Articles 
Lyft, AirBnB, TaskRabbit, Uber, Postmate, Fiverr. Everywhere you look these days, a new company is popping up to claim another slice of the job market on behalf of the gig economy, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. Thirty-five percent of the total U.S. workforce are currently choosing to work freelance, and companies like Uber and TaskRabbit are quadrupling their revenue and rapidly adding thousands of employees every month.
But despite the obvious demand for gig-based employment, recruiters face several unique challenges that require innovation and creativity, every day. Gig economy recruiters can’t react to current hiring needs — rather, they must anticipate future recruitment and adapt their techniques accordingly, always while maintaining a reliable talent pipeline. Secondly, employee “churn” is extremely high; many gig jobs are used for supplemental income and are therefore temporary and/or disposable, requiring frequent replacement.
With these hurdles in mind, here are five tips for recruiting success in our new gig-ified economy.
Think Like a Marketer
It’s not a coincidence that leading gig organizations such as Uber, Lyft and Postmates have all led the charge for marketing managers and specialists in their HR departments. From A/B testing job titles to writing inspiring job descriptions to crafting stunning career sites, organizations need to make decisions based on hard data that demonstrates what works and what doesn’t.
Prioritize Your Brand
A large quantity of job seekers in the gig economy seek freedom, productivity, and a sense of purpose in their work, and are usually intrigued by the autonomy and flexibility that a non-typical job brings. To maximize your engagement with these unique candidates, carefully consider your career site and make sure it highlights these ideals. Even if your organization isn’t actively participating in the gig economy, the aspirational elements of your corporate culture can still speak to the typical gigging careerists. Leverage Avature’s custom portals to create vibrant career pages that demonstrate the work-life balance of current employees, taking applicants on a journey through the freedom and autonomy your organization offers.
Simplify Your Application Process
It’s no secret that potential candidates across all industries prefer short application times. In fact, applications that take less than five minutes to complete result in 250 percent more applications completed. Due to the nature of gig-based employment, candidates don’t expect to invest major amounts of time in the application process. To boost your applicant numbers, ensure that the application process is easy. With Avature, you can easily allow applicants to sign up using their social media credentials, or you can leverage QR codes and text to apply to make it a snap for applicants to register their interest. Furthermore, to give the application process an easy-to-follow, e-commerce feel, try incorporating a progress chart that allows candidates to see which step of the process they are currently in.
Build for the Future
As previously stated, a high churn rate in the gig requires a rapid time-to-fill approach for many positions. To anticipate your hiring needs, utilize technology that segments and shares candidate information across organizations so that recruiters can locate the talent they need when they need it. With Avature CWM you can organize candidates according to geographical location, the area of interest, type of position, current job role, graduation date, skills, the number of days since joining a talent pool — the possibilities are endless. This allows you to easily establish contact with the correct target audience when it comes time to fill a vacant position. To keep this database clean and up to date, regularly send candidates interesting and relevant content, and ask them periodically to update their availability with a form completion request — which leads us to our next point…
Automate, Automate, Automate
Nurturing your candidates is crucial — but also time-consuming. Take some of the manual labor out of follow-ups, newsletters, and new job postings with automated messages that are triggered when a candidate performs an action such as applying to or registering interest in a position. With Avature these automated messages can be personalized, branded, and segmented to better connect with your candidates and build stronger relationships for future job openings. For example, candidates who apply for a finance position can be automatically sent different content than those candidates who apply for a marketing role.
