Why Total Talent Management Fails Without a Skills First Strategy

When you consider all the disruptive forces reshaping work—from AI in recruiting to the impact of tariffs on the global economy—bold thinking isn’t optional. It’s essential. And, Allen Chilson is the Contingent Workforce trailblazer helping Danaher Corporation navigate that uncertainty.

Serving as the Director of Global Talent Acquisition Vendor Management for Danaher, Allen brings over 15 years of expertise in contingent workforce strategy, partnering with RPOs, search firms, and MSPs worldwide. His experience at the intersection of HR, procurement, and talent acquisition gives him a unique vantage point on what’s holding organizations back and what’s possible when leaders embrace a skills-first mindset.

At ProcureCon 2025, Allen shared actionable insights for contingent hiring professionals who want to bridge the gap between traditional and flexible talent models—and build a workforce ready for whatever comes next.

Total Talent for Contingent Worker Programs

Despite the hype, most companies still can’t make total talent more than a buzzword. As Allen Chilson points out, the problem is simple but stubborn: workforce planning happens at 30,000 feet, while hiring struggles on the ground.

“We haven’t mastered workforce planning in the corporate world.”

Budgets get approved, but actual staffing plans often die in spreadsheets—never making it to HR or procurement in time to take real action.

For contingent hiring leaders, this means teams are often left scrambling, defaulting to familiar vendors or talent pools instead of strategically sourcing the right skills for each project. The fix? Build granular, skills-based workforce plans that empower managers to fill gaps with surgical precision.

Collaboration Over Turf Wars: Uniting HR and Procurement

One of the biggest barriers to effective contingent hiring is the siloed approach between HR and procurement. Allen sees this play out in companies everywhere: HR keeps non-employees at arm’s length, while procurement only steps in above certain spend thresholds. This leaves managers stuck in a fragmented process—forced to work around the system just to get the talent they need. Allen’s advice is clear:

“Until we can go in as a combined force, we won’t unlock the full potential of total talent.”

For contingent hiring professionals, this means championing cross-functional collaboration and shared data—especially around skills—so every stakeholder is aligned and empowered.

Modularizing Work: The Secret to Faster, Smarter Hires

Allen envisions a future where AI-driven tools guide managers through hiring as intuitively as shopping online. Instead of compliance-heavy decision trees, platforms should act like smart assistants. Imagine this:

“You should consider a gig worker for this task, paired with clear rationale and real-time availability. If those AI tools can start giving them that and consumerize this experience, that’s the piece the manager needs.”

For contingent hiring professionals, leveraging platforms that use AI to match skill requirements with available talent is quickly becoming the new standard for speed, accuracy, and manager satisfaction.

Building a Unified, Skills-First Workforce

The traditional divide between employees and contingent workers is fading. In Allen’s words:

“Managers don’t treat temps and employees differently—they’re all part of the workforce getting the work done.”

The future is holistic: a unified approach where all talent is managed, assessed, and deployed based on skills, not employment type.

Skills-based assessment platforms make this vision real, fuelling data-driven decisions and ensuring every worker is valued for their expertise.

The New Playbook for Contingent Hiring Professionals

Total talent success isn’t about piling on more technology. It’s about smarter skills-based planning, tight collaboration, and AI tools that actually make hiring easier. As Allen Chilson makes clear, leaders who break down silos and embrace skills-based hiring will be best positioned to build agile, high-performing teams.

“My dream is I can just roll into a system and say, ‘I need somebody to do this,’ and the AI will drive part of it.”

For contingent hiring professionals, the message is clear: prioritize skills, leverage assessment platforms, and champion real collaboration across HR and procurement. The future of workforce management is skills-first, agile, and unified. Now is the time to lead the change.

Interview Transcript

Dustin Talley (00:00.078)
All right, Alan Chilson, welcome to the ProcureCon CS, man. How are you? Yeah, welcome, welcome. We’re doing these podcasts. I want to dive in with you. You’ve been to a bunch of these conferences, obviously. I’ve heard you talk on all kinds of topics, but one I know that you love to talk about is total talent. We’ve got one theme, total talent 2.0, and I want to dig in and just get your thoughts on that. First of all, tell the audience that may not know you a little bit about yourself and your role.

Allen Chilson (00:02.265)
Yep, so I’m Alan Chilson. I’m the Director of Global Talent Acquisition Vendor Management at Danaher. My agreement encompasses our use of RPOs, search firms, and MSPs globally. I’ve been at Danahur about four years now and have been around the contingent workforce space for over 15 years now.

Dustin Talley (00:47.502)
Love it. Awesome, dude. I’m to dig in and we’re just going to get juicy from the beginning. Total talent has not worked, in my opinion. Why is that, though? What’s not going right to get total talent right? And then maybe an extension of this question, could AI play a role in that?

