TecHR Interview with Marlon Litz-Rosenzweig, Co-Founder and CEO at WorkGenius

Know My Company

What is your experience about the journey into HR Technology?

In 2012, I founded MyLittleJob (the predecessor to WorkGenius) to connect European students to companies because my co-founder, Daniel Barke, and I both noticed that it was a bit too difficult to land a summer job while we were at school together. The jobs we could find didn’t really match what we were looking to do, but we noticed that it wasn’t any easier for companies to justify investing in recruitment or training for these shorter stints. Five years later, we expanded into the U.S. and rebranded as WorkGenius once we grew our vetted talent base with professional freelancers.

What is WorkGenius and how does it fit into the current Digital Workforce landscape?

WorkGenius is a freelance workforce solution that simplifies hiring and managing freelancers with the use of Artificial Intelligence. We offer our clients on-demand access to more than 350,000 highly vetted freelancers with the technology to seamlessly integrate them into their organizations. The unemployment rate is at a record low and the lack of available talent has made it increasingly difficult to hire successfully. Almost 4 in every 10 working Americans is freelancing today and 91% of companies are struggling to find the specialized talent that they need. WorkGenius bridges together Client, Project, and Freelancer needs.

What does your ideal customer profile look like? Which businesses are the fastest to adopt your Digital Workforce products?

Anyone overseeing a company’s Digital Transformation strategy since they’re usually acutely aware of the inefficiencies that might be plaguing their organization. Since we see a variety of skill sets being accessed on the WorkGenius platform, there isn’t necessarily a departmental function where we’d exclusively be used. We instead solve for the inefficiencies of talent and project management since we immediately match work to the person best equipped to handle it. WorkGenius manages the entire workflow and allows for different business units to intuitively forecast costs about their different objectives. That being said, we’re quickly being adopted by lean teams that had previously needed to personally tackle time-intensive tasks like content creation and cleaning data.

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How should the head of businesses leverage technology to digitally transform their department and organizations into effective workplaces?

According to Deloitte, only 8% of companies have established processes to manage and develop their alternative workforces. Yet, nearly half of organizations that have integrated freelancers into their workforce have saved over 20% in labor costs. Plus, freelance platforms are making it easier for companies to access the talent that they’re looking for. Leaders should actively understand the core skills of their teams and the resources needed to meet their objectives. They should then invest in solutions that allow them to quickly source the talent needed to bridge those skill gaps, and that improve the management of the different project workflows involved in those objectives.

How do you compete with other job search and outsourcing platforms currently available to hiring and recruiting managers?

Speed is the most apparent differentiator when you first start using WorkGenius. Since our platform leverages proprietary AI technologies to both analyze the job briefing and the available talent pool, WorkGenius is usually able to start your project in just under 30 minutes. Given the scope of some projects, our ability to scale becomes more evident since we’re the only platform equipped to provide you more than 1,000 freelancers at a time. Yet our biggest advantage to freelance marketplaces is that we manage your talent and your workflows throughout the entirety of the project. All our clients really need to do is explain their objectives at the start and accept the submitted results at the end.

How do you see remote Workplace Automation and Performance Management impacting business growth in the next two years?

I’m a firm believer that human talent evolves alongside technology. Although automation will affect jobs across the board, we’ve been able to adapt to every major industrial revolution in the past. In the short term, I believe we’ll start having a more granular understanding of the skills every organization has access to. Workforces will start being audited for core competencies in order to reinforce the in-house talent with a freelance workforce with complementary skills.

Tell us more about Collaboration Engine and how it benefits an enterprise to improve their workplace performance?

Enterprises can now seamlessly accelerate entire project timelines by using WorkGenius to eliminate any bottlenecks caused by a team’s lack of bandwidth or skill set. Our AI-enabled platform intuitively structures complex workflows by allowing multiple freelancers to contribute with each of their individual skill sets. In practice, WorkGenius was recently used to write and translate over twenty-thousand hotel descriptions. Within minutes, multiple researchers began calling these hotels and collecting updated information. This information was then immediately picked up by copywriters that pushed out polished hotel descriptions. Editors jumped in to make the tonality more consistent throughout and translators batched the final results for our client. This efficient workflow is completely automated and ensures that progress is constantly being achieved for organizations.

