By Nicky Badenoch, Co-founder and CMO of Genie, a bot who connects freelance talent to creative companies and brands.
Our industry’s most prized commodity is not the creative work itself, but the talent behind the work. So much of creativity relies on serendipity, the chance meeting, conversations and stories. These all add up to something magical which then delivers fame and ultimately business results for creative agencies and brands. We all win or lose by the connections we make.
As the UK’s creative workforce now sits distributed between bedrooms, kitchens, gardens, sofas and the odd office, the businesses that thrive will be those who are agile and ready to flex to bring teams together, albeit virtually, around creative challenges.
Until now companies have been relying on platform led approaches to give them a technological advantage, but how can bot technology create new and improved pathways for accessing and securing world class talent?
Like the terminator but more chatty
Technology continues to be amazing at democratising access. Linkedin and such, have given everyone access to everybody. But the net result of having access to the haystack is “analogue overload” for all the humans involved. And the personal touch is sorely amiss. Finding the right person, for the right brief at the right time is the holy grail but engineering serendipity can only be achieved if you build a 1-2-1 relationship with your users. Sounds like old fashioned talent networking? Bot technology facilitates building those relationships quickly and at scale.
Awesome and available
It should be so simple but companies spend days going round in circles, finding the perfect creative only to realise they aren’t free. You’d think the technology giants would have API’d a calendar sync up to sort this one out. However, it’s hard to solve because availability is fluid. Talented people will make themselves available for a brief, if and only if, the brief is interesting. It’s less about availability and more about capacity. A bot, can phrase the question in the right way to provide a live and instant check on this.
We got you. You got this.
There is a brilliant line in Kate Tempest’s poem “These things I know” which sums up what we term, making a human difference. “Never underestimate how nice it is to make someone a cup of tea without them having to ask”. It’s funny but a Bot can bring soul to technology. Being respectful, sympathetic, sometimes even a little grumpy allows your users to open up. That is gold-dust.
Quick Smart
If our industries’ most prized commodity is the talent behind the work – the matching algorithm beneath the bot needs to be quick smart. Machine learning and AI can look at the data patterns but also the un-patterns. Creativity often surfaces from the un-patterns.
Canny Curation
Creative people have multi-personas. From the portfolio-work-you, to the passion-project-you, to the mum-of-3-kids you, to the I-nearly-died giving-birth-you. We all have a story to tell, and it’s the combination of your passions and interests which make you so very special. A bot can unearth those insights, and curate your story like no platform can.
Live, not alive
Your baby will grow into a flourishing human being, if you feed and nourish her from when she is born. The same goes with data. Data needs to be pure and accurate to be meaningful. Every conversation a bot has is live. She can learn why you turn down a brief, what you have done recently that might make you right for a role, all laddering up to a live profile and data picture which can help businesses and talent win. The days of static profiles are gone.
When you have the right people around a problem, anything is possible. But finding those right people has until now been tricky to automate. Bot technology is going to transform how this industry accesses talent, and with the workforce ever more distributed, this need will only increase from here.
