At last year's CWS Europe, nearly 4 in 10 delegates walked in with a procurement, sourcing, or category-management title. Fewer than 2 in 10 came from pure TA. And the biggest growing group, more than 1 in 4, didn't sit in either camp. They ran contingent workforce programs, external workforce functions, or total talent offices. That's a function that's neither, by design.
If you read most of the industry commentary right now, you'd think the defining argument of the moment is "should procurement still own contingent workforce, or should TA take it back?" But the people running these programs have largely moved on. The event-goers at CWS Europe isn't split down the middle of that debate. It's three-quarters past it.
So when the Worksome team sits down in London on 19–20 May, the conversation we want to have with program leaders isn't "which function should own this." It's "what have the best programs stopped doing, and what are they doing instead."
Here's what we've been seeing.
The Contingent Workforce tug-of-war
Take a look at last year's mix: 38% Procurement, 27% Dedicated Contingent Workforce Leaders, and 19% TA. That split matters because it reframes exactly who these programs are being built by.
Procurement didn't lose this category. Roughly four in ten delegates are still procurement leaders, category managers, or sourcing heads, and in most enterprises they're the ones who built the program in the first place. They're also the ones modernizing it. The Global Heads of External Workforce, the Category Directors for Contingent Labor, the External Workforce CoE Leads. Those titles are procurement-adjacent leaders who have graduated past unit-cost optimization into full program ownership.
TA is growing into the space, but slower than the headlines suggest. Pure TA and recruitment roles made up fewer than one in five delegates. Most of the "TA owns contingent now" narrative is running ahead of the org charts.
The loudest growth story is the third lane. More than a quarter of the room now holds a role that didn't exist a decade ago: Head of External Workforce, Director of Alternative Workforce, Global Lead Contingent Workforce, Product Owner External Workforce Management. These are people whose job title is the work itself, not the function it used to belong to.
That third lane is the story. And it's where the best program leaders are already running.
Why "talent as a line item" hit a wall
Contingent workforce programs were originally built to solve a procurement problem. Bruce Morton, who's spent three decades helping build them (and who sits on Worksome's Strategic Advisory Council), put it plainly in a recent conversation with Erika Novak:
"Enterprises realized they were dealing with human beings. Procurement, being naturally risk-averse, wasn't built for the complexity of the modern talent ecosystem."
Read that as a diagnosis of how the function was originally set up, not an indictment of the procurement leaders running it today. Bruce is describing the architecture of the category when it was new: cost control, supplier consolidation, tail-spend rationalization. That architecture delivered real savings for a decade. But it optimized for the wrong thing once the category stopped being "temps and IT contractors" and started being "half the specialist capability in the business."
The wall shows up in familiar places. Specialist contractors ghost slow programs. Classification risk gets filed under "legal" until a state AG or an HMRC audit drops it squarely on TA's reputation. Program KPIs still read like an indirect-spend dashboard (on-contract rate, savings vs. rate card, supplier consolidation), with nothing that tells a CHRO whether the program is actually delivering talent.
None of that is a failure of procurement. It's a signal that the category has outgrown a procurement-only frame.
Why "just let TA run it" doesn't solve it either
When contingent workforce gets handed to TA without a commercial spine, three things tend to happen.
Supplier sprawl returns. TA teams default to the agencies they already know, and rate discipline slips within a cycle. Classification risk gets under-counted because TA's instinct, correctly, is to move fast and say yes. And the program loses its unit economics, because TA KPIs are built for hiring funnels, not category spend.
A TA leader who has tried to run contingent without procurement will tell you the same thing a procurement leader who has tried it without TA will tell you: one function can't do this alone.
That's the point the best programs internalize first.
What the best-run programs are doing instead
Three moves show up consistently in the programs that work, regardless of whether they report into procurement, TA, HR, or a standalone CoE.
1. They measure success on more than unit cost.
Savings still matters. But the programs that are winning have added at least three other metrics to the dashboard: time-to-productive (how long until a contractor is actually working), specialist access (can we reach the skills our business units actually need, on demand), and redeployment rate (do the contractors we already know come back, or do we re-source them cold every time). Those three tell a CHRO a story that on-contract rate never could.
2. They replace the "open a req" default with a co-owned engagement-type menu.
Erika Novak calls this a "menu of options." The shift is subtle and it changes everything. Instead of a hiring manager writing a job spec and sending it through the one channel they know, the program offers a curated set of engagement types: FTE, independent contractor, SOW / deliverable-based, AOR / EOR, staff aug, each with its own intake criteria, classification guardrails, and time-to-start SLA. Procurement co-signs the commercial terms. TA co-signs the candidate experience and speed. The hiring manager picks the option that fits the work, not the function that's easiest to call.
3. They run the whole program on one system of record.
The best programs stopped accepting that procurement sees spend in one system, TA sees candidates in another, and HR sees headcount in a third. One platform, one data model, one source of truth on who is working, under what engagement, for how much, with which compliance status. That single system is what lets the three metrics in move #1 actually get measured, and what lets the engagement-type menu in move #2 actually get enforced.
None of those three moves requires resolving the "who should own this" argument. They're what the answer looks like in practice once you've stopped asking that question.
A better conversation to have in London
CWS Europe is the half's flagship contingent workforce event for a reason. It's also the room where this shift is most visible, because the attendee mix diverse in roles, experience and industry know-how, which is exactly the composition of a category that's in motion.
The Worksome team will be on site with a suite, a roundtable, and a kiosk and the conversation we're most interested in is the one underneath the org-chart question: where is your program on the line-item-to-program evolution, what's the next move you can actually ship this half, and which of the three moves above is hardest for you right now?
Come find us. Bring your hardest program question. Let's compare notes.
