Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Talent Assembly as Recruitment 2.0

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Talent Assembly as Recruitment 2.0 For most of recruiting’s history, in some ways all jobs were created equal. If your organization needed a human worker, you solicited qualified candidates to work full-time, onsite at your location, with the expectation that they’d be there for the foreseeable future. Traditional employees still exist, of course. But due to a combination of demographic shifts and technology advances, the recruitment role has become exponentially more complicated. I’ve talked about the rise of the gig economy for a while, but new surveys keep supporting its growth. For instance, a 2018 NPR study found 1 in 5 jobs in America is held by a contract worker and predicted that within a decade, contractors and freelancers will make up half of the workforce. This shift means that instead of relying on traditional employees to perform most organizational responsibilities, most companies are moving to a hybrid approach that includes temporary, contract, and virtual employees, as well as consultants and subject matter experts. And recruiters, still housed mostly within the HR function, are being called upon to quickly construct teams in response to immediate business priorities. Rapid talent assembly, which fits perfectly into the agile operations model embraced by many forward-thinking organizations, has many benefits. You can source talent when and where you need it, and it doesn’t matter that the best person for the job doesn’t live near your New York headquarters. When a project is finished, you don’t have to continue paying the employee. You don’t need a crystal ball requiring next year’s staffing requirements, and you don’t have to spend your profits on unnecessary overhead and benefits. But how do you do talent assembly exactly? In my new book about the future of work, Humanity Works, I discuss an example of a network set up by an individual organization for the express purpose of talent assembly. The Washington Post Talent Network, which is part social network and part job board, was designed to give Post editors an easy way to solicit and hire external writers for blogs, breaking news, and long features across a variety of departments. The system includes freelancer profiles, detailing professional experience and including work samples; story pitching, allowing freelancers to tailor ideas for specific departments and editorial initiatives; assignment posting, letting freelancers consider stories the Post would like to pursue; and location tracking, ensuring editors know freelancers’ primary work locations for quick deployment of breaking news. If you don’t have or can’t build a network of your own, several excellent sites can help with your sourcing, including: Freelancer.com: After acquiring vWorker and Scriptlance, this is the world’s biggest global outsourcing resource. Upwork: When oDesk.com and Elance.com merged, Upwork was the result. Like Freelancer.com, the employer support and service are terrific and the site takes only a small cut for matched projects. Guru.com: Going beyond the more typical freelancer occupations, this site matches subject matter experts with employers. TopTal: If you need skilled software development talent, TopTal employs a rigorous screening system and matches the top 3 percent of tech applicants with short and long-term employer projects. If you’d like to learn more about why recruitment is such a critical part of your overall talent strategy, join me and SilkRoad client Sonepar for a free webinar tomorrow, September 17th at 2PM EST.