Why Workforce Strategy Must Start With Skills

Workforce Strategy has driven the rise of Total Talent Management for over a decade, yet execution remains a challenge. Many organizations still struggle to unify full-time hiring, contingent workforce, and every talent channel in between. The idea feels big and exciting, but bringing it to life has proven much harder than expected.

That is the conversation that took shape when Mickey Pelletier, founder and CEO of CWM Strategies, sat down with Dustin Talley at ProcureCon CS. Mickey has spent years guiding companies through workforce transformation. He believes Total Talent is not broken. It just needs the right engine behind it.

“Managers only care about one thing. They need work done. They are not thinking about talent classification.”

Why Total Talent Stalled

Most organizations want a complete view of their workforce. They want better decisions about how work gets done. But reality sets in quickly:

• HR focuses on full-time roles.
• Procurement manages contingent workforce.
• IT controls the systems.
• Legal controls the rules.
• Hiring managers just need help.

Each group has a piece of the puzzle, but no one has the full picture. Mickey calls it the “scary beast” because the scope feels overwhelming.

“Tens of thousands of workers. Different channels. Different technologies. Everyone moving at their own pace. No wonder it is hard.”

Bringing all channels into one view requires coordination, shared data, and one place where decisions can happen with confidence. Until recently, most companies could not solve all three.

AI Can Simplify What Has Always Been Complicated

What has changed is the technology behind workplace decision-making. New agentic AI can sit across existing systems and help guide decisions that used to fall entirely on overwhelmed managers.

Imagine a hiring manager saying:
“I need someone to build this. Where do I start?”

AI can now look at skills, budget, timelines, compliance requirements, and available channels to recommend the smartest path. No more guessing the difference between staff augmentation, independent contractors, or project-based services.

“AI helps remove the administrative burden behind the scenes. It brings the best options forward without making managers figure it out on their own.”

AI does not replace humans in the decision. It clears the clutter so they can make the right one.

A Center of Excellence Must Lead the Way

Technology alone cannot solve workforce transformation. Mickey believes progress depends on structure.

A grounded Center of Excellence becomes the hub.
Procurement, talent acquisition, IT, and legal hold have dotted line ownership.
Everyone shapes the decisions.
Everyone follows the same strategy.

It looks different in every organization because culture and maturity influence the model. But the outcome is the same.

“There is not one single owner. There is shared governance that brings the best from each team.”

When the Center of Excellence leads and AI supports, Total Talent becomes less of a dream and more of a plan.

Where Companies Go Next

Mickey says movement is happening. Slowly for some. Boldly for others. But always in the same direction.

• Better coordination.
• Smarter routing of work.
• Talent strategy that adapts to real business needs.

Organizations no longer have to wait for the future. They can start simplifying Total Talent today.

“Everyone gets there at their own pace. What matters is that we are finally moving.”

Interview Transcript

Dustin Talley (00:00)
All right, I’m here at PrecureCon CS with Mickey Pelletier, the meme king himself. Mickey, how you doing, man?

Mickey Pelletier (00:02)
Dustin, it’s good to be here. Good to see you. Good to be in the flesh versus the just over the phone text messages.

Dustin Talley (00:13)
Zooms get old, No, but it’s good to see you in person as well. We’re recording a live podcast and we had topics, but we thought we’d just go off script since it’s me and Mickey and we’ve done a lot of fun things together in the past. Mickey, let’s dig in, right? ⁓ What fun topics do you think are going to come up at ProcureCon CS this year?

Mickey Pelletier (00:32)
I think we’ll hear a lot of the usual suspects a little bit of AI… direct sourcing, I think statement of work will be another big one just because it has been and I don’t think the industry evolves where there’s terribly new things that are coming out every year that you know let’s let’s talk about this thing that you’ve never heard about before I mean I think when it comes to AI we’ll hear a lot more about

Generative AI and how that is fitting into programs. these days, but I know I think ProcureCon does a pretty good job of

The topics that are maybe redundant and have a little bit of fluff to them, like let’s just get to the heart of the matter. So I’m interested to see what it’ll be, because it may, We may hear some things that we haven’t heard a lot about before. ⁓ I’m doing a session tomorrow with Monica spotlighting her program, and it does have some of the cliche things. We do talk about direct sourcing, we do talk about AI, we do talk about SOW, but they’re also very relevant to her, so I think it makes sense when done in the right way.

