Replace Your Staffing Vendor Without Losing the Contract Team
KORE1 takes over an incumbent’s active assignments on a dated cutover plan. Same people. Same desks. New paper. Nobody stops working while the handover happens.
Replacing a staffing vendor means moving your existing contract workers, their assignments and their paperwork to a new supplier on a fixed cutover date, without a coverage gap and without the contractors reapplying for jobs they already hold.
A medical device manufacturer called us in February with an agreement that expired March 31 and nine contractors they wanted to keep. Nine people. All of them productive. None of them aware anything was happening. Their procurement lead had already sent the non-renewal notice, which was the right call and also the reason the call was tense, because the incumbent now had thirty days of leverage and knew exactly what it was worth. What nobody had read closely was a clause saying any worker introduced by the incumbent stayed off limits to a replacement supplier for twelve months after the assignment ended, which on a fast read meant the nine people sitting at those desks could not be transferred to anybody at all.
It said something narrower than that. It usually does.
Their counsel and our contracts lead went through it on a Tuesday. The off-limits language covered candidates the incumbent had submitted and the client had not hired, not workers already sitting on a live assignment the client was electing to move. Seven of the nine transferred on April 1. Two stayed. That was their call to make, and we said so out loud rather than pretending it wasn’t an option.
That is the work this page covers. We take over an incumbent’s contract team on a dated plan, carry the transferred workers on our own W-2, and hold coverage through the changeover. If you’re weighing the engagement model itself rather than a specific supplier switch, contract staffing is the better place to start. We’re also not your lawyers, and we’ll say that on the first call before you have to ask.
Nobody Loses a Vendor Transition on Price. They Lose It on the Gap.
Two things go wrong, and the expensive one isn’t the one buyers spend their time worrying about. First is the coverage gap. Notice goes out on a Friday, the incumbent’s recruiters quietly stop working your open requisitions on Monday because there’s no commission left in them, and the replacement supplier hasn’t cleared your procurement portal yet. Three weeks. Nobody sourcing anything. That gap is almost always self-inflicted, because the letter went out before the replacement was papered.
Second is the workers. A contractor who learns their agency is being replaced from a rumor in a team channel is a contractor returning recruiter calls by lunchtime, and you will not get them back. They were never loyal to the invoice. They’re loyal to the team they sit with and a commute they’ve already optimized, and both of those survive a vendor change perfectly well, but only if a person tells them so before the rumor does.
So we ask to make that call ourselves, alongside your manager, in the first week. Not by email.
The Cutover, Day by Day
Dates run relative to go-live, which is normally the first Monday after the incumbent’s notice period closes. Nothing on this ladder is exotic. It’s just written down in advance, and that’s the part that usually isn’t.
Read the paper before anyone sends a letter
Notice window, off-limits language, non-solicitation, the conversion clock, and whether the incumbent or your own policy owns the background checks. Skip this one and everything after it gets harder. Every time.
Supplier setup runs in parallel, not after
Master agreement, a certificate of insurance naming you as holder, W-9, security review, and getting our remit-to entity into your AP master. That entity is a different legal name from the one on the agreement, which is normal in staffing and breaks vendor records constantly. Start it early.
The conversation with each contractor
Your manager and our account lead, one worker at a time, explaining what changes and what doesn’t. Fifteen minutes each. Skip this and you’ll spend the next quarter backfilling people who were never going anywhere.
Onboarding, all of it, in one week
A fresh Form I-9, background check and screening run to your standard rather than the incumbent’s, direct deposit, benefits election, and timecard logins issued before anyone needs them. Test the logins.
The changeover nobody in the building notices
Last incumbent timecard closes Sunday night. First KORE1 timecard opens Monday morning. Badges, laptops and system access don’t move, because none of that was ever the staffing vendor’s to hold. That’s the point.
First invoice cycle gets checked by us
We validate the first billing run against the signed rate sheet before it reaches your accounts payable queue. A rate typo caught in week one is a correction. Week one is cheap. Caught in month four it’s a credit memo, an apology and a procurement escalation.
