Recently, Avionté made a bold move that turned more than a few heads in the staffing world. We launched the first-ever integration between an ATS and a VMS—connecting Avionté and SimpleVMS in a way no one had attempted before. And let’s be clear: we knew it was a high-risk, high-reward bet. Some things went exactly as planned, others threw curveballs at us, and a few long-shot assumptions ended up holding more water than we expected.
But the biggest takeaway? This kind of integration isn’t just a nice-to-have; it has the power to fundamentally reshape how staffing agencies serve their clients, manage their workflows, and drive profitability in a market that isn’t getting any easier.
Today, we’re pulling back the curtain on that journey—what worked, what caught us off guard, and why we’re more confident than ever that this wasn’t just a smart play for Avionté, but a shift the industry needs. In this episode of Avionté: Digital Edge, Christopher Ryan, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Avionté, sits down with Joe Hiber, Director of Product Management at SimpleVMS, to unpack the wins, the misses, and why the future of agency-driven contingent labor depends on more integrations like this.
This is a partial transcript of the full conversation. Listen to the podcast episode for the complete discussion.
Christopher Ryan: Joe, why is the integration so powerful? What were your original goals when you were setting out to connect the AviontéBold ATS with SimpleVMS?
Joe Hiber: My original goal was to look at the efficiency we could gain by doing an integration of the systems. So, specifically, when you look at the old process, a recruiter would receive an email for a job opportunity and then go and enter that into the ATS, basically doing a bunch of copy and pasting of all the details that they received.
Once they created that job profile, they then would start to recruit against it, attaching a candidate, and then placing them on assignment — and then turning around and doing the same thing in the VMS, submitting the candidate and reentering candidate information to get it over to the hiring manager, maintaining a process of dual systems.
And so, when we set out to do the integration, we said, “Hey, let’s really meet the recruiter where they live inside of Bold. Let’s meet the employer where they live inside of SimpleVMS, and let’s meet the candidate wherever they live. So, by reducing the data load of those personas, we ultimately made it much easier, allowing users not to have to reenter information back and forth.
Christopher Ryan: So, in the integration world, the recruiter isn’t an information middleman who is entering in the VMS, then entering in the ATS, swiveling back and forth. And of course, whenever you’re doing manual entry between systems, a lot of mistakes and errors can happen.
So, part of the integration was just a dramatic improvement in workflow and elimination of double entry. So right there, that was an expectation.
Joe Hiber: Exactly. Let’s let the recruiters recruit, and let’s eliminate the data entry pieces of it all.
Christopher Ryan: So now the integration is live. We have a number of staffing agencies that are using it with clients. Are these benefits materializing?
Joe Hiber: It’s been impressive to see the time and labor savings just in that dual-entry piece. I would welcome our listeners to check out a recent case study our marketing team put out, really noting how one client implemented the integration.
What they saw was an increase in time savings that allowed them to reduce their headcount for on-site managers. This allowed them to focus more on recruiting and filling the top of the funnel with qualified candidates so that when a job comes in, they have more candidates ready to staff.
Christopher Ryan: Let’s talk about specific client examples. I know that you can’t mention names, but could you just provide us with a few examples about how the integration was set up, how did it work, and what’s happened since in each case?
Joe Hiber: So, we’ve been digging into the results and, honestly, the savings have been impressive. For instance, one client decreased their average time to fill by 80%, and the time to submit reduced by 64% of time.
Of course, it’s important to say not all improvements can be directly related to this integration alone. And we recognize that, in the staffing industry, there’s tons of variables at play. And even within our technology, we’ve changed some of the variables.
This year, SimpleVMS underwent a significant overhaul to introduce a 2.0 version, which enhanced efficiencies across the board. So, with those types of results, we can assume that the integration had a large part to do with some of that.
Christopher Ryan: So, the integration showed up at the party. It was part of the play. Whether it helped 50% or 80%, it was a huge contribution.
So, Joe, we’ve talked about some of the advantages of building an integration between the ATS and the VMS, but what were some of the big surprises along the way?
Joe Hiber: We set some ambitious goals directly related to ROI, and one of the surprising insights I gained is that the successful agency clients are still maintaining that strong relationship with the employer.
