.

The model we use at Workwell North America is built on the intelligence we’ve gathered from working with enterprise programs across industries, and validated against direct feedback from procurement, HR, TA, and operations leaders at organizations ranging from mid-market to multinational. It has five stages.

What makes a maturity model useful, rather than just a vendor positioning exercise, is that it starts with the buyer’s reality, not the vendor’s solution. Each stage describes a set of conditions that program leaders will recognize in their own organizations. The goal isn’t to make any organization feel behind. It’s to give every organization a clear picture of where they are and a concrete sense of what the next step looks like.

The Five Stages of Contingent Workforce Program Maturity

Stage 1: Cost vs. Value

• The signal:  Your program was built on price, or there’s no formal program at all.

Organizations at stage 1 of the contingent workforce program maturity model fall into two categories. The first has no formal contingent workforce program: hiring managers source directly, supplier relationships are informal, and there’s no centralized visibility into external workforce spend. The second has a program, but selected their MSP or primary vendor primarily on cost.

Both situations share the same underlying problem. The decision made sense when it was made. The challenge is that business requirements have changed, and a cost-first selection from five years ago isn’t built for today’s complexity.

The clearest indicator of a Stage 1 program: when someone asks how many external workers the organization has engaged this month across all suppliers, geographies, or engagement models, there’s no immediate answer.

The cost of staying here isn’t obvious, which is part of what makes this stage persistent. A primary vendor selected on rate will optimize for their own margin. The best requisitions get prioritized; the hardest ones sit. Niche suppliers and specialized skill sets fall outside the program entirely. SOW becomes a workaround when the program moves too slowly. And the total cost of the workforce, including attrition, ramp time, and compliance exposure, remains invisible.

One panelist from the recent ProcureCon Contingent Staffing event shared a data point worth sitting with: a program that analyzed turnover in a single worker segment reduced attrition by 42%, translating to over $1 million in training savings. The SVP tripled the budget the following year. That’s what the cost conversation looks like when it’s done right.

What this stage leads to: A value gap analysis: a clear accounting of what the current program is actually costing the business, and what a structured approach would change.

Stage 2: Internal Alignment

• The signal:  The right people aren’t pointing in the same direction.

The most common reason contingent workforce programs stall isn’t bad technology or the wrong supplier. It’s governance failure. HR is measuring time-to-fill. Procurement is measuring markup. Legal is counting compliance incidents. Finance is tracking budget variance. Operations just wants the work done. None of them are wrong, but they aren’t running the same program.

Stage 2 organizations have recognized the value gap, and they understand that something needs to change. What they haven’t yet solved is the alignment question: who is accountable for the program’s outcomes, and does every stakeholder share the same definition of success?

A useful diagnostic: if you asked every stakeholder involved in your contingent workforce program to name its top three priorities, would their answers match? In many organizations, they wouldn’t. That gap is where contingent workforce program maturity stalls.

One presenter put it plainly at ProcureCon this year: “Chase alignment, not savings. Savings follow alignment. Not the other way around.”

Alignment isn’t a meeting or a kick-off session, it’s a governance structure with a single accountable owner, defined decision rights for each function, and a shared scorecard where HR, Procurement, Finance, Legal, and Operations each see their own metrics reflected. Without that structure, every program improvement initiative becomes a negotiation.

What this stage leads to: The infrastructure conversation, because once you have alignment, the natural next question is what the operating model actually needs to look like to deliver on the value you’ve committed to.

Stage 3: Program Infrastructure

• The signal: Alignment exists, but the operating model can’t execute on it.

Organizations at Stage 3 of the contingent workforce program maturity model have the right people pointed in the right direction. What they don’t yet have is the infrastructure to convert that alignment into consistent program performance. The processes are inconsistent, the technology is a patchwork, the rate cards are static, or the supplier panel was built for a different scope.

There are two distinct entry points into Stage 3. The first is a first-build program: alignment in place, now designing the operating model from scratch. The second, and arguably more common, is a relaunch: an existing program that worked well at a smaller scale but has outgrown its original design. The business changed, but the program didn’t. And now it’s being worked around rather than worked through.

