Eric Osterhout’s forward-thinking approach to staffing and pragmatic attitude toward total talent management come from his blend of experience as a supplier of talent combined with more than a decade of buyer-side program experience.

As senior category specialist, SCM contingent labor for energy transportation firm Enbridge, he embraces new technologies, methodologies and industry trends. His program currently counts about $600 million in contingent spend in North America and deploys about 2,500 contractors daily.

“We’re very fond of building things on the fly in a very agile format,” he says. “And if there are issues that we encounter, we use the term ‘fail fast and pivot.’ We would take that information and move and change the direction to make it work.”

Osterhout’s successes include leading the rollout of the Enbridge Contingent Talent Community direct sourcing program in 2020. By cutting out the supplier middle layer and trading on Enbridge’s strong employer brand, the direct-sourcing program now fills one in four sourced requisitions with high-quality candidate, increasing hiring manager satisfaction.

In a candidate-driven market, “We preach hiring to what the requisition requires to get the job done, not the skill level of the candidate,” Osterhout says. “There’s a subtle difference there. You don’t need a 20-year person to do something a five-year person can do because it will skew your bill rates.” His team also stresses “the need for speed” with hiring managers, because in today’s market, you have to move fast to get the best talent.

More recently, he has been working with Enbridge’s employer-of-record payrolling company to curate a pipeline of candidates for hard-to-fill union roles in Eastern Canada, which has filled at least 85 positions so far.