So, the integration didn’t necessarily offer them more new jobs. It just made their lives easier. And the dynamic of that relationship is crucial because the relationship is still what’s selling and getting the deals.
You still need to be able to have that relationship, provide quality candidates, and understand the needs of the customer. The staffing aspect is still there.
We automate a lot of the process and make the dual-entry part much easier. But when it comes down to it, the success of working with a VMS partner and employer still comes down to how well you understand that customer, how well you put quality candidates forth.
The integration isn’t going to necessarily help you with that. It just makes those processes a lot faster and easier.
Christopher Ryan: So, Joe, with every rollout, there are going to be bumps. What were some of the early pain points encountered during the implementation, how did you work through them, and what did we learn from the experience?
Joe Hiber: One of the things that I was surprised by was just the change management process. Anytime you introduce a new process across the board to agencies and employers, you’re met with some reluctance.
But one of the things that we learned is that a lot of customers have peak seasons, and those peak seasons happened to be during the time we were rolling out the integration. And so, the change management piece of introducing a change during peak was met with some reluctance from the agency.
And so, we have to forecast calendar time into rolling out an integration. Rolling out an integration in the middle of the third and fourth quarters is a bit of a challenge.
Christopher Ryan: Thou shalt not implement new technology in peak season is one of the commandments. So let me follow up on the resistance to change. When the integration was being set up, was it easier for the employer or was it easier for the agency? Where’s the biggest point of resistance in that process?
Joe Hiber: I think it’s important for the listeners to learn that we built the integration so that you didn’t have to necessarily roll over your entire VMS business onto the integration.
We allowed you to test the waters and roll out the integration employer by employer, so that if you did have dedicated teams that were just servicing, say a single employer, we could roll out the integration one by one. So, you don’t have to disrupt the entire flow of your business, especially when you’re working with multiple employers, maybe multiple regions.
This allowed agencies to test the waters and see the value before rolling it out to the rest of the organization.
Christopher Ryan: Let’s look more closely at how the integration works and what it entails. So, when you initiate something in SimpleVMS, how does the information flow? What is passed over from the VMS directly into the ATS system?
Joe Hiber: So, from a functional perspective, employers still create jobs just as they typically would inside SimpleVMS. If the agency receiving the job posting is integrated on the BOLD ATS, the job automatically appears inside of BOLD. Now, there’s some automation configuration that can happen that allows for the job to automatically be created and distributed to the 24/7 mobile app.
When using that mobile app, candidates can automatically express interest, and then that flows directly into the job. Any jobs that don’t meet that automation rule configuration are directed to our external job staging screen. This is just a landing page for jobs where recruiters have the ability to make a decision — do I even want to staff for this role?
So, ultimately, what the staging screen allows for is that decision to be made: do I want to staff for that position? And the same process applies where they can automatically send the job out to the mobile app to candidates who might match and be interested.
Christopher Ryan: So, I’m curious, do you find that some agencies want the automatic pass-through and others want the recruiter to be looking over the data at each stage?
Joe Hiber: We’ve offered quite a bit of different automation configurations with that, so you can get very granular or specific to the jobs that are automatically created versus those that you want to review first.
What we’re finding is that quite a few jobs are being created by automation, especially those commonly staffed positions that you already have a bench of qualified candidates ready to go, and then it’s just a matter of, again, the employer creating the job, it flowing out to the app, and the talent saying, “Yeah, I’m interested.”
We still, though, have a recruiter involved in reviewing those candidates to make sure that quality fit is still there, and that’s important. We don’t automate the entire flow. The agency is still involved in ensuring that this candidate is the right fit for that job.
Christopher Ryan: Got it. But to be clear, once the recruiter reviews those documents, they are then able to pass them using the integration back to the VMS and back to the customer in an automated fashion. Is that correct?
Joe Hiber: Yeah. And that was a friction point. The old way, you’d have to download those documents to your desktop, go back over to the VMS system, and reattach those same documents. So, through the integration, by having all those documents inside BOLD, we’re able to easily identify those already reviewed documents and pass them through without having those additional clicks.
Christopher Ryan: Were there any unusual requests from customers or agencies? What insights can you share with us?
