People who have ever assembled IKEA or pre-fabricated furniture themselves share a common frustration. Occasionally, among the myriad of tiny plastic bags holding the various little screws, brackets, and other fastening pieces, you’ll pop open a lose a couple of pieces. And every so often, that piece is a specialized part you’ve never seen in any hardware store in your entire life—now lost forever like the socks that have vanished from the dryer—leaving you to improvise securing that last table leg or shelf with whatever’s lying around.
There’s no true replacement for that exact part, and whatever ends up acting in its stead isn’t likely to fulfill the job as intended. Though some may say it’s for insects, specialization extends beyond the realm of inanimate construction material and tools—project work, especially that in the complex world of IT field service, relies on people with specialized talents and qualifications.
Finding qualified technicians is a pressing issue for field service organizations all over, but a bit of an oversimplification. You’re not just looking for warm bodies to populate a job site — you need talent with the expertise to match the scope of your projects. However, doing so relies on intelligently leveraging modern options for sourcing field technicians, which in turn hinges on how in tune your field service processes are with new best practices.
How are You Currently Sourcing Techs?
Freelance labor markets have grown tremendously in the past several years, and now, the “gig economy” is a hot topic for millions of workers, HR professionals, managers, and executives around the world. Contingent workers have become incredibly valuable to organizations conducting IT field service through a combination of the cost-prohibitive nature of making all technicians full employees, the lack of direct oversight inherent in leaning too heavily on third-party labor providers, and the way demand for technicians has outpaced the availability of qualified individuals.
Supporting an affordable roster of in-house technicians with freelancers is becoming a necessity in IT field service. The new normal is creating an agile, scalable base of technicians that flexes to demand and can be easily dispatched to your farther-flung project locations. It’s both cost-effective (contingent workers only need to be paid when actively on a project) and growth-minded (many techs can be added for larger projects, or local workers can be acquired for international or remote deployments). But, for the inexperienced, the prospect of combing through endless job boards for each project is a nightmare that eliminates any benefits.
Fortunately, comprehensive field service management platforms feature ways to assist in locating, vetting, and acquiring available contingent workers. This software leverages global networks of freelance technicians and IT specialists to create an easy way to search for the right talent based on location, experience, or certification. Such platforms integrate that process easily into overall project management, allowing a simple way to dispatch and manage the techs you bring on board for each project.
Finding the Right Talent
With this modern methodology for finding freelance technicians in mind, how then does your organization identify and acquire specialists? Between work involving emerging technologies and projects which require strict regulatory compliance, often you’re looking for a very specific set of qualifications from on-demand workers. On these projects requiring specialization, you often need a freelancer whose skillset and experience hews closer to that of an engineer.
Your platform provides a good start to finding specialized contingent workers. For example, if you’re looking for technicians certified to install and calibrate weights-and-measures devices in Ottawa, you can either gather Ottawa-based freelancers with the necessary certifications and experience from the labor cloud or create a temporary job listing to attract qualified techs to apply. Categorical searching allows you to easily filter available candidates down to those who fit your needs or you can let the candidates come to you and choose from the best available.
Online labor platforms do a lot of the legwork, including handling essential HR functions like background checks, drug tests, and vetting. But finding the right talent—not just the qualified technicians, but those that fit your organizational philosophy and can hit the ground running—relies on some additional effort. Use direct communication with potential workers to glean more about their experience in the specializations you're searching for. That can also reveal useful other areas of expertise you may not be currently searching for but will be beneficial for this project or future ones.
Building a Deep Pool
Part of why you’re looking for a solid overall fit from contingent technicians and specialists is to build relationships for the long haul. As opposed to starting from scratch for each project, keep those freelancers that meet or exceed your expectations in your on-demand talent cloud. Over time, you’ll add many local techs to your roster, allowing you to contact and dispatch them again wherever you need help. That, in turn, does wonders for your on-the-fly response times, project time-to-completion, and other key performance indicators.
As your on-demand talent pool matures, your platform and the technicians you’ve added to your bench become a Swiss army knife of IT project management. Plan for recurring and future IT deployments by having a steady group of local talent at the ready in those locations. Acquire unique talent for handling new clients or internal IT challenges, whether those contingent workers are filling a skills gap or versatile jacks-of-all-trades. Continually add to, groom, and optimize your talent pool for exceptional field service agility and scalability.
However, one of the underlying differences of the gig economy is how it empowers freelancers to be selective when choosing work opportunities. Experienced on-demand workers value certain qualities in a client and have their own specific needs and preferences from organizations with which they’re going to work. It’s a two-way street: Yes, your field service operations need freelancers to check certain boxes to be considered, but the tradeoff is that you will have to entice them to be a part of your IT work when there are so many entities actively looking for contingent technicians.
Keep contingent workers’ professional needs in mind when building your relationship with them—be transparent and upfront about expectations, payment, and your long-term plans for utilizing them. Then watch your team of contingent workers grow and your organization’s field service capability and reach grow along with it.
