The impetus behind setting up the Productionbase fifteen years ago was to gather together a disparate group of people in an offline world and give them a focal point, and the power that comes from sticking together. Freelancers only tended to hear about new jobs when they were already working in a production office, but when they were off-contract they were also off the grapevine to hear about the next job. Meanwhile the indies were dependent on being able to crew up either the handful of people they knew and always used, or the other people who posted paper CVs through their letterboxes every week. You couldn’t have called it a scientific method. The only alternative at the time was a small and selective agency called the Research Register, which is still going.
Here we are years later, with a large well-connected freelance television community whose issues are publicised by Broadcast; taken seriously by Bectu which now runs an annual Freelancers’ Fair; that workforce has scotched exploitative work-experience by running its own TV-WRAP campaign. The community speaks through the talent and recruitment websites as well as its own meeting place at www.tvwatercooler.org - where a large number have clubbed together to hire senior counsel to counter a broad investigation by HMRC. That is a real flexing of the ‘power of many’. The old boy networks are withering on the vine, and diversity and better access is on the rise as a result.
Now there’s a proper network of freelancers, it’s the production companies who need the help. The companies can’t depend on their old friends to make their programmes any more, they’ve become significant media organisations with ongoing slates of production trying to manage recruitment in the face of an available freelance production workforce of perhaps 25,000 people, but the ones they already know never seem to be available – and they need to find just the right person for every production. It’s a task far beyond the little black contact book of any producer. Some of the big companies have paid big sums to build their own bespoke in-house databases, but this is still beyond the reach of hundreds of indies who are competing with each other to find the best programme-makers.
The new Talent Manager’s core motivation is to offer a different way. It offers a way for companies to pool their resources so they get great value, while still keeping their competitive edge. We have set up a framework where the companies create their own confidential talent records and up-to-date CV files, but they pay in common towards the software. And as their talent networks overlap (show me the freelancer who only ever works for one company!) their talent reach gets much longer. We’ve looked at the way that Google and Bing’s search engines work, and that’s the kind of accurate search-and-find within the tv community that we’re giving those companies. It makes the freelancers’ existing networks even more effective, and gives the twenty-something companies that already use it more hiring power together than they’ve ever had before. If we concentrate on this, the Talent Manager will fly!
Photo by XLibber
