One of the more difficult aspects of job seeking for independent contractors has been conveying the value of skill, experience and past results to hiring professionals. Creating and updating resumes and portfolios takes time and effort, which can add up for workers on shorter contracts. Companies don’t always invest in or track the performance of contractors as they would their full-timers, leaving them at a disadvantage when attempting to attract future employment. For a contractor, putting your best foot forward often feels like an elaborate game of Twister.
And it’s no picnic on the other side. Recruiters increasingly rely on algorithms to sort through the first wave of job applicants. Even the old stand-by – references – are no longer a reliable resource. The transparency of information from candidate-provided sources has always been suspect at best, of course, but companies have also become skittish over time about potential legal liability, most commonly defamation.
PeopleCaddie has an answer to the problem: a unique ratings system that helps recruiters who access our talent cloud to better understand what a candidate may provide their company after hiring. Rather than relying on the vague qualitative analysis and uncertain motivations of traditional references, PeopleCaddie’s rating system quantifies the hiring and job-seeking process, transforming crowdsourced data into insights that help both employers and employees. Here’s how they work:
Quantitative vs. Qualitative: Making Hiring More Reliable
The varied priorities and personalities among managers and supervisors might lead one to draw dramatically different conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of an employee than another. Rather than basing the hiring process on subjective criteria and opinions – qualitative analysis – PeopleCaddie is reinventing traditional hiring using standardized quantitative measures. And because every PeopleCaddie contractor is required to accept our terms of use, all reviewers are indemnified against any liability related to their feedback, allowing them to provide ratings without fear of legal ramifications.
The PeopleCaddie ratings system covers three key areas:
- Quality of work
- Timelines of work
- Contractor professionalism
Contractors are rated by former employers on a scale of 1-5 stars within each of these categories, and PeopleCaddie combines those scores to assign the contractor a composite star rating. This helps employers searching for contractors to quickly identify top candidates and compare them against one another.
Trustworthy References: No More Unverified Sources
Under the traditional hiring system, checking references was a difficult, time-consuming process that often couldn’t be verified. A hiring manager might know that a candidate worked at Company X, but they couldn’t be certain who that candidate worked for or reported to directly. A candidate had the ability to cherry-pick their best references – perhaps even peers or friendly colleagues willing to speak in glowing terms.
On the PeopleCaddie platform, however, a candidate’s rating must come from a person who was responsible for approving their timesheets or directly supervised the contractor at a previous employer. Our database even indicates how many ratings a contractor has received from employers within our network, as well as who within each company provided that contractor’s rating. And if a candidate hasn’t previously worked for a company in the PeopleCaddie network, we take the necessary steps to verify the person identified as the candidate’s supervisor, leveraging resources such as our proprietary user network, LinkedIn, Zoominfo and others in order to ensure that our clients have the benefit of full transparency.
Hiring is an inexact science. The stakes are high and the success rate historically has tended to be lower than most employers care to think about. But with a quantitative candidate evaluation system and reference verification, PeopleCaddie clients have the resources to remove the guesswork from hiring to bring on contractors confidently.
Interested in learning more about the PeopleCaddie ratings system? Contact us!