Joel Kammeyer, Head of Community at Direct Collective, How Connection and Community Turn Contingent Buyers Into Leaders

The contingent workforce is the one corner of business where the playbooks are not public. Banks, the Big Four, and Fortune 500 programs do not publish how they run their VMS, vet a freelancer, or catch candidate fraud. That knowledge lives in people's heads. Which means the leaders who win are the ones with the best access to other leaders.

Joel Kammeyer joined Direct Collective in June 2026 after 14 years running programs at Epiq and Cerner. Direct Collective is a curated community of 300+ contingent workforce leaders: Ask the Community, city chapters, monthly member matches, peer pods, and a no-fee job network for leaders caught in a reduction.

We're building Human Cloud to do the same thing for the supply side, so businesses can find, vet, and safely engage the right flexible talent solution in minutes instead of months.

In this episode, Joel shares:

• Why "buyer" is the wrong word, and how a peer network is what earns a contingent leader a seat at the table
• The three things keeping 300+ program leaders up at night: agentic AI inside the program, candidate fraud across the full worker lifecycle, and the freelancer and SOW spend still outside the VMS
• Why AI cannot replace peers in this industry: there is no public data, so the human in the loop is the data
• A day, a month, and a quarter in the life of a Direct Collective member, from Ask the Community to chapters and peer pods
• Why the hiring manager is already going around procurement, and what the carrot and the stick look like for leaders who do or do not build a network

Joel Kammeyer is Head of Community and Contingent Workforce Programs at Direct Collective, following seven years running the contingent program at Epiq and building the program and internal MSP at Cerner from scratch.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.