The World = Your Talent Pool.
The world is now your talent pool. So how can you leverage it?
As more and more independent talent enters the freelance market, businesses are no longer limited to working only with local candidates. Thanks to remote working, the best candidates from all around the world are suddenly in play, regardless of the location of your business. An exciting prospect in theory, but how does it work in practice? How do busy executives navigate the particulars of working with independent creative talent while doing all the other things it takes to keep their operations flourishing?
Great questions. I’ve got your answers.
Every orchestra needs a conductor.
It’s easy to conceptualize the advantages of hiring a team of independent talent to tackle your marketing projects. Think of the team as a symphony orchestra with world-class talent in the first chairs, and thoroughly proven musicians in the second and third chairs. The thing is: You sit on the symphony’s board of directors. You know what the end product needs to be, and you may even know a few musicians you could recruit. But what you need is someone capable of bringing together the very best musicians, tapping into the creative spirit of each performer and extracting the best possible performance from every performer in your newly minted orchestra.
You need a conductor.
In the business world of today, that role is called an Orchestrator. Assembling a team of independent creative talent for your marketing projects presents its own very real set of challenges. You need someone with the experience necessary to efficiently recruit, vet, hire, coordinate and continuously manage a diverse dream team of creative talent while remaining fully accountable to you.
Look around you. Do you or your team have the resources and time available to do all of that? An Orchestrator will. As a top-tier creative manager, an Orchestrator will handle the logistics and management of working with freelance talent for any project and will extract the greatest possible return on investment for those projects. She or he understands your business goals and speaks fluent ‘creative,’ so the Orchestrator will translate your vision into terms that keep every member of the team on track and on budget.
The Orchestrator: A role whose time has come.
Independent talent is great at providing fresh, outside-in perspectives on marketing challenges. There are, however, many challenges faced by companies when endeavoring to hire freelancers. The first challenge is trying to identify precisely which independent professional is the best fit for your project based on limited information found in the talent profiles on freelance service sites. Additionally, the job descriptions and specifications you write may be letter-perfect, but there is no guarantee you will get responses from well-suited professionals, let alone the best-suited.
Another challenge arises when you rely on online freelance platforms to help you build teams of talent for your projects. While the AI and data-driven technologies of these freelance platforms are powerful for narrowing down the candidate field, they can never be adept in understanding the nuances of human relationships, collaborative creativity and innovation in marketing communications.
When the onus is on you to perform every managerial duty, from the beginning of the freelance hiring process all the way through the final delivery of the finished product, the process may require more time than you are able to give. Having an Orchestrator at hand to manage all those responsibilities can be well worth the investment, especially when you consider the financial benefits of working with freelance teams.
A small sample of an Orchestrator’s duties include:
• Determining the mix of creative talent your project needs
• Recruiting the talent
• Vetting the talent
• Negotiating contracts with your company’s best interest in mind
• Communicating your vision and goals
• Creating project plans & timelines
• Assuring production quality all the way through to final delivery
• Reporting regularly to you with project updates
The Orchestrator enables you to remain focused on your responsibilities while she or he handles everything else.
Freelance platforms have proven slow to keep pace.
Online freelance platforms make no guarantees that the person they link you with will be around long enough to complete your project, let alone do a great job. A skilled Orchestrator will be careful to inquire about potential conflicts on the front-end of the hiring process. Should the circumstance arise that causes a freelancer to leave the project before its completion, your Orchestrator will manage the entire process of replacing that talent. Unlike online freelance platforms, an Orchestrator is always on hand; mindful of your project’s many moving parts and protective of your interests from beginning to end.
The marketplace is still evolving.
Today more than ever, effective marketing hinges on successful collaboration. As businesses grow more comfortable with the idea of forming creative teams comprised of independent professionals as an alternative to the traditional agency model, they will begin expanding the concept to include more ambitious projects. It’s likely they will look to assemble teams of executive-level experts to undertake strategic initiatives. When that day comes, so too will the arrival of the Executive Orchestrator.
In the meantime, tremendous opportunities await. Remote working has made world-class independent creative talent available to organizations located in even the smallest of markets.
Regardless of your location, having an Orchestrator on your team to manage your slate of projects will bring high quality results combined with a financial thrift which would not have been possible otherwise.
If you would like further insights into a better way to utilize independent creative talent, contact me at rbs@orchestata.com.
Robyn Stockdale
Chief Orchestrator, Orchestrata
