Future of Talent Marketplaces Recap
From 'Just A Marketplace' to A New Economy, From Acquisition to Access, From Country Club to Elastic Networks
Hey Y’all, sorry for being slower on the updates front. We’ve been extra in the weeds with our clients and have some really exciting news for you in the coming weeks :)
We all know about inflation and the looming recession.
Whether the impact is bad, terrible, or horrendous, the solution stays in the same - move fast, move lean, and use tech to prioritize the relationships with your talent. The Human Cloud is your way to do that. Specifically remote-first and freelance-first is your engine to be fast, lean, and impactful.
With that said, let’s geek on the future of this industry by digging into the future of talent marketplaces :)
Believe me when I say it’s extremely rare to have the leaders below all on one stage.
It was the absolute perfect balance of independent industry coverage (Jon Younger), industry market share (Upwork & Fiverr), and industry innovation (Vicoland).
A couple things that kept coming up:
From talent access to acquisition.
Tony Buffum of Upwork said, “This challenge of converting our kind of archaic talent acquisition mindset, to a talent access mindset. And the challenge there is, a lot of HR professionals are just completely overwhelmed right now”.
Jon Younger said, “we're trying to convince a global industry that they've got to change in their most fundamental assumption, and that is that if they don't own the people, they can't be successful. And that I believe, is the most important thing that we can do.”
Abby Forman of Fiverr said, "the number one challenge that we face as an industry is really to educate companies, both large and small.”
From ‘just a marketplace’ to a new economy.
The freelance economy isn’t just creating a bunch of marketplaces, it’s creating a new economy.
What does this new economy look like? Let’s break it down by the three main stakeholders.
Society
Companies
Individuals
For society:
Jon Younger said, “Nobody ever taught us how to architect the workforce. You know, it's like the big bank, suddenly, the universe is here. HR people have learned to do a fabulous job of improving, or administering, or supplementing, or aiding a workforce, but never had to figure out how to architect one from scratch. And if you don't know how to architect the workforce from scratch, you don't know how to create a flexible and blended one you don't trust it. And so what you default to is, if we own all these folks, quote unquote, somehow we'll be safer, the risk will be reduced.”
For companies:
It’s going to be impossible to fill all needs without freelancers.
Abby Forman of Fiverr said, “it's going to become impossible for companies to think that they can fill all the roles that they have with with full time talent, because the talent simply won't be there.”
You need to scale up/down while managing costs.
Abby Forman of Fiverr said, “In times like these, it's incredibly important for companies to ensure that they're managing costs accordingly, managing their fixed expenses and their variable expenses. And freelancers have the flexibility to come and help when needed and leave when they're not. They can help a company scale up and down based on changing customer demands and market needs, in addition to helping these companies diversify their workforce.”
It’s about transparency and supporting skill development.
Tony Buffum of Upwork said, “Technologies continuing to rapidly accelerate how transparent it is to work for companies to get freelance or independent contractor experiences. And as technology continues this rapid evolution, so skills also rapidly evolve.”
For individuals:
It’s all about the shift from gigs to projects.
Niklas Lieb of Vicoland said, “We are shifting towards an economy where freelancers are able to do more complex projects, going from the gig economy to I think in five years, we will call it a project economy.”
From an industry to an engine of opportunity.
At our core, our space is about re-structuring employment in a way that can work for everyone.
By unlocking a remote first, contract first way of work, we can:
Open up access to everyone.
As Tony Buffum of Upwork said, “the biggest impact we can have is just by educating people on what they have access to once they have the skills, and that they can find work really easily, really fast. And it's valuable work, it's work that can be proud of, and they can work for small companies, they can work for private companies, or they can work for the world's largest companies.”
As Niklas Lieb of Vicoland said (#DitchTheCountryClub), “We see companies right now always working with kind of the same suppliers. Like there's a whole, there's a shortlist of the preferred suppliers, and the project always always go to them. A huge part of what all of the platforms are doing is democratizing the access to all of the project opportunities that are within a company and giving the best talent in the world access to these to these opportunities.
Further: “I think once companies realize that, actually posting something to the crowd where a lot of people can create offers for that I can gather maybe different kinds of proposals, rather than just going to the guy with whom I play golf on Sunday, and just get a proposal from that guy. And I get to better results. And I think once that realization is there, we are really paving the way to democratizing access to opportunity, because that is kind of what it's all about.”
Bring us closer to family:
Jon Younger said, “one of the things that that we are able to do through this wonderful invention of a new way of working is an opportunity for people to create more meaningful relationships with their family and to support their family in ways that that you know, don't destroy their family, if I may put it in those to dramatic terms. You know, if my kids were to were to honestly answer the question, was I away too much when they were growing up? Their answer would be, of course you were. And one of the things that I am quite certain of because of that belief is that neither of them wants jobs and will accept jobs that require a tremendous amount of travel. They don't want to be that far away from their kids.”
A couple other interesting points
We’re just getting started, our market currently is less than 10% of what it will be.
According to Jon Younger, “all of the business of all of the freelance platforms, agencies, marketplaces represent less than 5% of total staffing spend globally. So who's our competition? It's not each other. Our competition is history.”
Legislation
We NEED to figure out a way to tax us or else we’ll be shut down.
According to Jon Younger, “I'll tell you folks, we got to help governments figure out how to tax us because if we can't figure out how to how to help governments tax us, they will shut us down. Right now what's happening in the UK with IR35 has nothing to do with policy towards employment, it has everything to do with how do we tax you. Because we know historically, that companies send tax rolls to government, and that forms the basis for being taxed. And now I'm in Argentina, but I'm doing work in Austin, Texas. And they're not tracking me and they are pissed as hell.”
Next Steps:
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