Elance and oDesk are the world’s leading platforms for online work and the most popular places to find, hire, manage and collaborate with online freelancers. Belgian Curator Marco Torregrossa had a chat with Kjetil to understand how savvy businesses and talented freelancers alike are moving to online work at record pace – and why Elance-oDesk is leading the way in today’s hiring revolution.
What growth have you seen in online work since Elance-oDesk began several years ago? How much bigger could this market be in the years to come, also considering the Elance/oDesk merger? What are your views on the overall future of work?
The merge between Elance and oDesk is the most exciting thing happening for us at the moment. We have united two of the main competitors in the market into one new company that we honestly feel it will create more and better opportunities for freelancers and businesses across the world. It’s something that will not create a monopoly, because this market already has a lot of players, but instead it will certainly help to attract new players.
The future of work will relay more and more on individuals rather than companies and employers. We predict that the upcoming workforce, particularly the one that belongs to the Generation Y, will have a higher demand for flexibility compared to the prior generation. When this group that now wants to work for whoever, whenever, wherever sets its own demands, employers will need to find ways to meet these new expectations. So I think we will see more people turning into freelancers and more hybrid organisational models emerging where businesses re-organise themselves to a larger degree after this new way of working and they will have one team on site and one other team which is online/remote. As well as becoming more adept at handling data, companies will inevitably have to integrate different types of workers into their business in the upcoming years. We are already seeing very successful companies adopting this new staffing model, whereby a pool of skilled online workers work side-by-side with full time staff, albeit in a virtual sense. This gives businesses a unique opportunity to scale up and down on demand, hire the best talents regardless of where in the world they are and benefit from significant cost savings.
Some say freelancers are the engines powering up the collaborative economy. What is in your opinion the link between the freelance economy and the collaborative/sharing economy? How can they support each other and are there areas where they could potentially conflict?
At Elance-oDesk we have championed the concept of “human cloud” whereby we match skilled cloud based talents with businesses, helping collaboration and facilitating payments. Through our platform we give businesses access to a fraction part of professionals’ time.
“Nowadays, access to talent is becoming more important than ownership of talent. And this goes very much according to what the collaborative economy has introduced”.
We are still at an early stage of this industry but if you see what happened 10-15 years ago with other collaborative economy marketplaces like Amazon or Ebay, you understand chances are that we are set to rise.
Platforms like Elance and oDesk provide a transparent marketplace that ensures companies are able to access freelancers. They can leave their feedback on the freelancers’ performance which may help to guide other potential clients engaging the right collaborators on demand. In addition, a competitive labour market also makes sure that these online freelancers stay up to date on the technology and skills that they offer. At Elance we have launched a skills program (based on a series of skills tests which freelancers can take) to help the knowledge workers we serve stay up to date with their competences, as we believe accessing training programs is more problematic for freelancers than traditional employees.
Elance and oDesk also offer several ways for employers to make good hiring decisions, by providing a review of the freelancer’s reputation as well as skills, past work experience and sample work been done in the past. This does not differ much from the online trust and reputation systems that are currently in use in many other collaborative economy marketplaces.
For people accustomed to working in the same office, sending work to someone on the other side of the world could seem unthinkable. How would you know the work will be done well, or that the person is actually working on the project during the times they were billing you for it? How do you ensure your information is going to stay safe? Is there a secret to effectively managing virtual talent and work remotely? What’s your advice to companies using freelancers?
Elance-oDesk’s success worldwide shows that companies have the potential to work in a truly globalised way. When talent isn’t available locally, businesses in all industries can tap into a global pool of online freelancers to source the required skills. Prior to online work, this was not an option as businesses were faced with the option of either relocating, hiring staff without the right skills or even worse, failing to get the work done. We see this trend continuing as businesses seek talent from across borders to gain a competitive edge. Especially for small companies, there are specific benefits in hiring freelancers, mostly in relation to costs savings and the faster time to hire and turn projects around. This way, small companies have the same chance as the big ones to attract talent, which gives them a competitive advantage they didn’t have before. And many larger enterprises are also starting to understand the need to hire talent based on their skills, not on their location. HR’s acceptance of the on-demand work model will radically shift the way they source, manage and hire both permanent and freelance staff to meet their organisations’ current and future talent and skills need.
The main challenge for companies is to attract the right freelancer or talent to the job. The secret lies in the job description. Companies need to understand what online freelancers require in order to offer an attractive job on demand. Elance and oDesk provide templates to help creating a good job post. By default, both platforms also offer recommendations of freelancers that companies may want to invite to submit proposals in relation to their project. It is also key for companies to find the best ways to communicate and collaborate with online freelancers. Employers need to help online teams feel the ownership of a certain project as if they were part of the company, which in turn will create loyalty and the successful accomplishment of the project.
It used to be that people became freelancers because they just got laid off, whereas nowadays freelancing may be seen as a career path, as flexible work models become more and more mainstream. Any message for the newbies who want to start their freelancing career? Do you get many companies developing good relationships with freelancers and then hire them directly? Do Elance and oDesk ever lead to “job” creation or is it only “work” creation?
Online freelancing is becoming a hugely competitive market. Newcomers should not think that just by registering on our platform, work will smoothly come their way without making efforts. It may take some time to understand how the platform works, how to build experience on an online marketplace, and find the right company to work for before contracts are signed.
In order to succeed, freelancers hinge on positive feedback and ratings from their clients. This means that it will take time before a reputation is established and freelancers need to constantly deliver high quality work within the agreed deadlines. In addition, clients and freelancers will have to get to know one another before actually starting to work on a project. Essentially this follows the same pattern which happens in the off-line world.
There are more employers, hiring more freelancers across a wider range of jobs. For some, this is about managing short-term demand for talent and de-risking growth, but it’s also evident that for tens of thousands of businesses, retaining freelancers as an integral part of their talent mix is becoming an essential strategy.