What is the state of Communications Analytics in 2019? How much has it evolved since the time you first started WorkGenius?

In order to make managing multiple freelancers more palpable, communication must be prioritized from the start. Our workflows each present a transparent trail of postings, progress, and payments to ensure that every job can be appropriately monitored. Our platform has a clear understanding of what was asked for, how long it took to respond, and what feedback played a part in improving performance.

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How can modern HR teams fully-transform their overall organization and promote diversity/inclusion using technological capabilities?

HR should be the first to understand that a lot of the current processes involving employees are ingrained with human biases. 60% of WorkGenius freelancers are female — and women on our platform get paid 26% more on the platform than men. When AI is correctly integrated into an organization, you’re able to take a more merit-based approach that gives everyone the opportunity to be right for the job. It’s no longer about “seeing them doing very well here,” it’s now about the data that identifies the person that should be doing the job.

How can customers connect your technology to HRMS? Tell us about your integrations and technology partnerships with other platforms?

We’re a full turn-key solution that is fully adaptable to our client needs. We’ve continually been successful in integrating into the custom HRM systems of many of our enterprise partners. WorkGenius is equipped to handle any skill set needs and in order to leverage that workforce flexibility, it was important to make sure that most organizations were ready to tap into it.

What is your vision into growing revenue opportunities for HR Technology platforms?

Employee preferences are being taken seriously in the workplace and that prioritization is aligned with the available revenue opportunities in the space. I believe investments in tools to better engage current in-house employees are justified at a time where employee tenure is shortening. Nevertheless, this departure to freelancing isn’t slowing down, so refining the ability in which we collect data about work performance will be key to improving genuinely trusted networks of on-demand talent.

How do you play a part in the Digital Transformation of such culture-driven organizations?

WorkGenius is able to accelerate a company’s Digital Transformation without diluting any of the brand value. Our Geniuses are matched to our client projects on more than just skill set. The platform accounts for the knowledge base, past experience, and hard and soft skills. This instant access to quality work at scale allows us to become an organization’s execution arm. WorkGenius was built for those with a plan and we’re giving companies that are inching towards a digital transformation, the ability to get that work done in a fraction of the time.

Which Marketing and Sales Technology solutions do you use at WorkGenius?

We use Salesforce, SalesLoft, and Panda for our sales efforts. Our marketing efforts are all housed within HubSpot and organized on Monday.com.

The Crystal Gaze

Which start-ups in the tech industry interest you the most and why?

I’m predominantly interested in companies that are optimizing the way we organize data and companies that are using AI to make that data actionable. Airtable has made it possible to analyze your data through a hybrid of a database and a relational database. Optimizing project management capabilities as we expand our workforce will be crucial to the data-driven strategy. Equally interested in seeing how Jumio continues to use AI to enable verification processes. We constantly think of quality assurance and payment protection here at WorkGenius. Technologies like end-to-end identity verification make it possible to guarantee who you’re working with and paying for results.

What technologies within AI and HR Technology are you interested in?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the AI technology that gives machines the ability to derive meaning from our words. NLP allows our platform to read and understand the requirements of each job posting and inform our matching process at scale. I’m excited to see conversational models and multilingual adaptability continues to improve. This should further reduce AI training time while increasing performance.

In HR Technology, what are the new emerging markets that you see providing the biggest opportunities?

I’m all about technology and initiatives that provide people with additional autonomy. This does translate into freelancing, but more broadly, into the remote workspace. I believe that the advances in technology and restructuring of traditional workplace norms will make for a more motivated workforce. 70% of global professionals work remotely at least once a week and organizations are realizing that they can build themselves an entire talent network. They’ll be able to tap current in-house employees, company alumni, and vetted freelancers from a single interface to ensure that the best person for the job will always be there.

What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?

I create a ‘to-do’ list every morning and I’ll tackle the least desirable tasks first. This guarantees that I address those challenges with full concentration and that my day’s remaining workload is continually being improved.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Chris Hyams, CEO @ Indeed.

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