If you're running contingent workforce hiring at a creative or technology company right now, you probably already know the problem. Hiring managers want talent yesterday. Finance wants visibility on spend. Legal wants compliance. Operations wants a process they don't have to babysit. And the talent themselves want to feel like more than a line item on a 30-day contract.
Most companies pick two of those and hope the others sort themselves out. Zulie Miles, SVP of Global Talent Acquisition at Huge, has built a program that does all five.
James Nicholls, Media & Advertising Indsutry Lead at Worksome, sat down with Zulie for 30 minutes on what it actually took. The full recording is below and a few highlights from the conversation that are worth holding onto.
Compliance is not the trade-off
The most quotable line of the session, and the one we keep coming back to:
"Compliance versus speed, who's going to win that battle? It has to be compliance. You don't want to see the other side of that coin."
What's interesting is the framing underneath. Zulie isn't saying compliance and speed are mutually exclusive. She's saying when they appear to conflict, compliance has to win. Her actual number for getting a contractor onboarded at Huge isn't 35 days. It's also not 24 hours. It's 48. That's the real compromise, and it's the one that holds up to scrutiny in both directions.
The implication: if your team has settled into "we can have it faster if we just skip a few steps," you've made the trade. You just haven't priced in what it costs when the trade goes wrong.
Single point of entry is the discipline, not the tool
Zulie talked about this one in a way that solidified the whole conversation around avoiding shadow spend and uncovering hidden headcount:
"Single point of entry, period. That's it. Full stop, single point of entry. Everything is being tracked."
At Huge, every contingent worker flows through one system. There are no workarounds. Exceptions exist, but they're exceptions, not the norm. The Wild West moment of an executive creative director hiring four people for a weekend project off the books, nobody tracking it, $20,000 spent and untraceable? Examples like that don't happen anymore.
The discipline is the part. Tools don't solve this on their own. You can buy the best contingent workforce platform on the market and still have shadow spend if hiring managers route around it. The thing that makes the system work is the cultural agreement that no contractor gets engaged outside it.
Stakeholder design is the actual project
A pattern in Zulie's answers: the hard part of building a contingent workforce program isn't the technology, the audit, or the vendor selection. It's getting hiring managers, talent operations, finance, legal, and procurement to agree on a single workflow that serves all of them.
"Identify your stakeholders. [With] too many cooks in the kitchen, you're going to get a lot of opinions, you're going to get a lot of direction."
The primary stakeholders Zulie named: the business (hiring managers who want people yesterday), the operations team (who own the workflow), and finance (who want to understand spend and ROI). Each one has different success criteria. Each one will pull the program in a different direction if left unmanaged.
The system that works is the one that protects each stakeholder's core need without making any of them feel like they compromised.
Going global means following the talent
Huge hires across the US, UK, Canada, Colombia, India, and Vietnam. The way Zulie framed the philosophy:
"We operate under the theory of follow the talent. Let's find the talent and then create the path."
The path part is what makes it possible. Federal, state, and local labor laws in the US alone vary enough to be daunting. Add Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and you're navigating dozens of compliance regimes simultaneously. Zulie's answer isn't to hire less internationally. It's to partner with someone whose job is to keep up with the rules, so her team can focus on finding the right talent and engaging them well.
When a creative director asks if Huge can hire a designer in Switzerland or Spain or Chile, the answer is always yes. Hang tight. The four boxes get checked before the welcome email goes out.
The challenge to anyone watching
Zulie closed with a direct ask of the audience, and it's worth repeating:
"Review your compliance in hiring your contingent workforce. You might be surprised. You might be exposed. And you have no idea that you have been operating in a way that is not ideal."
If your team has been running contingent workforce hiring decentralized for a few years, this is the audit worth doing. Pull your reports. Look at your worker classifications. The honest review is the first step toward the kind of program Zulie built.
Watch the full conversation
Want to see how Worksome handles a program like Huge's?
20 minutes with our team. No slides, no pitch deck, just a walkthrough of how Worksome makes a global, compliant, single-system-of-record contingent workforce program operationally real.
