#95: Freelancers To Beat The Freeze, Voice of The Freelancer, How The Human Cloud Can Fix Higher Ed
With an accelerated acceptance of contractors from Covid, and a shift of contractors from reactive to strategic, hiring freelancers is your way to break through the freeze and continue shipping.
Leaders,
For you Americans, time to go to the gym after all that turkey (let’s be real, it was the stuffing).
For everyone, time to grind.
Leaders, time to get creative by hiring contractors to break through the freeze of hiring. While budgets are frozen for FTE’s, from a budget perspective, contractors are no different than the tools and agencies needed to keep shipping. Take it from Mina of Airbus who uses contractors to customize customer demo’s.
Individuals, time to protect your worth by flexing your opportunity pipeline. This does NOT mean quitting your job to start a business or freelance. Quite the opposite, it means building value alongside your day job to either supplement your income, be prepared for a layoff, or get to a point where you don’t need your day job.
*Also please don’t pay for freelancer bootcamps. You can if you have the money, but best practices are unique to you, universal best practices are basic and not worth charging for, and the real learning will happen through experience.
🚀 Industry Update
This past month we’ve repeatedly heard:
An acceptance of contractors accelerated during Covid (some saw 10-30% increase in usage of contractors) and is expected to continue.
Contractor usage is now strategic. Leaders know contractor usage needs to go beyond a Procurement line item.
Companies are prioritizing the contractor experience so they can acquire and retain good contractors.
Contractors provide a specialized expert advantage that can help service firms win deals and help product teams accelerate insights or builds. Example, companies engaging an autonomous vehicle expert for 6 months to drive ideation and opportunity analysis.
Enterprises are increasingly pissed off with middle man processes and want to go direct and want to re-engage with contractors.
Enterprises want simple reporting and measuring of their talent vendors instead of trusting the 2 they’ve always worked with.
*Reply if you want a slide you can send up the chain.
🤔 PREVIEW: How The Human Cloud Can Fix Higher Ed Through Micro-Internships
This week we’ll announce an exciting initiative. We’ve been fortunate to partner with the Florida International University Honors College to integrate the freelance economy into their curriculum so that students can get immediate access to companies, immediate opportunities for learning, and accelerate their career through the student equivalent of freelance projects - Micro-Internships.
The results have been outstanding, Phase 1 data:
618 students signed up
23 companies signed up
15 Micro-Internships created
Subscribe to be first to hear about it later this week :)
Shoutout to Paul Polo, our Director of University Operations, JC Espinosa, the Dean of the Honors College, and our exclusive partner Parker Dewey, the world’s largest micro-internship platform.
💡 Voice of The Freelancer With Maari and Brooke
For the past 10 years we’ve been client focused. Meaning our attention, our investment, and our decisions typically were based off what was best for the client, not the freelancer.
Today we’re freelancer focused. Meaning the value of marketplaces is shifting from volume (lots of freelancers) to quality. This seems small, but this is a massive shift in marketplace value away from large networks and towards strong individual outcomes.
The tough part is that freelancers are tough to understand, and while we have phenomenal data to point to, most marketplaces or solutions aren’t run by leaders who have freelanced themselves.
We were fortunate to have 10+ year freelancers and entrepreneurs Maari and Brooke to help breakdown the voice of good freelancers.
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