Allen Chilson (00:49.241)
Yeah, in my mind, total talent probably hasn’t worked because I don’t believe we’ve mastered workforce planning in the corporate world, right? So there’s budgeting that goes on. People are definitely planning for their needs for staff, but they don’t bring it to HR and break it down to a staff. At least, I’ve never worked any place that gets that staffing plan. So I think it’s really hard to do total talent management if you’re not truly breaking that down, because how can we start being proactive?

Allen Chilson (01:30.489)
Could AI help with it? I certainly think it could. I think there’s a challenge with however we try to evolve is can we get managers to also change the way they’ve always wanted to build project teams, right? So there’s that tendency to, John Doe, right, who’s always helped me build out my project teams, right? And so I don’t want to hear that there’s a different way of doing this. I just want to go to this consultant that I’ve always used. And I don’t think we’ve done a great job of breaking managers tendencies. we’ve got to be able to show them what’s in it for me on why they should change the way they’ve done it. And I think we see it even in the corporate world with our programs even when we do things, whether it’s tenure guidelines, whether it’s other things, managers get worried that our rules and regulations are going to hinder them from meeting their deliverables.

Dustin Talley (02:06.626)
Sure, yeah. I like how you framed it breaking the managers. It’s also building them up at the same time too, right? Giving them options, giving them all the things. Sometimes, though, I think from a manager’s perspective, if you think about it from their thought process, right? Total talent to them might look like I have a need, but then you end up down one of these crazy paths, right? And you’re like, who is this team that I just ended up with within my own organization? Or maybe it’s a partner, right? And so the ecosystem seems a bit messy.

Sometimes in my opinion, that’s because HR and procurement are both involved and they both got different remits and so things kind of end up all over the place. Talk to us about it from that perspective and I know I’ve heard you talk about this in the past, right? Like who has ultimate authority? What does it look like for HR and procurement to kind of go at this together and how could that play out?

Allen Chilson (03:02.979)
Right, yeah, and I think that’s a real key thing there because if we’re territorial and if we can’t talk together, work together, TA in procurement, and even HR in procurement, right, so let’s even take it a notch above TA where I sit, HR is like, hey, those are non-employees, I don’t want to know about them. And TA, we kind of realize they’re probably going to wind up being in our talent pool at some point, so we do want to know about them to a certain extent.

Allen Chilson (03:27.767)
Yeah, think it’s until we can go in as a combined force, right? And it’s funny because I feel like in most companies too, procurement has thresholds, right? And if the spend isn’t above a certain amount, they’re not that interested, right? Because there’s not a big savings opportunity. And I think the managers also learn how to stay below that radar, right? With shorter durations on an SOW, those kind of things. I think it evolves a lot of change. mean, I think to the point of AI, could AI help us understand that?

Dustin Talley (03:28.11)
It can certainly help us crunch the numbers, analyze better where we’re spending money, where there’s opportunity. mean, one of the things I always think of when we look at about.

Optimizing talent management or at least as far as those areas that have been my remit is can we break things down to be a little more modular. So if I’m hiring manager putting together project team, I usually look for the unicorn and I list everything I need somebody to be able to do and I want them for the full six months. But there may be one little portion of that list that I only really need for three days and can we get them to compartmentalize that so you just go get a pure subject matter expert, pay them whatever it takes. You get them for three days and you get what you need from them and now you’ve taken that one holy grail skill out of the mix and now we can probably go find you through our MSP or through some other resource the person that has the other 95% of what you need for the duration of the project but but how do we get them to start segmenting out those elite skills right those one out of a thousand type of things.

Yeah. Let’s stick on something else. And this isn’t on script, obviously. None of this is. But the AI piece of it, right? I’m always baffled at where do you inject AI into the equation, right? And I’ve seen some of these tools. I think there’s one floating around this conference even. And they’re talking about putting AI in the very front end of it, helping managers make decisions about where they end up. And that being a total talent kind of player, right? I’m going to end up in one of these paths. It’s kind of augmenting the guidance, if you will.

Allen Chilson (05:17.603)
Yeah.

Dustin Talley (05:22.048)
To some degree this is replacing the widget that used to exist in the VMS. Decision trees, yeah. Do you think that’s the answer or one of the answers that AI could play?

Allen Chilson (05:27.513)
the decision trees, right? Yeah.

