Talent Acquisition and the "Gig Economy" - Building a strategy and maintaining a network of "Side Hustlers" (3/4)

Continuing the discussion with John Syverson of Gentry Partnership. This time we'll look into the actual strategy behind building out a compelling opportunity to attract a gig workforce and some of the strategy behind finding them.

Attracting a Gig workforce – There are similarities between how an organization attracts FTE’s and Gig workers. Employment brand is important to both as is the type of work being done. The main difference will be the length of engagement, flexibility, and the messaging around the differences. For example, having a task or process that absolutely needs to be done from 9-5 will close the talent pool to only those workers available at that time. If the task can be done after hours, in bits and pieces through out the day, or over the weekend it opens the opportunity up to a talent pool that potentially works in a similar capacity for another organization or has a similar skillset as an FTE in another industry. Building a strategy around attracting workers like this also should include a clear definition of the task or project highlighting the benefits or experience gained from being a gig worker for your organization. The gig experience must not only provide value to the company, but also something that benefits and interests the employee, allows the flexibility to turn the work on and off as the worker sees fit, and is a task that can be completed with minimal training.

Strategy behind "finding them" - Many of the places you find regular employees are also great resources for gig workers. For certain skillsets traditional job boards will work, for others professional networks will be effective, but there are also less traditional areas that will need to be explored also. Craigslist and other non-traditional advertising can produce unexpected results. Social networks and word of mouth can be great resources if the story you are able to tell around the work and flexibility is compelling. The JOB BRAND and your ability to tell the story around the opportunity becomes more important than employment brand and benefits that would typically attract your traditional FTE.

Tracking the success – As you build out your strategy and experiment with the different resources, it is important to build out a process of being able to track the resources that are producing the most and the best workers. Knowing which ones provide the best and most cost effective results will allow you to reinvest in the ones that are working and cut and reallocate funds on ones that aren’t. Over time you can start to streamline resources and parts of the process to allow for quicker turn around.

Attracting gig workers is important, but there is a huge investment of both time and money that go into finding them. In the final part of this 4 part article we’ll look at the strategy behind maximizing that investment by maintaining the workforce that you’ve worked so hard to build.