Cyndi Scallion

Cyndi Scallion for 16 years has been instrumental in the launch and buildout of the contingent workforce programs at Cox Communications and Cox Automotive, both subsidiaries of Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises Inc., a global company with nearly 50,000 employees and $20 billion in revenue.

“The contingent workforce plays a critical role, if you think about the overall workforce and how we staff for the day-to-day work that we have to do,” she says. “When there are spikes, or even when there are drop-offs [like Cox Automotive experienced last year amid Covid], it allows you to flex up and flex down. So, I think it’s always going to be a channel that we rely on quite heavily because it allows you a lot more flexibility than full-time labor.”

Scallion last year spearheaded a consolidation of Cox Communications, Cox Automotive, and Cox Enterprises’ CW program, which has an annual spend of $1.2 billion and counts about 5,000 to 6,000 contingent workers. Its divisional programs were “completely different,” she says, with different scorecards, reports, performance metrics and vendors. The effort resulted in a 60% reduction in the supply base and the ability to evaluate suppliers on key metrics — most importantly, speed and quality.

In October of 2020, she also began building up Cox’s direct-sourcing efforts, with the help of two supplier partners; the job categories currently being run through the direct sourcing channel cover the majority of our jobs to include technicians, software engineers architects, IT security roles, and IT sourcing.

“That’s a program that has been growing pretty dramatically recently because, if you think about the war on talent, we need all the recruiting channels we can get right now,” she says.