Cambridge Business Association
The Inside Gig
Book

The Inside Gig

How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capacity

Edie Goldberg and Kelley Steven-Waiss
Life Tree Media, 2020
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Managers tend to assess people’s skills by looking at their current roles and jobs titles. However, employees have additional skills and passions they want to use, and which you can leverage. Human resources and change management experts Edie Goldberg and Kelley Steven-Waiss provide detailed examples, drawn from companies in various industries, to help illustrate six core principles organizations can use to tap into employees’ skills. By leveraging your current workforce in new ways, you can create an agile organization, able to adapt to the fast-changing forces of the new digital economy.

Summary

Instead of recruiting externally to fill skill gaps, companies should learn to recognize and leverage the talent they have within.

Technology brings disruption to all sectors of the workforce. However, human resource (HR) departments continue to use traditional, outdated tools and policies to recruit and oversee the company workforce. Leaders must consider new approaches to meet the challenges of an environment that continually presents new technologies and demands new skills of workers.

Employees bring previous experiences and outside interests to a job. Job titles alone don’t reflect the full range of their skills. For example, an employee who studied engineering but now works in marketing will retain relevant expertise that could benefit the company. Yet, many companies assign jobs based solely on people’s current job profiles. Freelance platforms, by contrast, list candidates’ skills and talents so that companies can match them to specific projects. By adopting a similar approach, companies can replicate the gig economy internally.

Six core principles underpin the Inside Gig talent model which helps organizations use existing...

About the Authors

Edie Goldberg, PhD, is a nationally recognized expert in talent management and organization development who focuses on designing HR processes to attract, engage and retain employees. Kelley Steven-Waiss – the former chief human resource manager of HERE Technologies – is the founder and CEO of Hitch Works, a cloud-based talent mobility platform.

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