As Splunk’s contingent workforce program director, Keisha Stephens has yet to set foot in the office. Hired during Covid-19, Stephens — who sits in talent acquisition and reports into Splunk’s people team — in just over a year has grown the program to a $60 million spend under management focused on professional skills.

Relying strongly on an MSP that comes with an intuitive integrated tech solution, Splunk now has visibility into its first-generation vendor neutral program. Stephens is delighted that the visibility coupled with the tool’s ease of use has helped adoption. Another key to the program’s success is its close relationship with procurement. “We partner on the suppliers, the optimization, and, in the future, on SOWs,” just to name a few, she says.

She also credits some of the program’s adoption gains to its brand, PeoplePlus. Building a brand for a contingent workforce program is a first for her and brings her pride, as does the program’s different approach to diversity, equity and inclusion. “We started to build what we’re calling diversity cohorts,” she says. Stephens is looking at niche suppliers to find alternative sources of talent that it can’t get from its standard supplier pool — including women returning to work, veterans and neurodiverse hires.

Stephens was brought in to Splunk to push the boundaries of what a contingent labor program could be by creating  a program that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Looking ahead, Stephens has developed a three-year program roadmap with the MSP. Starting with PeoplePlus expanding to the UK, Australia and Canada in September to beta testing the SOW model, to turning on direct sourcing, the plan outlines program expansion goals that Stephens hopes will provide Splunk with increased visibility, cost savings and access to the best talent.