9-5 jobs are still in vogue. There’s no doubt about that. But a growing number of employees are now whipping out their smartphones to engage in small–time “gigs.” Conservative estimates peg the number of people engaged in gig labor in the US at ~55 million or about 35% of the entire US workforce.
Nearly 60% of enterprises in the US & the UK now rely on gig workers to fill 20% of their workforce. Given these figures and the fact that they are only going to increase from here on, it’s critical that business leaders and workforce planners understand the implications of the gig economy.
We’ve already covered how the gig economy is gradually changing the face of tech hiring in our post on Meeting The Talent Demands Of The Gig Economy.
In this post, we continue the discussion on how the enterprise landscape is changing and how business owners can adapt their workflow to accommodate the emergence of gigs.
Meeting Ad-hoc Talent Requirements
The greatest upside for enterprises is that the gig economy provides access to global talent and enables them to quickly scale their workforce based on project requirements. Upwork estimates that 40% of businesses preferred hiring gig or contract workers to meet the immediate need for an expert in a niche field.
Take the expert of retail establishments who have an on-season and an off-season. Rather than go through the process of hiring external talent and then laying off someone during downturns, workforce planners in this sector are turning towards giggers to meet short-term needs.
Gig workers can be dispatched at a moment’s notice. Lengthy formalities like legal, background verification & onboarding them to the company health insurance plan can be entirely skipped. All this adds up to big bucks saved in the long term.
These benefits can be summed up to:
- Lower costs
- Ability to scale quickly
- A diverse pool of flexible workers
Job Roles Going The Gig Way
It looks like literally, no job role is immune from the gig economy. Even deep learning jobs, which are projected to see an exponential rise in demand, are going the gig way with contractors earning on average ~$100 per hour!
While blue–collar jobs have been on the gig bandwagon for a while now, the increasing prevalence of white–collar gigs is expected to increase in the post-COVID economy. Some startups are even hiring for their C-suite in a gig model. This allows them to validate their fit for the role before offering a full-time role.
Jobs in cybersecurity (pen testing = ~$67 per hour), AWS (~$55 per hour), virtual reality (~$50 per hour) and other emerging fields offer contractors competitive remuneration. Employers, on the other hand, don’t have to worry about lengthy onboarding formalities and can save on costs both in the short and long terms.
Workforce planners need to be on their toes regarding typical hourly rates for contractors working on niche fields. To do this, they need the backing of a huge dataset that covers talent skillsets and corresponding compensations across geographies. Draup for Talent provides these data and more.
Reinvent Job Descriptions into Skills-Based categories
With automation ruling the roost in most organizations, people are being freed up to engage in more value-adding, skills-based tasks.
The gig economy is primed to provide for such talent. However, enterprises should meet them half-way by tailoring job descriptions to let giggers know what specific skills are in need.
This is not a problem if you’re hiring from conventional gig platforms like Freelancer or Upwork. However, if your HR team is looking to fill for a niche position in an emerging technology, traditional job descriptions will be casting a net that is both wide and with too many holes.
Undoubtedly, the gig culture makes it easy for corporates to find talent that exactly matches up with the required skills set.
The Gig Workforce is Here to Stay
As the workforce becomes increasingly fluid and less constrained by geography and time, organizations should embrace newer ways of worker engagement & management. The gig economy has opened up a whole new frontier for talent acquisition. By making a few small changes to the way enterprises operate, they can fully utilize this emerging talent pool to bridge the talent gap.
Draup’s proprietary Talent dashboard features talent across 1500+ geographies and 28+ industries. Our talent intelligence platform is loaded with a comprehensive dataset of 450 million–plus professional profiles. Perform skills analysis for in-demand, niche roles in emerging technologies and gain insights on talent trends of competitors across industries.
