You blink, and something new is on the market, yet again! Times are changing so fast, it’s become very hard to keep up. All generations of consumers have become comfortable with shopping via online platforms, stores and marketplaces- from basic shopping for consumables to shopping for services such as who would be your accountant, your doctor, your realtor.
What is the real future of hiring platforms, and are they here to stay?
Scope of Hiring Platforms
Companies that have keyed into the concept of online hiring have got to understand where they fit into. Would you be carrying out small sized tasks, medium-sized tasks or long-term contracts?
Small-sized Tasks
These include tasks like plumbing, mechanical or writing assignments. Restaurants can also be grouped in this category of tasks since in a restaurant, one person can be responsible for the cooking.
Medium-sized Tasks
Tasks grouped under this category usually take between an average of 50-200 hours to complete. This group has potential high risks, as if something goes wrong in carrying out designated tasks, there could be severe repercussions. Examples of tasks that fall under this category include tasks you have to be professionally trained for e.g. lawyer, real estate agent, nanny and renovation contractors.
Long Term Contracts
Handling these tasks usually require a minimum of about 1000 hours. These often require a combination of in-depth knowledge and significant skill. The tasks are often handled by corporations who have either permanent staff members or people employed on long-term contracts to handle them. Firing of an individual who’s required to handle this task often has huge impacts on the corporation.
How Can 2nd and 3rd Category Services Become Fully Integrated on Hiring Platforms?
You would have observed that for the hiring scope of most platforms, they target a particular group of services/tasks to be completed.
Platforms such as YELP and Upwork often target the first category of tasks (i.e. small-sized tasks). There are very few successful online platforms that carry out the 2nd and 3rd category of tasks. Have you ever wondered why? What stops a platform for services e.g. YELP from becoming highly successful like a shopping platform like Amazon? Here’s why: for people who perform highly skilled services such as accountants or lawyers, a lot of people still rely heavily on word of mouth! And for some other services such as investment brokers the services are becoming more automated and online such as investment platforms and consequently less human services are needed in these fields.
You need way more information than can be put on a resume, to hire someone to carry out such trusted tasks for you. How can you perfectly gauge trustworthiness or even human chemistry based off these platforms? Another downside is that monetization is a bit challenging on these platforms. Therefore, for important hires, we need platforms that are possess a mixture of qualities found on online shopping and dating platforms.
The Importance of Metrics on Hiring Services
We can all agree that when it comes to important human services, people are looking for more aspects than are being offered by these online service platforms. How about we integrate metrics which can help compare the competency and level of trust amongst potential service providers? The absence of these comparing metrics is one major reason people still make use of providers gotten by referral (similar to 80 years ago!) as opposed to using online hiring service platforms.
In Canada, a real estate platform, Wowa tries to address this issue for real estate services by providing metrics through which clients can compare the agent experiences (e.g. historical real estate transactions), reviews and interestingly, see the body language of the agents by watching short clips where they see agents expressing themselves. This is a brilliant concept, and is why Wowa is known as the Tinder of real estate agents. Before choosing an agent, you need to know your budget and how much mortgage you can afford.
What Will be The Future?
For smart decision-making processes to be complete, especially with regards to sensitive human services where trust is a currency, you definitely need more than a resume to hire a person for the role. While resumes can stay as the “first filter” through which you decide who gets to be on the list of potential service providers, there needs to be more ways to check the person out without necessarily meeting in person; especially if this ends up being a waste of time. So how about providing a clip of the person? (Some marketplaces for services like Wowa have already started this)