Joe Hiber: One of the things that we learned is that hiring managers are not experts at marketing jobs to candidates. And so, by having a full automated flow from the job being created in the VMS out to the mobile app, sometimes those job descriptions were not mobile-friendly. They were not the best foot forward, so to speak, in getting these jobs out to candidates.
So, we pivoted very quickly into allowing for templates to be used, allowing the recruiter to still indicate, “Hey, this is a job I typically staff for, but I also know how to market this position out to candidates.”
And so, by including some automation configuration that allowed templates to be used, we still allowed for that automation flow to happen, but we put in the middle the recruiters’ spin on, “Hey, this is what the job entails versus what the employer was originally putting out.”
Christopher Ryan: I think one of the interesting ways that a staffing agency could help the employer is by marketing to candidates. That’s a real value add for a recruiter.
But that also changes the way you think about the integration, doesn’t it? Because now you’re looking for ways to transform the information while constantly keeping your employer apprised of what you’re doing,
Joe Hiber: Absolutely. And again, it’s focusing on where the agency provides a ton of value. And so, we didn’t want to lose the agency marketing jobs out to the candidate. And so, through the integration, we had to add some defaults, some templates, some ways to which we could still have that frictionless flow, yet still provide agency value.
Christopher Ryan: So, one thing I’m curious about is, during the integration, are there certain things that you found common across all of the different setups? How much has to be customized or configured agency by agency, because they want to do something different, or the employer wants to do something different
Joe Hiber: There’s not a one-size-fits-all process. And I think one of the things that we’ve learned through the integration is that each employer or buyer has a different configuration across the VMS system, and each agency has its own configuration inside of their ATS.
So, unifying that data has been a little bit of a challenge, but ultimately, what we’ve come up with is a way to have that automation flow and be able to service each of those personas.
Christopher Ryan: So, what you’re trying to do is create a configurable architecture with standard data models, but a configurable architecture that allows different variations in workflow, different levels of recruiter intervention as the data gets passed over.
So, let’s talk a little bit about compliance. I know that’s something that’s on everybody’s mind. And, when a staffing agency onboards, employers have to be very concerned about ensuring that compliance goes properly. How is compliance information passed back and forth between Simple and BOLD?
Joe Hiber: When you think about compliance, a lot of information can get lost when you’re not integrated. It’s really up to the interpreter to enter, configure, and set up everything in the ATS that is needed to meet the compliance of that job.
And so, the integration ultimately standardizes that process. So, if a job has a drug test requirement or a background check requirement, it’s all inside of that job when it was created through the integration. So, to submit candidates, recruiters must attach these things.
There’s no spot where a recruiter might forget or misconfigure a certain job requirement. We force that through the integration, and it allows us to standardize that process to ensure compliance is being met.
Christopher Ryan: So, what that means essentially is that if compliance is set according to the employer’s rules and Simple, then the integration enforces the compliance from the staffing agency automatically.
So, Joe, how will this integration evolve, and where do you see it going? What are the next couple of innovations in the longer term?
Joe Hiber: We recently released a feature that allows for the sign-on between both platforms to be easy. It’s a single sign-on tool.
What we learned is that there are still certain actions that a recruiter must do inside of SimpleVMS. I want to review who’s punched in for today. I want to be able to generate a report for my client prior to going on-site.
So, certain aspects of the integration were just, “Hey, make it easy for me to go between platforms.” So, the feature that we most recently came out with is a single sign-on. It allows you to easily go between both systems.
On top of that, we’re working on same-day labor functionality inside of SimpleVMS. And so, we’ll be enhancing the integration to support all the day labor customers. And, from there, we’re looking longer term at bringing in a lot of the back-office data. So, bringing in invoicing, bringing in time data, making that much easier for our back-office folks.
Christopher Ryan: So, within the staffing industry, we often talk about the adversarial relationship between a VMS vendor and a staffing agency. But one of the things that Avionté learned about SimpleVMS was that it could actually enhance the relationship between a staffing agency and an employer if it was used properly, and it could simplify or save a staffing agency money in serving an employer.
Joe Hiber: SimpleVMS offers the employer quite a bit of benefits, especially when they’re working with multiple staffing vendors. From an employer’s perspective, it solves pain points such as multiple invoices, different reconciliations that I have to do. And so, by the agency bringing in SimpleVMS to the relationship, they’re ultimately acting as an advisor to that employer to say, “I have a solution for you, Mr. Buyer, that allows for you to solve a lot of your pain points. Yet, keeping me a part of that relationship.”
