How to Organize Your Independent Contractor Workforce with Labor Clouds

Why you need to organize your independent contractor workforce

You've just secured a large customer order that needs to be fulfilled in a matter of days. You now face the challenge of quickly finding qualified contractors who not only have the skill sets and availability, but are within driving distance of the customer site.

How are you going to scale quickly for this opportunity?

The answer? Labor Clouds.

What is a Labor Cloud?

A Labor Cloud is a way to digitally organize independent contractors in one place. Through the WorkMarket platform, you can leverage automation to vet independent contractors based on criteria you choose, such as skill sets, licenses, certifications, completed background checks, worker location and more. Once workers have met your requirements, you can begin sending them work.

Organizing talent into Labor Clouds makes it easier to quickly find the right worker with the right skills in the right location, when you need them.

WorkMarket interface showing labor clouds and a list of contractors

How to organize your talent using Labor Clouds

WorkMarket lets you choose from a wide range of requirements to help identify and vet the right workers for the right jobs. Here are four steps to maximizing Labor Clouds so you can organize your independent contractors in useful ways:

1. Set up your acceptance criteria

Determine what criteria are needed for each Labor Cloud, choosing from options such as:

  • Background checks and drug tests

  • Client-specific agreements (eg NDAs, Contractor Agreements)

  • U.S. Tax ID and banking verification

  • Licenses, certifications

  • Worker location

  • Satisfaction ratings

You can also set up tests and surveys to help ensure certain types of workers meet your skills requirements.

WorkMarket interface showing the screen to add requirements to a labor cloud

2. Recruit your network

Onboard your on-demand talent via bulk upload or your own branded talent recruitment page on the WorkMarket platform.

Our talent recruitment page allows you to attract independent contractors by showcasing the opportunities you have to offer. Customize the page with your branding and messaging, then easily share with your network at scale.

2 WorkMarket interfaces showing the send and receipt of invitations to join WorkMarket

3. Monitor your Labor Clouds

Once requirements are met, workers are organized based on requirements you've indicated, such as skills, location and other criteria. Through our dynamic monitoring system, your Labor Clouds can be kept up to date, retaining only the workers who meet the requirements you’ve indicated.  Once you have set up an assignment, you can send it to a Labor Cloud consisting of individuals who have met your specified requirements, allowing you to quickly find qualified workers for the job.

Please note WorkMarket collects documentation for certain worker profile attributes that can be used as requirements. These include licenses, certifications and insurances. We conduct a basic "legitimacy" validation of the document (e.g., does this look doctored or unrelated?)*, but we do not verify contents.

WorkMarket interface showing route & send options for a new assignment

4. Configure and customize

You can configure and customize your Labor Clouds in different ways. One common example is syncing unique worker data and statuses with third-party systems (e.g. Salesforce). Through an API connection with your Labor Cloud, you can easily invite workers and track their details within your third-party platform of choice. This allows you to still send workers assignments and payments in WorkMarket in real-time.

Another common example is chaining Labor Clouds together. An organization can invite workers to a Labor Cloud based on their background qualifications, certifications or test scores. The workers who meet all of those variables can be invited to the next Labor Cloud for other (more costly) requirements, such as drug tests or background checks. This helps organizations expedite onboarding while not wasting the workers' time or money.

The benefits of Labor Clouds

You could create your own master spreadsheet, interview each individual, ascertain their credentials, manually search for the needed skill, contact them to deploy, obtain confirmation of the completed work and then trigger payment of their invoice. 

That's a lot of manual, administrative work prone to errors.

Labor Clouds provide you with a significant advantage and competitive edge by automating the verification process. Benefits include:

Faster onboarding

Leverage workflows for automated verification of worker credentials. Empower workers to self-onboard, saving you hours of valuable administrative time.

Faster deployment

The faster you can onboard and verify your workers, the faster you can deploy resources to meet a client need and satisfy your customers. Using Labor Clouds mean being able to quickly identify the right worker for the right job because you already have vetted talent pools.

Mitigate risk

Labor Clouds empower enterprises like yours to meet business requirements determined by client-defined criteria. Setting up automated guardrails in your onboarding processes helps ensure workers have the right qualifications.

Increased visibility

Reporting allows you to track the status of workers -- such as invited, member, or pending -- within your Labor Clouds. You can also easily see which requirements have been fulfilled and which are outstanding.

Get an edge in the growing economy

On-demand talent is allowing enterprises to compete in global markets and provides the agility to keep up with rapid change. Yet, competing in today’s business landscape is challenging and it’s critical for businesses to evaluate the way they’re managing this talent. The ability to expedite onboarding and verification through the use of sophisticated tools like Labor Clouds will give forward-thinking businesses just the edge they need to succeed in today's environment.

Realize the full potential of independent contracting today. Get in touch with sales.