Both entry points require the same three infrastructure components: people (a single accountable owner, defined cross-functional decision rights, structural enforcement through Finance and IT), process (standardized workflows, regular rate card benchmarking, clear SLAs), and platform (a true system of record with centralized worker and supplier data, compliance controls, and real-time reporting).

The programs that scale well are those that build structural enforcement into their design. Not policies people follow when it’s convenient; systems that make the program the path of least resistance.

What this stage leads to: The global question. Once the infrastructure is in place, the next question is almost always how to extend it across new geographies.

Stage 4: Global Agility

• The signal: The program is expanding across borders and hitting friction.

Global workforce expansion is no longer a strategic option that some organizations are evaluating. In our recent survey of enterprise workforce leaders at ProcureCon, every respondent reported planning workforce growth across new borders. Either domestically into new states or internationally into new markets.

The friction isn’t finding workers in new geographies; it’s navigating employment law, tax classification, IC compliance, and onboarding logistics in markets where the rules differ from the US and change faster than annual policy cycles can keep up with.

Organizations at stage 4 of the contingent workforce program maturity model are dealing with this friction in real time. Some are managing it well; most are managing it with a patchwork of local vendors, separate contracting in each market, and compliance processes that don’t scale. The result is implementation drag: what should take weeks takes months, and every new geography requires a new crisis management exercise.

A program embedded with EOR capabilities in 150+ countries, integrated directly into the VMS, eliminates that drag. One panelist at ProcureCon described onboarding 1,000 contractors across 30 countries in a matter of weeks. The difference between that outcome and the typical experience is infrastructure, not geography.

What this stage leads to: The final governance question. Even a global program with robust infrastructure has a blind spot if it governs only traditional contingent workers.

Stage 5: Formalize the Full Flexible Workforce

• The signal: ICs, SOW vendors, and EOR workers are outside the program.

Flexible worker formalization was the highest active budget priority among enterprise workforce leaders surveyed at ProcureCon this year, which means most organizations at Stage 5 aren’t stuck on whether to move. They’ve already decided. The question is execution.

The scope of the challenge is larger than most programs initially estimate. SOW spend frequently exceeds contingent staffing spend, and most of it sits outside the program entirely. Independent contractors are growing as a segment, driven by Gen Z workforce preferences and experienced workers re-entering as freelancers. And EOR workers engaged through a program MSP often enter through hiring manager referrals, bypassing the rate benchmarking and compliance controls that the rest of the program requires.

The risk is real and it’s quiet. SOW reclassifies from OpEx to CapEx and disappears from program visibility. The compliance exposure doesn’t disappear with it.

On the IC side, the regulatory environment is tightening. Research from the Economic Policy Institute estimates that as many as 10–30% of employers misclassify at least one worker as an independent contractor, and in 2025 and 2026, lawmakers in at least 12 states proposed or passed new legislation to address it.

Formalization isn’t about adding complexity to the program. It’s about building one governed view of the entire external workforce, every worker type, every engagement model, every geography, so program leaders can report to the C-suite with confidence, and the business can make workforce decisions based on complete information.

The destination: One governed program that covers every worker type and geography, aligned to business strategy and measured in business outcomes.

How to Identify Your Contingent Workforce Program Maturity Stage

The five stages aren’t strictly sequential. Most programs show characteristics of more than one, and some organizations enter the journey at Stage 3 or Stage 4 rather than Stage 1. The goal isn’t to assign a definitive label. It’s to identify the highest-friction point in your current program and understand what resolving it would require.

A few diagnostic questions worth sitting with:

• If someone asked right now how many external workers your organization has engaged this month, could you answer in under a minute?
• If you asked every stakeholder involved in your CW program to name its top three priorities, would the answers align?
• When a hiring manager works around the program, what’s the most common reason?
• Do you have visibility into your total SOW spend, and is it connected to your contingent workforce program at all?
• When you expand into a new geography, how long does it take to onboard your first worker, and what causes the delay?

The answers to those questions will tell you more about your program’s maturity stage than any survey.