So, it changes the dynamic of I’m trying to sell based on cost to, “Hey, I’m trying to solve real problems for you, Mr. Employer.”
Christopher Ryan: So, the VMS is helping the employer to consolidate all their contingent workforce operations, but are there specific requests that an employer makes of a staffing agency that are kind of like value added that the VMS could take care of instead? For example, are there unusual reporting requirements and requests?
Joe Hiber: One of the biggest advantages is to be able to track the cost of labor, be able to see what does it cost for me to produce whatever it is I’m producing or manufacturing, and be able to have that data to say, “I know this costs me X so I can charge Y and get X in profit.”
Christopher Ryan: I know that there has been a movement afoot within manufacturing to understand total labor costs, including both full-time work and contingent labor, and factoring them in together. My understanding is that sometimes employers are asking staffing agencies to provide them with data to support that, but it sounds like, if you have SimpleVMS, now you’ve taken a burden off the staffing agency to provide that kind of reporting. That strikes me as one example.
Are there other examples, like timekeeping?
Joe Hiber: We’re proud of our new AI photo time. And, what that allows for is stopping the mispunching, the buddy punching, things like that, that you hear in the industry. What it does is ultimately ensure that the right person is there.
And, so with our advanced timekeeping solutions, we’re also solving real buyer pain by being able to say, “Hey, we have advanced solutions. And it doesn’t matter what agency your contingent labor is coming from; you don’t have to have 10 clocks on the wall. You can have one. And it’s a unified timekeeping process for all the line managers and anybody else involved in the process.”
Christopher Ryan: So, this might be a way for a staffing agency to avoid having to put in a special timekeeping system and still have some kind of flow back and forth between the systems. So, Joe, let me ask a more speculative question. Occasionally, I will hear from a staffing agency that says, “I want to partner with a VMS and become an MSP.”
I’m curious about your thoughts on that. Is that realistic?
Joe Hiber: Wanting to be an MSP is a desire that a lot of agencies have, but I think that to become an MSP, the agency has to understand what that means.
Being a tier-one vendor and still having a relationship with the employer is oftentimes just as good, if not better, than becoming an MSP. Managing a full MSP program is a skillset that a lot of agencies, unless they’ve done it before, can become a trap, because, if they don’t do it well, they’re going to get removed from that employer and potentially lose the entire account.
Whereas being a tier one vendor, they still are allowed to support that client and still have the first right at capturing that business. However, they can rely on the support team behind SimpleVMS to manage the program.
So, this is one of the things that we’re advising our customers on pretty often. Are you the right fit to be an MSP, or should you let us manage the program for you and just be that top-tier client doing what you’re used to doing, namely staffing?
I think that we’re seeing more and more use of vendor management systems across the industry among larger employers. The employers are requesting to use VMS systems because they have a lot of those pain points that we talked about earlier.
And so, it’s one of those situations where, as an agency, we have to recognize that the business is evolving and that platforms, such as a VMS, are another tool in your tool belt to help sell to your employers. The employers are looking for a VMS system, and so it’s either be a consultant providing value or, potentially, get caught in the dust.
Joe Hiber
Director of Product Management for SimpleVMS
Joe Hiber is the Director of Product Management for SimpleVMS, leading the strategic vision and execution of its SaaS-based vendor management platform. Joe drives product innovation, prioritizes development, and ensures solutions meet client needs. With a track record of bringing new technology to the staffing industry, he previously served as Director of Product at Avionté, leading key initiatives such as the acquisition of SimpleVMS and the launch of Avionté PIXEL, Avionté’s AI-powered chatbot.
Christopher Ryan
Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Avionté
Christopher Ryan leads the Strategy and Marketing functions for Avionté. He brings more than three decades of consulting, thought leadership, and corporate experience in Human Capital Management.
Modern technology has revolutionized the way we live, work, and play. It’s also what’s fueling the gig economy which has dramatically changed employment practices. So, what does that mean for staffing and contingent work? In our Avionté Digital Edge podcast series, we will speak directly with industry experts to explore topics and trends related to the digital transformation of staffing and temporary employment in the US workforce.
