While the “gig economy” has gained a certain amount of notoriety in the past decade, both employers and employees have sought out the flexibility of non-full-time employment throughout history. For organizations—especially large enterprises—that rely on independent, contract, part-time or freelance workers to serve their customers, the administrative challenges involved have grown significantly in recent years.
Since it was founded in 1946, Kelly Services has grown to be one of the largest and most well-known suppliers of contract talent in the world. And, according to Ed Pederson, vice president, and M&A Integration Leader with the firm, Kelly increasingly has been addressing those challenges for its clients with automation. Because Kelly works with clients in such a wide range of industries, the opportunities to serve those clients with automation solutions has been growing.
Pederson acknowledges that the nature of work itself has changed significantly in the past several years. Kelly’s own data shows that more than a third of employees (37 percent) have workloads they find unmanageable. At the same time, nearly half (47 percent) of employers polled in the survey say they struggle to build or access the workforce they need to outperform their rivals. Many of them have turned to contract workers.
Kelly, as a company that brings those workers and employers together, sits astride this gap and is turning to automation to address the concerns of both constituencies in an era where finding work and workers has become more difficult.
Digital and Human Collaboration
Kelly, like many businesses that end up offering automated solutions to their customers, recognized the benefit process automation had provided their own company and began to explore different ways they could offer the same efficiencies they were benefitting from to their clients.
As a staffing provider, Kelly was perfectly positioned to develop a system that offered clients access to digital workers in addition to human workers. Along with partner UiPath, Kelly Services in the Spring launched Kelly Fusion—a suite of solutions that includes technology that automates the repetitive administrative tasks that are specific to the management of contract workers.
The technology automates a range of tasks that have become burdensome to many businesses building digital workers to address challenges including data entry, background screenings, onboarding procedures, contractor extensions, manager changes and more.
Pederson, who leads Kelly’s in-house automation team, notes that in addition to state-of-the-art automation technology, Kelly Fusion includes a consultation component that offers clients its expertise in staffing and recruitment to more fully understand their workforce needs to determine the right blend of digital tools and human talent and manage both.
Matchmaker
Another way Kelly is leveraging AI and automation to address the needs of their client organizations and the population of independent workers looking for positions is a marketplace the company introduced last Fall called Kelly Arc.
It enables potential employees to fill out a talent profile and match with organizations that have an opening suitable to a specific candidate. Pederson notes that the tool has been extremely successful on the talent side, with a significant number of potential workers filling out profiles and searching for open positions. He would like to see more uptake on the client side, he says, and has plans to make the supply of job requisitions more plentiful.
“We’re actually connecting it into some of our other platforms that are already more integrated into some of our existing customers,” he says. “For large companies, you generally have three labor channels: full-time, temporary, and contract. As an engagement manager, you have to go to different places for all three. We have a platform called Helix that simplifies that. It interacts with you—whatever business unit you are from—and funnels you down the right labor channel infusing predictive analytics to effectively fill your needs. By connecting Kelly Arc, we’re reconstituting that talent presentment so that as we’re naturally picking up orders from those customers, just flows right into the platform and does the matching automatically.”
The Future of Work
Automation is both a response to the changing nature of work and a catalyst for even more change. Everyone knows, Pederson says, that jobs are going to change over time and AI and automation will take a more prominent role. How businesses and employees react to that will dictate their success. Kelly is working on a tool called Future Skills Navigator that can guide organizations as they try to predict how the positions they have now will change.
“Say we know that we place 500 workers of a certain type at a certain company,” he says. “We know that a portion of that job is automatable and/or can leverage some sort of AI. So, we plug that job description into this tool, and it suggests where that automation potential could exist. If you know you’re going to automate a certain set of responsibilities, you can use Kelly to find automation talent that can program the bots or whatever automation is required. Or you can go to Kelly Fusion and we’ll build the bots for you. So, you’re not firing, you’re hiring for future roles.”
However an organization chooses to engage—or not—with automation, it’s coming. Pederson warns that those who ignore that eventuality will not be prepared to survive in the new reality. Those who do will be better positioned to take control of their careers.
“If you embrace it, whatever that means for your particular type of job, then you will continue to stay relevant,” he says. “And for businesses, I suggest controlling the narrative around it. In the absence of information, people will make up stories that might be counterproductive to your efforts. It’s important to scream from the rooftops about the value that’s being created from automation.”
