Pamela O’Rourke, Founder and CEO of ICON and WBENC-Certified WBE, reflects on staying relevant in the staffing industry and her advice for other WBEs.
Client expectations are higher today than ever before: they want technology to perform cost-effective, complex tasks with the human element tactically deployed. Digital transformation is no longer a choice if a company wants to remain relevant; it is an absolute necessity for market leaders.
The world’s most successful companies and digital front-runners personify a common collection of principles:
- Embrace the customer experience above all else.
- Optimize and maximize simplicity to the extreme.
- Institute innovation as key to decision making.
- Collaborate as part of the company culture.
Customer experience, above all else, requires a strategic approach to prepare business for digital transformation. At ICON, we have adapted and innovated to lead in this new age, with a focus on further disrupting the talent acquisition industry in 2021 and beyond.
Speed of innovation is key and application platforms need to be hyper-available and hyper-elastic, responding effortlessly to different scenarios.
Firstly, we discuss Opptly (an ICON company), a direct sourcing platform which removes the intermediaries inherent within the current contingent workforce framework Opptly’s proprietary and revolutionary AI technology reframes how organizations and talent engage. Opptly’s innovative AI modernizes the matching accuracy and speed efficiency connecting opportunities and candidates in a mutually beneficial new way.
Then, we take a peek into ICONpliance, a first-of-its-kind technology solution that resolves the independent contractor maze from end-to-end. The solution is entirely automated, with no technology gaps.
Opptly
Opptly, rebranded from Genesys Talent in 2021, is a built-for-purpose direct sourcing talent solution. Opptly’s mission is to challenge the status quo and revolutionize the way people connect with work. Following are challenges in the talent acquisition industry that Opptly resolves:
- Technology innovation is disrupting numerous industries such as travel, transportation, retail, healthcare; this same innovative disruption was needed in talent acquisition..
- Solution: Opptly’s direct sourcing innovation enables talent communities that center on the “candidate experience,” much like other industries have centered on the “consumer experience.”
- Hiring process intermediaries hindered candidates from connecting directly with preferred hiring companies.
- Solution: Opptly’s talent communities remove the intermediaries and empower candidates to connect directly with their preferred hiring companies.
- Hiring companies could not leverage their brand loyalty/brand power to attract and engage with purposeful candidates.
- Solution: Opptly’s branded direct sourcing solutions enable customers to engage with talent attracted to their brand. Opptly enables customers to engage previous workers, known workers, brand loyalty workers, etc.
ICONpliance
ICONpliance is a proprietary, end-to-end, fully automated Independent Contractor (IC) compliance testing solution. ICON created the logic, and then designed and built ICONpliance from the ground up. Following are some of the major challenges that ICONpliance resolves:
- Slow onboarding time. Due to either manual IC testing, which dominates the current marketplace, and/or a slow remediation process, which occurs manually with no technology assistance, it is not uncommon for the IC compliance testing phase to last 10 to 14 days, especially if an IC is initially deemed out of compliance with applicable law.
- Solution: ICONpliance automates the testing process from end-to-end, including the remediation process. As a result, the duration of the IC compliance testing phase typically is reduced to 1 to 3 days.
- Inconsistent application of the law. Due to the predominance of manual testing, with different compliance personnel, and the elongated process of remediation, no IC provider in the marketplace today can claim they have pure consistency of process and results.
- Solution: ICONpliance removes human biases and automates the remediation process so that the same questions are asked to the same relevant groups of IC’s. As a result, compliance confidence increases significantly, particularly in an audit defense.
- Inability to test different groups of IC’s with relevant compliance questions. No IC compliance provider in the industry today asks different sets of questions to different types of IC groups, thus increasing the likelihood of misclassification.
- Solution: ICONpliance creates groups of test questions relevant to different groups. For instance, testing IT personnel is and should be different than testing non-IT financial consultants. Understanding this concern, ICONpliance resolves this issue by creating buckets of differential questions. Further, ICONpliance’s technology enables it to test differential groups within the same company using the same platform; thus, from a test taker’s perspective, the entire process is consistent and seamless.
Talent acquisition, vetting, and management has undergone big changes in the last decade. With big data, mobile apps, social media, technology saturating every crevice of the market, the sector is having to react to a candidate driven market while maintaining relevance in a hyper-competitive industry.
ICON’s innovative focus delivers cost savings, increases efficiency, broadens access to talent, and revolutionizes the talent acquisition market. Opptly identifies and delivers highly matched opportunities and workers faster, and ICONpliance dramatically reduces onboarding times while increasing the quality of compliance. By resolving problems in the talent acquisition marketplace, ICON’s technology makes a powerful, positive impact.
If you would like to hear more about either of these latest advancements, please reach out to the author.