Thirty-day review, run by you
Rates against market, fills against the plan, anything that broke, and honest treatment of the requisitions the incumbent had been sitting on. You chair it. We show up with numbers.
Roughly 27,000 staffing and recruiting companies operate in the United States, per the American Staffing Association’s industry statistics, which also put 2.2 million temporary and contract employees at work in an average week in 2024. The odds that the vendor you signed four years ago is still the right one for the work are not especially good.
The Contractors Come With You, and Their Pay Rate Doesn’t Have to Move
Transferring a worker is administratively dull and emotionally loud. The dull part is a new W-2, a new I-9, a background check re-run to your standard, and a benefits election. Two hours of their time spread across a week, most of it waiting on a screening vendor. None of it makes us an employer of record, which is a different arrangement with different obligations, and we say so out loud because buyers conflate the two constantly.
The loud part is what they assume it means. Usually about money. Most contractors have survived one of these already and remember it badly, because last time nobody told them whether their rate was going to make it through. Ours does. We hold a transferred worker’s pay flat as the default and price the bill rate around it, and on the rare occasion we can’t, we say so before the conversation with the worker rather than after.
A contractor hears the truth about their rate in the same meeting where we ask them to move. That has cost us assignments. It has never cost us a team.
Tenure with your team carries over in every way a manager cares about. What does not carry is the conversion clock. It restarts. From zero. Hours billed under somebody else’s master agreement are hours under somebody else’s master agreement, and no scale we run knows about them. On our standard paper a conversion runs 20 percent of first-year base through the first 800 billable hours, 15 percent from 800 to 1,040, and nothing at all past 1,040 hours, which means a worker you already intend to hire outright is usually cheapest to convert before the transition rather than after it. We’ll model both. Sometimes the answer isn’t us, and you should hear that from a vendor rather than find it in a spreadsheet in month seven.
What You Get on the Other Side of the Cutover
The conversion scale is section B.8 of KORE1’s standard master services agreement and individual client agreements can differ, so treat it as a starting point rather than a quote. Time-to-submittal and retention are our own placement figures across the trailing twelve months. Industry definitions for terms like payrolling, temp-to-hire and contract-to-hire come from the American Staffing Association’s definitions of staffing services, which is the glossary most procurement teams end up citing anyway.
Three Ways a Takeover Gets Structured
Buyers tend to assume this is all or nothing. It rarely is. The middle option wins more first-year business than the other two combined.
Every Seat Moves on One Date
Cleanest when the incumbent agreement is ending anyway and the program is small enough to move over a single weekend.
The contract staffing model →We Run Alongside for a Quarter
The incumbent keeps the tail, new requisitions go to both of us, and you award on submittal quality instead of a reference call.
IT staff augmentation →The Tail Finishes Where It Is
Nobody transfers, nobody has a difficult conversation, and every opening from today forward starts with us.
Contract-to-hire →
Four Line Items That Add a Week If You Find Them Late
Procurement onboarding surprises people every time. If your supplier portal wants a completed security review and a signed data processing addendum before anyone can raise a purchase order, that isn’t a vendor delay on either side, it’s your own workflow, and at most mid-market companies it runs six to fifteen business days. Start it at D−30 and it disappears into the schedule.
Insurance certificates are fast if you ask early and slow if you ask on a Friday. Ask on a Tuesday. Our stack carries $5 million in staffing professional liability, $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate on general liability, and a $5 million umbrella above that, which clears most manufacturing and healthcare requirements without an endorsement. Naming you as certificate holder takes about a day. Additional insured takes longer. Ask for both in the same email.
Then the entity problem, which nobody scopes and everybody hits. The legal entity on our agreement and the entity your accounts payable team actually pays are two different names. That’s ordinary in this industry and it jams supplier masters constantly, so get both onto the same vendor-record ticket instead of discovering the second one when an invoice bounces. Same ticket. One pass.