I mean, I think if you think about can we make the Amazon effect, right? So can they have a thought bubble that they can click on when it says, you should consider a gig worker. What does that really mean, right? Because that’s the piece the manager needs. Decision trees, I feel, have always been a compliance focus, right? It’s either this person’s a W2 worker or not, right? Right. So I think if those AI tools can start giving them that and consumerize this experience, because that’s what we all do in our personal lives, right? We shop Amazon, we do whatever else we do, and it’s a very consumer driven right and and

I’m here in Vegas, you’re in Vegas. Well, all of a sudden my Facebook feed is showing me advertisements for stuff in Vegas. It’s not Maryland anymore. It knows I’m here. I don’t know that I’ve given it permission to know I’m here, but it knows I’m here. So what can I do that helps that manager know what they need so they can key in some questions or tell me about the availability of those elite subject matter experts? So I think there’s that piece that can give them what that decision tree can’t.

We have to see. I if the tool’s not out there yet, so you said there’s some tools floating around, if they’re not here yet, you know, somebody’s probably working on it, right? But it’s, do they know that we have a need to solve this? Because I feel like the total talent management piece is just missed at most companies, and we’re not looking for a technology solution because we don’t know enough about the problem, right? Because we don’t have that workforce plan, we don’t know where our gaps are. So those are my thoughts on it.

Dustin Talley (07:03.554)
Okay, another quick curveball. When I used to hear total talent management, I always thought, man, if the TA side of this, right, those more responsible for the full-time hiring wanted to, couldn’t they just consume this whole ecosystem that you and I are part of right here and incorporate that into all things talent? Would that be the quickest path to total talent?

Allen Chilson (07:27.769)
Absolutely, and we’d be given, least from my experience working in manufacturing organizations, it’s the way the managers look at it anyway. So if I have 100 workers for me in a manufacturing plant and 60 are employees, 40 are temps, I don’t know that. I mean, I do kind of, but I don’t treat them any differently. They’re all part of my workforce. They’re all getting the work done. So how do we change the way we look at it? And could talent acquisition say, OK. we’re gonna build this muscle and we’re gonna learn how to manage this need. It’s just, like I said earlier, it’s that piece where they put it at arm’s length and say they’re not employees. But if we look at it the way the business looks at it, they’re all workforce, right? So yeah, holistically, right? How do we come up with a holistic solution for this? And start with just incorporating what’s in the MSP, so the Truro Staff Hog. And then once you get that good, now let’s go after the gig work, the SOW work, all the other stuff that managers are doing around the managed programs.

Dustin Talley (08:20.962)
Yeah, you round them up into one spot and then arguably you start to create a total talent effect. All right, last question.

The frontier, right? The frontier effect. What does this look like when we finally get there integrating full-time and contingent talent into one thing? What does that look like, the final frontier?

Allen Chilson (09:47.948)
Yeah, mean to me, mean it’s that one harmonious workforce vision, And, you know, we’re always going to feel like there’s regulations, co-employment, other things that put us at risk if we blend it all together. But I totally, in my opinion, you can build it. Put in whatever firewalls you can. Make sure you’re compliant. It’s clear who gets benefits, who doesn’t. hopefully, agreement from the legal people and other people on other compliance topics like tenures. you know, you would be able to smooth this all out of a manager, my dream is I can just roll in to a system or call a person but I think we’re going system-wise right and I’m just gonna go into a system and say I need somebody to do this and there’s gonna be…

I’m just going to go into a system and say I need somebody to do this.

Allen Chilson (10:30.698)
The AI will drive part of it. At some point it’s going to ring me through to the MSP desk or the talent acquisition desk or somebody. Somebody’s going get my work order after I go through an intake briefing, right? And because it’s the stuff we do now, but we do it manually. We do it with people, but it’s a flawed process. The managers don’t often know where to go, so they go around it. Often, a lot of times those are new managers. They don’t really know how to do it at the company they’re at, so they do it the way they did it before, right? Yeah, yeah. Because it’s not part of the training. And suddenly their boss says, hey, you need some help, go get yourself a temp. Okay, what does that mean? So there’d be a link, there’d be a widget on their desktop, I need staff, right, and I’m gonna go through the process and it’s gonna be a smooth process and the manager’s gonna have options, right, on you could do this, you could do that, you could do that, this is gonna cost you more, this is gonna get you maybe a better quality worker, maybe it all bundles together, but I think…

Allen Chilson (11:24.608)
Like I said, I think it has to be a consumerization approach that they’re going to get that smooth experience that they’re used to with all the portals that we’re in all the time.

Dustin Talley (11:32.482)
Yeah. You said it earlier. You said the word territorial, and then you talked about rolling it into one umbrella. I think the collaboration part of it, us no longer being afraid of like, I got to hold on to what’s mine and actually start working with these teams to have an effect together could be really powerful. So dude, thank you so much for sitting down.
Allen Chilson (11:45.836)
Right.

Allen Chilson (11:56.076)
All right, great. Thanks, Dustin.