Talent-attracting etiquette for a tight labour market
With the balance of power shifting from the boss class to the worker class, you might want to rethink your offhand approach to dealing with freelancers and contractors
Australia’s unemployment rate reached four per cent in recent weeks. It’s expected to keep drifting down into the three per cent range in the coming months. This is the kind of full employment that Australia hasn’t experienced since the long post-war boom busted in the mid-1970s. Similar labour market dynamics are playing out in many first-world nations.
The older I get, the more I realise that most things in life come down to a question of supply and demand. Since the mid-1970s, the supply of labour – thanks in no small part to enthusiastic outsourcing and high immigration – has outstripped the demand for it in many developed nations.
That situation now appears to be reversing. Given recent events, onshoring is in vogue. In a post-Brexit-and-Trump world, politicians are fearful of antagonising low and middle-income voters by returning to the openish borders arrangements that earn donations and plaudits from those occupying the uppermost rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
How to win over top talent and influence them to hang around
Before going any further, I should point out that I’ve worked both sides of the client-service provider street and am well aware that service providers are by no means without sin. (In the past, I’ve warned my fellow freelancers of the dangers of succumbing to hubris.)
But most service providers are at least self-aware enough to recognise when they are behaving like divas. In contrast, I get the impression that clients are frequently oblivious to how obnoxious service providers find many of their actions.
In defence of clients, it’s notoriously difficult not to become high handed when you’re accustomed to having the whip hand. But when circumstances change, that kind of regal arrogance can become very costly (see: European aristocrats, 1793–1918).
If you’d like to avoid having an important project grind to a halt because you’ve inadvertently driven an in-demand content creator, graphic designer, social media marketer, videographer or web developer to rage quit, you might want to consider upping your courtesy game. See below for some insights into how to do that.
Don’t Casper it
Yes, you’re busy. And, yes, you have the natural human inclination to avoid awkward interactions.
But if you’re willing to endure a little short-term pain, you’ll soon acquire a reputation as the kind of straight shooter service providers love to work with. (NB: We service providers do like to talk among ourselves and love trading ‘nightmare client’ stories. So, you should keep in mind that either delighting or antagonising one service provider can have wider and longer-term consequences than you might imagine.)
Scenario one: You post some sort of job ad. More than one suitably qualified freelancer or contractor applies
Don’t: Reply to the best candidate then ignore everybody else who made the effort to put together an application
Do: Send a form email, ideally addressing the unsuccessful candidates by name, saying they’ve missed out this time but that you will keep their details on file in case future work they are better suited to materialises. (Service providers know that you won’t ever actually get in contact again, but we appreciate you at least making a token effort to salve the sting of rejection)
Scenario two: You receive an email (or, more likely, a series of increasingly desperate emails) from a freelancer asking for urgent clarification about a critical element of a project
Don’t: Leave the freelancer in agonising limbo for days, unable to move forward with the project and reduced to staring despairingly at their inbox as the non-billable hours slip by
Do: Respond promptly
Scenario three: After delivering excellent work to the agreed deadline, a freelancer invoices you
Don’t: Assume that the freelancer can delay paying their grocery bills/mortgage/kid’s school fees/medical expenses until such time as it is convenient for you or your organisation’s pay department to get around to processing the invoice
Do: Make it your personal responsibility – even if it involves multiple, squeaky-wheel phone calls and emails to your organisation’s Kafkaesque payroll department – to get the invoice paid in a timely fashion
Scenario four: You no longer require the services of a freelancer you’ve been working with for months or years
Don’t: Abruptly cease taking their calls and answering their emails and hope they will eventually get the message
Do: Send them an email thanking them for the work they have done for you and wishing them all the best for the future. If it’s not their fault they are being dispensed with, please make that abundantly clear (e.g. “I truly appreciate the excellent work you’ve done for us, but budget cuts mean we can’t afford you anymore…”). If it is their fault they are being dispensed with, don’t lie about the situation. But, unless they ask for feedback and genuinely want to know where they’ve gone wrong, don’t be brutally honest either (e.g. “Hey, thanks for all your help in recent times. We’ve decided to go in a different direction but appreciate all the effort you’ve put in over the last few months”)
A few other tips
If you can simply resist the temptation to engage in ghosting, you’ll soon differentiate yourself from all those who opt to save themselves a little time and effort at the cost of causing others a lot of frustration, confusion and self-doubt. (And, as well as fostering more trusting and productive professional relationships, giving up the ghost will also make you feel better about yourself.)
If you really want to take things to the next level and have freelancers queuing up around the block to work with you, consider busting out the following moves as well:
Pay decently: Chances are that freelancer you’re offering work to spent a long and poorly paid apprenticeship acquiring the skills you now want access to. After acquiring a university degree, working countless hours in unpaid internships, then earning subsistence-level wages in early career roles, they now have two or three decades to make enough money to (hopefully) buy a home, raise their children and save for their retirement.
Yes, gig economy workers might be doing something creative, and completing tasks that look like a lot of fun to the average cubicle-imprisoned, office-politics-afflicted, 9-5 corporate drone. Nonetheless, they still have all the usual bills to pay.
And, frankly, it’s not like your business doesn’t have the money to pay better. For the last four decades, employers have pocketed almost all the gains from increased productivity, while wages for workers have flatlined. Post-pandemic, employees are becoming increasingly assertive about their working conditions. You should expect gig-economy types to become equally bolshie about their remuneration, especially if employer groups fail in their increasingly frantic efforts to prise open the immigration floodgates.
Communicate your wishes clearly: Swearing off ghosting is a good start, but there’s more to good communication than just responding to emails and returning phone calls within a reasonable length of time. Things will go much more smoothly for everybody involved if you provide a clear and comprehensive brief and are readily available to clarify your wishes as the project progresses.
Pretend it’s more than a purely transactional relationship: Business may be business, but it’s also the case that humans are humans. Sure, everybody involved in a freelancer–client relationship knows it’s a temporary marriage of convenience. But good manners cost nothing and neither does treating service providers as more than interchangeable cogs in a giant machine.
Show a little humanity and you’ll be amazed at the lengths that service providers will go to for you. (Late last year, a well-paying client had a bottle of wine delivered to my front door to thank me for finding time in my schedule to do some work for them at short notice. Having invested, I’d estimate, five minutes and $30 in a thoughtful gesture, that client now has a content provider who’ll happily crawl over broken glass for them for years to come.)
Send business their way: If someone has done a good job for you, send them (unprompted) a glowing testimonial they can put on their website and include in their marketing materials. Also, recommend them to colleagues and industry peers. This is a win-win arrangement for you. First, you’ll earn the undying gratitude of the service provider. Second, you’ll get the somewhat less intense but still valuable gratitude of the colleague or peer who now doesn’t need to faff around finding a competent copywriter/photographer/software developer/virtual assistant.
PS – Are you a service-provider-respecting agency head or business owner in the market for an agreeable content provider with a lot of business, finance and tech experience? If so, you may like to check out my portfolio and email me at nigel@contentsherpa.com.au if you’d like to discuss us working together.