Why Maverick Spending Matters in Recruitment

Organisations that route 80% of their hiring through preferred suppliers typically spend 15 to 25% less per placement than those with unmanaged supplier bases, according to analyst benchmarks from firms including Staffing Industry Analysts. The gap comes almost entirely from off-programme spending: hiring managers who bypass the agreed vendor list and go directly to their preferred agency contact, or who use a personal LinkedIn connection to fill a role without triggering the procurement process. This is maverick spending, and in workforce procurement, it consistently undermines the commercial logic of managed programmes.

For staffing agencies with preferred supplier agreements, maverick spending cuts both ways. When a hiring manager places an off-programme order directly with an agency that isn't on the approved list, the agency captures revenue it wouldn't have won through the formal process. But for agencies that hold preferred supplier status, maverick spending dilutes the volume commitment that justified the rate concessions they made to win the position. Understanding how clients manage, or fail to manage, maverick spend helps agencies have more credible conversations about programme design.

Managed service providers and procurement teams spend significant effort quantifying and reducing maverick spend. The ability to report on it accurately and present a reduction plan is part of the value proposition for any VMS or MSP solution.

How Maverick Spending Works

Maverick spending in recruitment occurs when a hiring manager initiates a supplier engagement outside the organisation's agreed procurement framework. This might mean calling a recruiter they've worked with previously, approving an invoice from a non-preferred agency, or using a department budget code to avoid triggering the formal purchase order process. The result is a hire that doesn't appear in the programme data until the invoice arrives, and sometimes not even then if it's miscoded.

The incentive structure that drives maverick spending is straightforward: hiring managers optimise for speed and relationship comfort, not procurement compliance. A sales director who needs to fill a regional account manager role in three weeks isn't thinking about preferred supplier tiers; they're thinking about who they trust to find good candidates quickly. If the programme's preferred agencies haven't filled a similar role well recently, the temptation to go outside the list is real.

The compliance cost is equally real. Organisations running managed service programmes typically have rate cards and SLA commitments embedded in their preferred supplier agreements. Off-programme placements don't benefit from those rate cards, often cost more, and create data gaps that make workforce planning and audit reporting harder. In regulated industries, an off-programme hire that hasn't gone through standard background screening or right-to-work checking creates legal exposure.

Consider a technology company running a VMS programme with six preferred staffing agencies. A VP of Engineering with strong personal relationships at a boutique AI staffing firm bypasses the VMS entirely, directly engaging the firm to place three machine learning engineers. The invoice arrives outside the VMS, gets coded to a project budget, and never appears in the programme reporting. The company has paid an above-programme rate for three placements, has no right-to-work documentation in its central system, and has no visibility into those workers' engagement terms.

Maverick Spending in Practice

A programme manager at a financial services firm runs a quarterly spend analysis and identifies that 22% of temporary staffing invoices in the past three months came from non-preferred suppliers, up from 14% the previous quarter. She traces the majority to two business units where recent preferred supplier delivery had been slow. She presents the data to the CPO with a recommendation to address root cause by adding a specialist legal staffing agency to the preferred list, rather than attempting pure enforcement. Off-programme spend returns to below 10% within two quarters.