Dustin Talley (01:38)
Good stuff, man. What do you think will be rebranded? Is there any terms that we’ve been using for forever? It’s happened, right? Like you mentioned SOW, right? And that’s all of a sudden in focus. Is there anything that they’re calling something new? There’s a new buzzword for something that’s been around?

Mickey Pelletier (01:57)
Yeah, I’m trying to think skills-based hiring. That’s like the big one. Was that branded as something else recently? Man, there’s one I had on the tip of my tongue, but now that you ask it, I’m not able to figure it out. So I’ll have to edit that part out.

Dustin Talley (02:11)
All good, You can edit away man.

Mickey Pelletier (02:12)
What about you? Dustin, let’s interview the interviewee. What are you looking forward to? What do you want to hear people talk about?

Dustin Talley (02:20)
Dude, I like when program leaders come together, right? You know me. There are a lot of us that like to think we know the answers to all this stuff. But the people are in the seat running the program. They’ve got interesting things to talk about. And so one of the things that’s special about this conference is those folks take the stage a lot here, right? ⁓ Your session tomorrow, right? Those are fun to watch unfold. And I think it’s a reason that a lot of the program leaders want to be here, just to learn from their peers. So excited for that.

Mickey Pelletier (02:49)
I think it’s lot of like a relationship, like they’re doing that or how did we’ll pick on Monica? How did Monica handle that type of thing before because a lot of these folks that are in the program, leading a program and stuff, a lot of them are on their own and they could feel quite isolating. So events like ProcureCon allow them the opportunity to not only network but hear from others like, oh hey, I’m not as crazy as I think I am and this thing I’m presenting to my leader, man, these other programs are doing it. They’re bringing it to life and here’s what they did and here’s what they accomplished with that. I think the stories always end up being pretty powerful. Hearing it from the folks that are doing it, not a provider representing what they did for their client, but we did and we accomplished.

Dustin Talley (03:33)
Yeah.
Since I saw you at last year’s conference, I think you launched a company, Emberpath, right? Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Non-promo here, right? But I want to hear, right? What’s it been like to start that company?

Mickey Pelletier (03:46)
Yeah, so Emberpath, it’s a different step that I thought I would take in my career. I’ve always done consulting and working directly with a client, usually from a personal perspective, not so much from a technology. This is bringing together a technology that’s meant to sit over top of all of your existing technology to be that front door, using agentic AI to really help you solve the problems that you’re trying to figure out with talent. I have a need for something to do X.
Well what is X, what is the talent actually going to do and knowing what you want to accomplish, what’s the right workforce you want to go through, so what’s the proper decisioning and the criteria to go to. But while it sits on top of your existing technologies, it also becomes your workforce strategy tool.
But while it sits on top of your existing technologies, it also becomes your strategy tool. Yeah, love it. Pulling data sources of your own policies and procedures, mixed with leading practices in the industry, it gives you sort of a one-stop focal point for all things you need to do to figure out talent.

Dustin Talley (04:46)
So for the program leader that’s all on their own that you were mentioning earlier, right, the lonesome loan ranger.
This this tool could be a useful thing for someone like that.

Mickey Pelletier (04:57)
Absolutely, it benefits them. It can also be for the hiring manager themselves that I have a need but I don’t know where the heck to start and what other options are there. I know I can go to my MSP through my VMS. I know maybe I could go over to my big consulting firm. Maybe I should get an independent contractor. What is the right thing? Are there avenues that we could go that are outside of our current remit that may be better for us that we could build a business case around looking into new opportunities like that and new talent channels.

