Bringing In a Seamless Technology-Based Hiring Programme for Gig Workers Gig economy companies need to hire verified workers with clean background to mitigate risks of employee fraud or customer harassment
By Ajay Trehan
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With the pandemic around the world restricting our movement and physical behavior, how do you ensure large-scale hiring of gig workers? Gig economy is one of the few sectors gaining demand and to match the supply it must have a quick and efficient on-boarding process.
The traditional hiring methodologies are passé, to speak the least as they don't support the scale of hiring gig workers. The unstructured and manual verification processes cannot provide quality assessment of the on-boarded workers. This is true across the industry—cab aggregation, food delivery, logistics or professional service marketplace.
The challenge
Gig economy companies need to hire verified workers with clean background to mitigate risks of employee fraud or customer harassment. The challenge is that delay in on-boarding means potential business loss. And with pandemic around, the physical dependencies are making it more difficult to background check and onboard gig workers quickly.
Any future-ready organizations in gig economy must lay a strong foundation of on-boarding workforce that meets their dynamic needs at a large scale.
Automation is imperative to remain competitive in the current scenario
Authentication technology and digital workflows are solving this problem. A seamless integration of technologies delivered on an easy-to-use dashboard can do the trick. Real-time verification and process automation can be used to seamlessly digitize and allow remote and paperless on-boarding.
Background check: Organizations need to validate identity, criminal background and address of the candidates. Technologies such as AI/ML, facial recognition, OCR and deep search can deliver these verifications remotely.
Automation technology integrates databases, online document collection and verification. Once the IDs are verified and no criminal history is found, then the address of the worker is verified digitally via geo-coordinates.
Onboarding: Automation of document collection, data transfer and data enrichment can reduce on-boarding time drastically. This combined with electronic signatures means truly paperless processes and no redundant documentation.
Recent developments in recruitment technologies have effectively helped in managing the hiring processes better by focusing on these key points:
Enhanced visibility for better recruitment
With all the reports and the data stored online, it has become easy to not only manage the data over cloud, but it has brought in ease in the analysis domain. Now, the HR need not put in extra hours to first store the physical report and then digitalizing it in a suitable format and then analyzing the same. With the information filled in and stored digitally, the HR can design dashboards basis the desired inputs and can come with hiring based insights at a much faster pace and with minimum manual error possible.
Streamlining workflows to reduce turnaround time of processes
With the hiring process, background verification process and document storage now being online, it has made the whole hiring process digital and more in-sync. Earlier while the employee information gathering being online, it still had to go through a manual background verification process and physical document collection and storage process which not only resulted in drop in efficiency but also these process were difficult to manage as they were not synced up. But with all these processes online, their workflows can now be streamlined and synced together to give a more seamless experience.
Centralizing the whole recruitment process and mitigate risk
With the complete hiring process digital, streamlined and synced up on a common platform, it has helped in making the whole recruitment process centralized. This has not only helped in reducing the turnaround time in the various processes involved but has also helped in improving efficiency, making the data ready for analysis, reducing errors during manual handling and storage of physical data. With all the data stored online, it is easy to check the audit trail to verify the data handling process alongside making the processes to being integrated with future technologies that might come up in the domain.
One can say that big changes could be coming to the gig economy. With the ever-changing regulations in the sector, it becomes critical for the companies to pay close attention to whether their gig workers feel empowered or exploited. Effective workforce management, that includes employee onboarding as well, will become more important than ever. As more employees on and off-board, companies will want to keep a close eye on the constant alignment of talent supply and demand.
Cloud-based systems that put all that information in one place will continue to play a big role. And more than ever, employee experience will be a differentiator. With so much competition for talent, experience will be even more important. They will want to work in systems that use machine learning to understand to come up with insights that will help in managing and recruiting workforce in a better way. Gig workers have a myriad of opportunities at their fingertips, so anything companies can do to keep them on board will help build retention.
To say the least, technology is not only making the whole hiring process simple, it's also delivering a seamless experience to hiring teams and candidates along with helping the HR in building stronger retention strategy.
