We’ve all been there before: your boss comes to you and says you need to hire a contractor to fill x position, and it triggers a wave of panic.
There’s the initial panic of wondering how you’ll ever find time to find, interview, and hire someone in addition to your workload. Then there’s the panic that happens when you start your search by Googling “best practices for hiring.”. Then, even more panic when thousands of results appear. With so many choices, it’s tempting to go for one of the first options out of sheer exhaustion, but not every platform is created equally.
When it comes to hiring a contractor, a job posting is good enough, right? Not entirely. When using a shallow talent platform such as Indeed, posting an open role on a website will likely give you hundreds of applications from everywhere in the country- maybe even the world. Double that considering each has a resume and cover letter they’ve contributed, and you’ve just lost your whole workweek to sorting through (mostly) unqualified candidates.
But, what if there was a better way to hire that didn’t involve so much wasted time? Enter the creation of the deep talent platform.
Deep talent platforms vs shallow talent platforms
It’s not just you: everyone is enticed by the idea of simply posting a job and having candidates come to you in droves, but the time-consuming process that comes next is usually an after-thought. A shallow platform makes the user do most of the work: they create the job description, post it to the website, then sort through every candidate and ultimately hire someone, if there even was a qualified professional. If that description makes you exhausted just reading it (who could blame you?), deep platforms provide an excellent alternative for businesses in need of hiring new candidates, but hoping to spend as little internal time on the process as possible. So, how are deep platforms different from shallow platforms?
If “shallow talent platform” sounds unfamiliar to you, it’s likely not: they’ve been around for decades, allowing prospective candidates to pluck off information about open roles, then applying to each role of interest themselves, starting as a physical job board with flyers advertising jobs that any passersby could take.
Fast forward 50 years and websites such as Indeed or Monster.com are the tech versions of this age-old practice. These platforms are classified as “shallow,” simply because the platform does very little work in aiding the user in their search for candidates outside of providing a place for them to post a job.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have the deep talent platform. On a deep platform – like FlexTal – the process is completely taken care of by the platform itself: the talent is found, vetted, and presented to the user, typically within just a few days. With FlexTal, organizations who are seeking to hire flexible talent come to the platform with a skill need, such as a part-time social media manager or a developer for a tech project. From there, FlexTal works to find, vet, and hire the perfect match for the company’s needs. As this requires very little work on behalf of the employer, more companies are beginning to favor this type of platform for their candidate search.
How are deep platforms more convenient for businesses?
It goes without saying that leaders don’t have the time to hire talent all by themselves- and unfortunately, shallow platforms make their users do just that. Therefore, more and more employers are seeking the help of deep talent platforms to find talent in half the time and effort of a typical job site.
In a traditional hiring process, HR is typically notified by a department about the need for a role, then begins to create the job description (may need to hire a writer to do so). After this process, they’ll go to different deep platforms to post the job, wait a few weeks to a month and begin to rifle through the applications submitted- only to hopefully hire a candidate at the end of the search. Even from an outside perspective, this is an incredible amount of work to do simply for a hope that one applicant will pan out to be qualified and ready to accept the offer, if they haven’t already accepted another.
With deep platforms, the company is saved the time of repeating this process over and over again, and instead, matched with a candidate by the platform itself. This not only cuts the amount of time spent in a traditional process, but also the costs, such as labor (writers for job descriptions and hours spent searching), and any additional fees that the deep talent platform may require. Risk is also cut: the employer is guaranteed to be provided with a vetted match for their open role in just a few days to a week.
In a post-COVID world, the old ways of hiring through shallow talent platforms are simply not efficient and don’t move at the speed necessary to build a successful workforce in this new era. Deep talent platforms offer employers the ability to hire top talent quickly with little to no work while saving them precious time, money, and sanity.
Alex Sixt is a creative professional specializing in content creation with a passion for all things marketing. Her professional experience includes developing marketing strategies, focusing on social media and content, for multiple industries. Outside of work, she loves spending time outdoors; all it takes is some time in the sunshine and a good hiking trail to make her happy.
