A Q&A with Vikram Ashok, CEO and Founder of Graphite 

HR teams wear many hats, including sourcing talent, reading resumes, interviewing candidates, headhunting, and managing contractor payments across teams. Yet, managing all the details of contractors can be time-consuming and overwhelming, especially if you’re using multiple platforms to manage payments and invoices, and doing your day job of executing client projects.

While HR software solutions have modernized the entire full-time employee (FTE) lifecycle, managing contractors continues to be a largely disjointed and manual process. It involves dealing with different platforms and companies for sourcing independent talent, worker classification, tracking utilization, invoicing and payments.

With over 50% of the workforce expected to be freelance by 2027, companies are now more than ever looking for ways to simplify and automate how they manage independent talent. 

We sat down with Graphite CEO and Founder, Vikram Ashok to discuss Graphite’s new Private Talent solution, its benefits to HR teams, and the future of contractor management. 

How has managing independent talent over the years changed? 

Vikram Ashok: The workforce has been in flux for over a decade, with more of the workforce shifting to remote and flexible work arrangements. And when the pandemic came, this trend accelerated and the workforce became even more distributed, yet the management of independent talent remained largely the same. This has significantly increased the burden on HR teams, adding pain to the process of onboarding, managing, and paying contractors. 

Graphite is an on-demand talent platform; what led you to build the Private Talent Cloud solution? 

Vikram Ashok: It was really listening to our customers that got us here.  Most started as customers of our independent talent marketplace, but as they got exposure to the software solutions we have built to manage contractors, they started asking us if they could bring their own talent onto our platform. We realized that our customers had a new pain point we could solve around contractor management and formalized our solution into a Private Talent Cloud offering.  Now, we provide an all-in-one solution to seamlessly manage independent talent all over the world - at scale - and our solution is used by some of the largest corporations and professional services firms in the world.

With our solution, companies can now access a centralized platform to effectively manage their entire contractor workforce - from locating, hiring, onboarding, managing, and evaluating their performance. HR teams are now able to oversee the entire contractor lifecycle to enhance productivity, reduce administrative burdens, and ensure compliance and financial security. It makes the day in the life of HR teams a whole lot easier. 

Why now? 

Vikram Ashok: We’ve witnessed first-hand from our clients how they’re being expected to do more with less. Less talent and tighter budgets but with the same expectations. Then, when you add the inefficient processes associated with managing independent talent on top of that, this can push HR teams to the brink. 

What companies are looking for today are sustainable solutions - ways to not only cut operating expenses but also to increase productivity with real-time data and insights. That’s why we built Graphite’s Private Talent Cloud. We offer an agile, cost-effective approach to manage large distributed pools of contractors. 

What are the benefits leveraging the solutions from an on-demand talent marketplace? 

Vikram Ashok: With our Private Talent Cloud solution, we make it easy to manage all your independent contractors in one place by centralizing, classifying, onboarding, managing, and paying all your company’s contractors from one platform. 

Companies can now not just tap our pool of 10,000+ independent consultants, they can also manage their existing pool of contractors in one place in just a few clicks.

How are companies currently benefiting from Graphite’s all-in-one solution?

Vikram Ashok: We’ve built trusted partnerships with  many Fortune 1000 companies and professional services firms, and this is why they use our all-in-one solution: 

• Operational Efficiency. Save hundreds of hours of accounting time by streamlining contractor payments under one platform.
• Compliance.  Leverage Graphite’s proprietary worker classification software to ensure contractors are properly classified across all 50 states.  Graphite indemnifies against worker misclassification risk.
• Cost Savings.  Reduce reliance on staffing and recruiting agencies by easily allocating work to a trusted pool of contractors.
• Contractor Experience. Keep contractors happy with predictable, on-time ACH payments, best-in-class time tracking and invoicing tools, Instant Payments and our 1099 solution.
• Reporting/Analytics. Keep better tabs on monthly and quarterly contractor spend, market pay trends and project budgets.

What does the future of contract management look like?

Many people aren’t working in a traditional corporate capacity anymore. Instead they’re opting to be independent and moving toward a more flexible way of working. As a result, companies will be looking for ways to integrate this growing group of independent talent into their workforces, and will be relying heavily on AI and automation tools to make contractor management more efficient, secure, and tailored to the needs of both businesses and contractors.