How Gig Economy can become a key component of Talent Acquisition strategy in India | GCDCP
Indian corporates want to engage gig professionals but the number of corporates is very limited at present. Some of the big IT companies like Tech Mahindra engage gig professionals for their projects. Start-Ups and hyper-logistic companies also take the benefit of available gig workers by engaging them as per their needs.
A round table on Gig Economy — Opportunities for Talent Acquisition was organized by “Global Council for Development of Consulting Professionals” (GCDCP) in Hyderabad’s Hitec City to discuss the opportunities for talent acquisition professionals in harnessing the best talent using gig economy on 6th Sept 2019 which was attended by HR leaders, Talent Acquisition professionals and Hiring managers.
Gig professionals will need some social security support, they can not be used as cheap labour, emphasized Ajay Sharma, a thought leader in Gig Economy, who is founder of Flexiorg.com, a company working to develop an ecosystem to support gig professionals with health insurance, providing Emotional support system as these professionals will be working alone and most importantly continuously helping them with skill development. It was also echoed by Rammohan Chepuri of Angha Global HR. He suggested that more delibrations are required by the HR community to discuss compliance issues related to engagement of Gig Professionals to encourage them to be part of mainstream business.
A senior HR professional mentioned in the meet that an interesting area where Gig professionals can help is “Notice period”. He said that when employees leave the company and the next employee takes 2–3 months to join, these gig professionals come very handy in keeping the projects running.
It was mentioned that as per a report of Paypal, India has around 10 million gig workers who support companies across the world. With millennial taking over more and more jobs in the industry, their needs for employment will not be job security; it will be more of freedom, flexibility, variety, and challenges and strive to take global projects. Forbes has projected that 75% of the workforce will be millennial by 2025 and they would like to be gig workers instead of regular full-time employees.
Many participants shared that there is a myth that gig jobs are synonym with temporary/ contract jobs. It is actually a specifically defined job which required specialized skills with clear deliverables in the defined time.
It was further stressed that TA professionals need to develop their skills in Job Analysis and manpower planning to identify gigs at a different level of the organization. Creating/Identifying Gigs need a dynamic evaluation of Business plans and mapping expertise requirements which can be managed with project-based assignments.