Taming Talent Management in the Gig Economy
Engaged workers are loyal workers. Engaging gig economy workers requires data about their skills and interests.
Many workers who are part of the Great Resignation left their traditional full-time jobs to embrace the gig economy (think Uber, Deliveroo, Instacart, etc. – digital platforms connecting freelancers with customers to provide short-term services or to share assets). Lured by the promise of freedom, better work-life balance, convenience, and the ability to determine their own schedules, these workers helped propel the gig economy’s explosive growth, which is estimated to reach $455 billion by 2023, according to Statista.
The gig economy already grew 33% during the pandemic, and Fortune reports an estimated 24 million Europeans work in the gig economy today.
Based on these numbers and growth, this appears to be a trend that won’t go away anytime soon. Flexible labor will become a more entrenched part of the workforce, which will require organizations to think more strategically about how work is done.
Managing this volume of freelance talent can be quite challenging. With the rapidly growing talent pool and highly competitive marketplace, it’s imperative to ensure you’re employing quality talent that will help you meet your targeted business outcomes. But who has time to review every aspect of every applicant’s previous work history and background?
Business insurance company Embroker suggests, “Streamline your work by utilizing an established, on-demand outsourcing platform that maintains stable, vetted talent. From there, it’s easy to post ads, evaluate proposals and candidates, and manage the logistics of projects and payments from a single interface.”
That’s what a Talent Lifecycle Management strategy offers.
What is Talent Lifecycle Management?
Simply put, Talent Lifecycle Management is a comprehensive, modern approach to managing every stage of your talent lifecycle, from building candidate pipelines, to facilitating career development, internal mobility and beyond. Where other talent strategies focus on roles, this one emphasizes skills. It includes four major components:
- A talent data platform that connects all talent-related information
- Artificial intelligence (AI) to power insights and analytics
- The ability to create human experiences
- An HR ecosystem through a single source of truth
Data is at the core of a Talent Lifecycle Management strategy. Aggregating all of your talent-related data into a single platform allows you to create talent pools based on specific needs and timelines, so you can quickly and easily scale your business for seasonal spikes and peak times.
Recruiting and nurturing new talent
Talent recruiting today is harder than ever. According to Achievers, 62% of recruiters struggle more to find qualified candidates than they did five years ago.
A talent lifecycle management approach can help talent teams overcome those struggles by making it easy to create and nurture talent pools of candidates who are ready to fill positions as soon as they open.
Instead of piling up all of the applications coming in day after day, you can feed them into the talent data platform and let AI go to work for you to narrow down the best candidate for each role. Those not chosen can be put into a pool to nurture for when a role becomes available. Keeping and enriching talent data like this is especially important in the gig economy.
To keep candidates warm and engaged, you can automatically send suggested readings about the field or something pertinent to their skills or role on a regular cadence, such as every other week. These engagements need to be personalized to be most effective.
You can send out surveys based on certain candidate actions, such as after reading an article, to assess candidates’ interest in it and to gain their feedback. This back-and-forth correspondence helps candidates feel valued by the company and, in turn, helps them build a connection with the company.
Singapore-based gig economy player Grab found it needed a better way to attract and engage talent, as well as scale its business. Adopting the Beamery Talent Lifecycle Management solution helped the company personalize the candidate experience, gain end-to-end control of the recruiting process, and increase talent engagement by 50%.
Developing internal talent
Recruiting and nurturing candidates is only half the battle. You also need to pay attention to your employees. You don’t want them to get bored or lose them to competitors. Allowing your employees a chance to do something different and learn something new can give your company an exciting edge over other traditional workplaces.
A skills-based Talent Lifecycle Management strategy can help with this as well. By mapping myriad talent data points, the AI-powered talent data platform can find connections between workers’ current skills and their ability to develop additionally needed skills. AI can also help map personalized professional development plans, as no two workers learn and advance in exactly the same way. Could you offer your employees internal gigs or projects to help them grow?
Helping your employees gain skills and progress in their careers can make them feel more engaged with their work and with the company.
Learn how Beamery can help those in the gig economy manage talent across the whole lifecycle.