Last one is smallest and makes the most noise. Timecards. If your contractors approve hours inside your own vendor management system rather than ours, somebody has to add KORE1 as a supplier there and map the existing workers to our supplier ID, and that somebody is usually one administrator with a queue and a day job. Get their name. Week one.
Common Questions
Can we move our existing contractors to a new staffing agency?
Usually yes. Most staffing agreements restrict who a replacement supplier may recruit, not whether a client can move a worker it already engages, but the exact wording in your incumbent’s contract is what decides it.
Read the off-limits clause and the non-solicitation clause as two separate things, because they normally are and they normally say different things. Then have your own counsel read them. We’ll tell you what we’ve seen across a lot of these, and we’ll tell you in the same breath that we aren’t lawyers, which is what any honest vendor should say before a contract question.
How long does a staffing vendor transition take?
Thirty days end to end is normal for a team under twenty contractors. Two weeks is possible when supplier onboarding is already finished, and anything under ten days is a coverage gap wearing a schedule.
The long pole is almost never recruiting. It’s your own supplier setup. Security review, insurance certificates, the vendor master record and the timecard mapping all run in parallel with everything else if you start them first, and strictly one after another if you don’t.
What does it cost to replace a staffing vendor?
There’s no transition fee on our side. The real costs are whatever conversion or buyout terms already sit in your incumbent’s agreement, plus the internal hours your procurement and AP teams spend onboarding a new supplier.
Bill rates get quoted against the roles, not against the transfer. If your incumbent’s rates were competitive we’ll say so on the first call. If they were twelve points under market we’ll say that too, because you find out either way in about six months when the strongest people on the team stop returning your manager’s messages. Rate benchmarks for contract technology roles sit in our 2026 contractor rate guide, and the fee side is covered in the staffing agency pricing guide.
Do the contractors keep their pay rate through the change?
That’s our default. We hold a transferred worker’s pay flat and build the bill rate around it, and when a rate genuinely can’t survive the move we raise it with you before anybody speaks to the worker.
Benefits are the piece that actually changes, since plan design differs by agency. Ours is real W-2 coverage. Not a stipend. Walk them through it in the D−14 conversation instead of letting somebody read a benefits PDF alone at nine at night and draw their own conclusions.
Should we give the incumbent notice before or after we pick a replacement?
After. Send notice once the replacement supplier is papered and onboarded, because the day that letter lands is the day the incumbent’s recruiters stop working your open requisitions.
None of that is hostility. It’s how commission plans work. Nobody sources a role they won’t be paid on, and a thirty-day notice period is thirty days of a desk going quietly idle unless somebody else is already covering it.
What happens to a contractor’s conversion clock?
It restarts. Billable hours accrued under your previous agency’s agreement don’t carry across to a new master services agreement, so a worker who was two months from a free conversion is no longer two months away.
On our standard agreement the scale runs 20 percent of first-year base through 800 billable hours, 15 percent from 800 to 1,040, and zero past 1,040. So when you already plan to hire somebody outright, the cheaper sequence is often to convert them off the incumbent’s paper before the cutover rather than after it. We’ll run both. That’s a conversation where the answer is sometimes to pay your outgoing vendor, and we’d rather say it early than have you find it yourself.
Can you take over only part of the program?
Yes, and it’s the most common structure we run. You keep the incumbent on live assignments, open new requisitions with both suppliers for a quarter, and award on submittal quality rather than on a reference call.
Split awards make procurement teams nervous and they shouldn’t. Two suppliers working a shared requisition list produces the one comparison you can actually defend to a CFO, and it doesn’t ask anybody to bet a whole program on a first impression. If the wider question is really staffing versus an outsourced delivery model, staff augmentation versus outsourcing covers that fork properly.
Start With the Agreement, Not the Notice Letter
One call is usually enough to tell whether your incumbent’s contract lets the team move, what it costs, and whether the switch is worth running at all this quarter.
Talk to a Staffing Partner →