Akhil Seth of UST, Why the Future Of Talent is Freelancers, and How Enterprises Can Tap Into This Abundant Pool of Open Talent
Leaders, while every board is talking about a contradictory great resignation, hiring freezes, and talent shortage (see update 83), Akhil Seth and UST are leading Enterprises to an abundant talent pool of freelancers.
Some crazy learnings:
- How Open Talent can shorten proof of concepts from 2 months to 2 days
- How you can fractionalize unicorn full time employees into multiple freelancers
- Why a company like UST is leading the charge in helping both themselves and their clients in adopting Open Talent
*Paid readers find this at the bottom.
A Preview of What To Expect…
2:00 - Why he's so passionate about Open Talent
“We don't have the right talent, we don't have the resources, who know the right things, to be able to achieve the work outcomes that we want to achieve. The strategy, the vision, the leadership, the tools, and the products, they're all there. The one missing piece is the people who know how to bring it all together. And where I see freelancing come in is that it's where that talent supply is now abundant. It used to be you could hire 1000 factory workers in a day, I imagine back when steel mills were first opening up or, but now now where you can go and hire 1000 people in a day is on freelance open talent marketplaces”.
12:52 - What he's working on at UST
“We're very interested in the problem statement of how do we get the abundance of talent supply into the work streams that allow our clients work done as quickly as possible? Currently when they come to us, we say we can't do that yesterday, we need at least a month to hire these people. We'd love to flip that around and say we've done it last week. That's the outcome we'd really like to achieve. And open talent is the perfect medium that gets us there.”
“Where we're positioning ourselves is we're solving for the fact that most freelancers don't have insurance, or don't have the insurance levels that our clients expect us to have for them to feel comfortable access to data security, IP protection, just general management of a fluid workforce.”
“All of these things we want to figure out and solve for, so that our clients don't need to worry about it. Or we want to be able to tell them give us the work that needs to get done. We'll orchestrate the talent that needs to exist to get that done. And we'll deliver you a finished work product.”
15:55 - Industry leading solutions in virtual desktopping and change management
18:27 - Big wins for Open Talent
“We projected it will take about 2 months of internal resources time to develop this proof of concept to a stage where it's ready to present to our client.”
“Instead we ship that off to to an open talent market space, we hired a freelancer to complete that. And it took them two weeks to do what we thought it would take two months, and it only cost us $150.”
“Of the 7 billion people in the world, it's very likely that there's already someone that's done something very similar to what we need to get done. And so with this proof of concept, we found someone that had, they really just needed to take some code that they owned, put it in, make a couple of tweaks and then send it to us very easy for them. And we got exactly what we needed.”
“What we found brilliant was that when we engage open talent, we can kind of build the person we want out of fractions of other people. So to make what I mean clear, we found a mathematician that could explain all the complex computational geometry that needed to be done. And we found an Angular developer who understood how to convert the mathematicians notes into front end development code. And so rather than having to find one person that knew how to do both, we were able to build the solution with fractions, well, building blocks. So the way I like to see it is rather than having to operate in the middle of a Venn diagram, that one person in the middle that has both that overlap that's in the intersection, that Venn diagram, we can operate with the talent that's out there in the union of the Venn diagram. So everyone, and that opens us up.”
22:13 - Best projects to start hiring freelancers for
27:55 - The biggest challenges of hiring freelancers
37:00 - Why classification is such a big problem in hiring freelancers
41:00 - Akhil's leadership journey
45:49 - How to acquire and keep top young talent like Akhil
Go connect with Akhil asap! https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhilvseth/
Also special thank you to our freelance producer Ryan Mellinger for an extra innovative production!
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