It’s increasingly clear that creating an exceptional employee experience (EX) can be a competitive advantage to attract and maintain top talent. Faced with multiple opportunities, the most skilled workers will consider not just salary and benefits, but also their quality of [work]life.
For full-time employees, companies often put their best foot forward starting in recruitment and onboarding to foster the most positive impressions of their EX from the start.
All too often, however, that’s not the case when it comes to contractors, freelancers and consultants, also known as contingent labor. This is a mistake, says Joseph Hanna, chief product officer at Magnit, a leading workforce management platform and services provider.
“There is no difference between…a full-timer and a contingent [worker],” he says. “They deliver for us. They are part of our team.”
Savvy hiring directors already know that a great contingent worker experience can drive positive brand recognition for their company, and they’re leveraging the latest technology to pull ahead of the competition.
“A lot of our customers [now] realize that, when we work with a contingent worker, there’s very little difference between what we need and what they need,” Hanna says.
To help recruiters and other employment professionals better understand this process, Hanna identifies three ways companies can leverage technology to improve the contingent worker experience.
Attract The Right Candidates With More Thoughtful Recruitment
Though undeniably convenient, the ability for candidates to submit applications with just one click can overwhelm hiring managers. As a result, great candidates are overlooked as screeners struggle to filter through applicants.
But the burden of responsibility does not rest solely on the candidates’ shoulders. As Hanna explains, both parties must be more thoughtful during this process.
“A lot of companies take the blanket approach [and] send 1,000 emails to people who may or may not be appropriate for the job,” he explains. “Then we have candidates who apply to 10 jobs within three minutes…without actually reading [the job description].”
Here, artificial intelligence and advanced data can help.
“Instead of that blanket approach, [we use] AI to identify the right time to connect with a specific target candidate [with] the correct job that makes sense to where their career is,” Hanna says.
For candidates, powerful matching algorithms help ensure that inappropriate positions aren’t offered to them in the first place. And when they do spot the right job, artificial intelligence can parse their resume, pre-populate questionnaires and even schedule interviews.
“When we’re competing for top talent…that process needs to be very frictionless,” adds Hanna.
Optimize Daily Processes With Mobile-First Apps
Once they’re in the door, many contingent workers find themselves underserviced by IT departments that prioritize full-time staffers. Consider employment portals and intranets that are still designed for desktop web browsers. This alone can disenfranchise contract workers, Hanna says.
“I find it hard to believe that [employee] technologies are not as mobile-friendly as they need to be,” he notes. “We have a whole generation of workers who all they know is mobile [and] if you force them to go to a desktop…you’re going to make the experience pretty difficult.”
Additionally, it may alienate entire categories of workers who simply can’t access desktop browsers while on-the-job, like drivers or floor workers or a host of other positions that don’t take place in front of a computer.
But going mobile-first is more than just reformatting apps for smaller screens, cautions Hanna. Instead, he says the contingent worker’s daily experience must be fundamentally reconsidered from their perspective. Are lengthy forms, for example, really necessary? Why should it take several minutes to create time sheets and record expenses? And why should they have to wait two weeks (or more) for a paycheck, versus accessing their pay on-demand with a few simple swipes and taps in a mobile app?
Hanna likens the process to shopping online. When a checkout process is fussy and overly complicated, consumers abandon their shopping carts and go elsewhere.
“Making that experience a lot more pleasant for everybody [may be] the difference between being able to get that worker to complete the process versus not.”
Create Career Paths For Upskilling, Reskilling And Redeployment
For full-time workers, it’s common for organizations to invest in their professional development. When new opportunities crop up, they are thus well-prepared to progress their careers.
Traditionally, contingent workers have been shut out of this experience. Maybe organizations overlook their potential long-term impact, or they lack the data needed to understand the skill sets currently active across their contingent workforce. Whatever the reason, this can force contingent workers to seek opportunities outside their present organization—even if their skills are in demand at this company or make them good candidates for upskilling.
This no longer needs to be the case, Hanna says. Thanks to advances in AI and related technologies, it’s now possible to chart career paths and maintain employee profiles that accurately reflect their current skill sets and capabilities.
“Whether it was for a week, six months [or] years—we know a lot about them,” he says. “Instead of trying to think about everything in a fixed and stiff job description…[we] move it to purely a skills discussion. With that, comes career-pathing and upskilling.”
After all, he adds, “There is no better pool of candidates…than people who we actually worked with before and know their capabilities and so forth… At the right time, hopefully [we can] bring them back, multiple times over their career.”
