Know Vakanta

Topping the EU innovation scoreboard, Sweden is one of the ten most competitive countries in the world. It’s at the leading edge of technology and highly digitised – with Swedes being early adopters, Sweden has been dubbed the first cashless nation. An extraordinary 3% of the GDP is invested in R&D. The start-up scene is buzzing. And in Stockholm, there are more unicorns – privately-owned companies valued at over $1bn – per capita than in any other city.

Yet, for all their entrepreneurial brilliance, most Swedish companies share a major challenge with the rest of the world: there’s little to no control of the contingent workforce.

Hiring managers are unaware of preferred suppliers. There’s no consistency in writing requests. Personal information and CVs are scattered across multiple inboxes and hard drives, the organisation a sitting duck for GDPR audits. Important supplier relationships are lost when staff move on. Not even leadership teams know what consultants work for their company, nor why they were hired or how much is spent on them. And managers spend much of their time fielding phone calls from suppliers desperate not to be forgotten.

The list goes on.

True to Swedish minimalism, Vakanta’s sleek and intuitive VMS makes it easy to find, hire, manage and analyse your contingent workforce. Consolidate all your existing consultants and invite any new supplier in a few clicks. Designate preferred suppliers. Send templated, powerful requests to your private Vakanta suppliers and benchmark bids against Vakanta’s network of more than 1,400 independent agencies and consultants. Negotiate directly with suppliers – and don’t let internal payment policies get in the way. Vakanta meets the cash flow needs of small and specialised contractors, so you can always hire the best talent for your projects.

With Vakanta, both customers and suppliers know exactly where they have each other. Everyone speaks the same language and follows the same processes. From hiring and onboarding through time-reporting and invoicing to offboarding and analysing, Vakanta puts consultants and real-time data at your fingertips. And this is a gamechanger.

Knowledge and human capital are your company’s greatest assets.

Vakanta was founded in Stockholm in 2013. Having launched a minimal viable product, we initially established a foothold by working closely with demanding and innovative clients in perfecting our VMS and building our supplier network. This creative collaboration paid increasingly great dividends for our clients and put Vakanta in position to capitalise on a major shift in the market.

It happened in 2017. A synergy effect of three factors then suddenly gave our clients a massive competitive advantage. Firstly, the gig economy exploded, with more and more professionals actively choosing consulting roles over employment. Secondly, an accelerating rate of innovation ramped up the race to secure the very best talent. Thirdly, the market proved that only a digitised workflow could provide the strategic insights and speed required to win this race.

Global research company Technavio forecast what would happen next. In 2017, Technavio identified the need for intra-department cost-benefit analysis as a key factor to an expected 22% year-on-year revenue growth in the IT-as-a-service market by 2021.

Vakanta’s VMS was now firmly in the driver’s seat, and results were soon to show. Offering our proven product to a wider market, Vakanta achieved a hundredfold increase in revenue over the following three years. And the COVID crisis is set to cement our position. With external staff already accounting for 42% of global workforce costs, a 2020 McKinsey survey reports that 70% of executives expect to use more contractors after the pandemic than they did before.

The race is on.