Dustin Talley (05:28)
Yeah. When I heard you say it earlier, the way managers kind of approach what they need to get accomplished, right? That feeds into this theme we were going to look at, the total talent management or total talent 2.0. What are your thoughts on that? Why has that failed? And could AI actually be the key to making that work?

Mickey Pelletier (05:47)
So, I think the idea of total talent management is so large and expansive. We call it this sort of the scary beast when you think of every talent, every part of talent that you have in your entire ecosystem, your human capital spectrum. That’s every person there and the various ways that you engage and procure them. And then we have these different silos and channels in which we engage them. We have full time versus all of our channels of contingent workforce. There’s not necessarily one easy entry points to help us solve that.

Dustin Talley (06:17)
Yeah, that’s true.

Mickey Pelletier (06:18)
And I think it’s been hard because there’s so much to tackle that, how do we, like a large company that has tens of thousands of workers, how do we bring that into one nice purview when HR’s doing one thing.

IT’s doing another thing, procurement’s doing another thing, it can become very difficult to get one consensus of the right way to engage various channels of talent. There’s already relationships that are set up with existing vendors, existing channels, and so to decouple those and create consensus across the companies is pretty challenging. I mean there’s a whole slew of reasons why it struggled and I think AI helps create some of the administrative burden behind the scene. It takes care of those for you, some of the decisioning, some of pulling together all of the data points that need to be considered and helping to orchestrate that in a meaningful way that takes the burden off of hiring managers. I think one of the biggest struggles in our entire industry is the hiring managers, the engagement managers that we work with, contingent workforce, talent engagement, regardless of the classification.
Regardless of the talent channel that you’re trying to go through, these managers, that’s not their job. So they don’t know the difference between a contractor, temp staff versus this. So they need something that’s simple and can be automated behind the scenes for them.

Dustin Talley (07:50)
Sure.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Last question. So you’ve got full-time hiring, you’ve got contingent, you’re right. The manager doesn’t care. They just know they need to get work done. Are we entering that next frontier where the full-time workforce and contingent can be integrated? And bigger question here, who owns it? When it’s all said and done, who ends up owning this?

Mickey Pelletier (08:14)
Yeah, I think yes.
It can be done. is it easy? No. Is there one way that every single company should be doing it? No. It’s going to be like that, we spoke to them based on their culture, their values, their priorities, and how they have things set up.

What I think does need to happen to bring it together is having a focused center of excellence, whether that’s for total talent or contingent workforce, something that brings together these various disparate teams.

Dustin Talley (08:44)
Yeah, like the hub.

Mickey Pelletier (08:46)
Precisely. Yeah, centralized function that pulls the best from each one of these teams and gives representation within the way of managing this and governing it so that they’re all on board and all to the same drum.

Dustin Talley (08:59)
So are you saying no one owns it it still stays across functional. Who owns does the Center of Excellence owns it?

Mickey Pelletier (09:08)
I think within a hierarchy, we all have to roll up to somebody, right? So I think the center of excellence has dotted lines to procurement, to talent acquisition, to IT, to legal. And the way you do that within a company, again, it comes back to how your company set things up. So I think the dotted line center of excellence approach is the way to go, but I think it requires a decent amount of analysis to figure out what is the best solution for you.

Dustin Talley (09:15)
Sure.
Yeah, or there’s different paths that each organization is going to take to get there and then ultimately we all get there at some fictitious point in the future.

Mickey Pelletier (09:41)
Right, we all move at our own pace and with our own priorities and yeah the traditional consultant answer well it depends.

Dustin Talley (09:49)
Let me analyze that for you
Let’s analyze that. Mickey, thanks for sitting down with us at Precure Con. Hope you have a great time. Dustin, thanks for having me. See you guys later.

Mickey Pelletier (09:51)
Let’s analyze that.

Dustin Talley (09:52)
Mickey, thanks for sitting down with us at PrecureCon CS. Hope you have a great time.

Mickey Pelletier (90:55)
Dustin, thanks for having me here. See you guys later.