Published : 29th November 2023

Attracting the Best and Brightest

As we continue to manage the lifecycle of a contractor in an organization, the primary focus of MSPs like Workspend Inc., let’s take the next step after last week’s article wherein we created a requisition to open a role for a new contingent worker. Attracting talent with the right skills, capabilities, and perspectives aligned with their organization is the objective of any hiring manager for their open roles. In this article, we’ll be focusing on how to use GenerativeAI (GenAI) technologies to attract this contingent talent.

Fish Where the Fish Are

Charlie Munger, of Berkshire Hathaway fame, once said, “fish where the fish are.” While Charlie was using this phrase as it relates to the art of investing, it’s equally applicable to the “fishing” for candidates for your new contractor role.

What this essentially means to the hiring manager is to look for talent on social media, forums, jobsites, and other “ponds” where the talent you’re looking for is likely to congregate. A hiring manager needs to consider the nature of the contractor role before considering where to “fish” for the right talent.

As an example, the role might be heavily focused on IT, in which case a job board like Stack Overflow, GitHub Jobs, or Dice would be a more targeted “pool” in which to fish, versus the broader “lake” of a Monster. Similarly, a hiring manager may be looking at a more construction-oriented role, in which case an industry specific “pond” like constructionjobs.com or ihireconstruction.com are much better fits, than a career “ocean” site like Indeed.

It’s critically important for a hiring manager to consider their choice of “ponds to fish in,” based on their contractor roles as this will make a substantial difference in the level of investment (time and money) and outcomes (quantity and quality) of candidates they will get out of the process. Fortunately, this is exactly the kind of work the current crop of GenAI platforms can do for hiring managers. In fact, Workspend’s proprietary WRAP platform has been designed to do exactly that for a hiring manager. WRAP takes advantage of GenAI technology, utilizing several pieces of information like the job title, and provides a recommended list of websites, forums, or social media sites where hiring managers would be most likely to find this type of talent. Effectively, GenAI tech can help find where the fish are for hiring managers, thus making their fishing that much more successful.

“The Finer the Bait, the Shorter the Wait!”

While this may be a quote from Riddler in an episode of Batman who may have been talking about attracting Batman, the applicability of this quote to hiring managers looking to find the right talent can’t be overlooked. In fact, given the time compressed nature of our daily lives and the velocity at which we consume information, hiring managers need to find every opportunity to expertly craft their “bait” to attract the contingent workers they need.

Furthermore, given the myriad of data and information sources available and utilized by everyone, all the time, it becomes even more critical in order for the “bait” to attract the right talent for the job, to be well developed. Both of these factors can be seen by the  diagram below, which shows the level of activity in a minute on the internet – identifying both the variety of sources and the velocity at which they are consumed.

Given all of this hyper-activity and information overload in the hiring manager’s target audience, getting the bait right becomes paramount. Thankfully, here is another advantageous use case for GenAI.

Given the proper parameters, and with just the right prompt engineering, the current crop of GenAI platforms like ChatGPT are able to produce the right kind of “bait” to target qualified candidates for hiring managers. This is precisely the level of engineering that forward thinking companies and platforms, like Workspend’s WRAP, have built into their design.

The intent is to make this platform easy to use – with just one button click – to generate the right “hook” you’ll need to use across the various ponds you’re looking to fish in for your talent. If the pond is X (formerly Twitter,) then WRAP can help with a 280-character teaser to attract candidates.

If the pond is LinkedIn, it can create a more “formal” listing for your role. Lastly, if it’s an industry blog, career website, or any other mechanism, the same level of targeted content to use on these sites can easily be created. Through this utilization of GenAI, we are able to give the hiring manager the right bait to shorten their wait.

The Master Angler of Contractors

While this article has used a lot of fishing analogies, thank Charlie Munger for getting us started down that track, the reality is the job of finding contingent talent for your organization can often be as frustrating as fishing all day and having nothing to show for it.

The process of identifying the right “ponds” to look at and creating the right “hook” of content to attract talent can be facilitated by GenAI capabilities, especially as leveraged through targeted platforms like WRAP. But these capabilities must be employed by the skilled professionals within an organization; whether in HR, procurement, or by hiring managers in various divisions or departments.

It is ultimately the use of these techniques by these individuals, partnering with contingent staffing industry experts, that results in contractors being hired and successfully placed into a critical role in the organization. Attracting the best and the brightest is not for the faint of heart, nor can it be readily outsourced to the latest and greatest technology in the market.

With the overall goal of implementing, improving, expanding and shifting your contingent labor procurement strategies over time, it is important to recognize that a human element needs to be present and that this process cannot be fully automated. While it is true that GenAI can facilitate the process and outcomes for hiring contingent labor, to find the most qualified talent for the organization, the true “fishing” for this talent must be done by skilled professionals.