More Companies Are Using Marketplaces To Find Freelance Workers

To rub salt into the wounds Covid inflicted, the “Great Resignation” hit many employers and is set to continue.  With a record number of people around the world quitting their jobs over flexibility, better pay and benefits, mental well-being, and work-life balance, this plague hasn’t spared Singapore. 

According to DBS Bank in a 2022 article, “Nearly half of Singapore SMEs (49%) surveyed say they aren’t finding it easy to deal with the “Great Resignation,” with 62% of Singapore SMEs revealing that more staff were resigning compared to 2021.  Another survey of workers across the Asia-Pacific reveals that 1 in 5 employees intend to switch to a new employer within the year. 

The article continues, “And because companies might have shrunk in size as a survival response to the pandemic, rehiring now is a real issue,” explains Irvin Seah, Senior Economist at DBS Bank.  Of Singapore SMEs (Small to Medium Enterprises), 65% now find it difficult to hire or find replacements.

SMEs, especially, require skilled talent to help them innovate and execute strategies for growth while staying ahead of the competition. Despite the urgency, these companies struggle to fish from Singapore’s experience pool.  This can be for multiple reasons, but the most common are

1. that highly-skilled staff prefer to work with the large companies and multinationals, which eliminates the uncertainty of their next payday and of course the cheques that these companies can cut are larger.  And therein, lies the rub.  Better qualified people are expensive and they will always prefer the security of tenure at large companies over SME’s.

2. The difficulty of finding the right talent to hire.  Experts are rare.  They would not be experts otherwise.  However, it is difficult to find expertise on the market.  The obvious choice of seeking expertise form a university fails when these very same experts are tied down by non-compete and non-freelance clauses in their contracts.  Then there is word of mouth and Linkedin, but these take multiple tries before you can locate an appropriate expert, with no guarantee that they will be available to take on your commission when you do locate them.

Thus, SMEs struggle to attract, retain and manage appropriate talent for non-routine development tasks.

Rise of the Contingent Workforce

Contingent workers are not on any company’s payroll but comprise individuals who provide services to them, on project bases or part-time, or who fill a temporary vacancy (eg. pregnancy leave) or simply are specialist advisers. They are called by many names, but “Consultants”, “Contract Hires” and “Advisers” are common identifiers.

The ‘Great Resignation’ is itself indicative of changing attitudes to employment. The Covid layoffs taught many that there is no job security.  Many concluded that if ‘employment’ no longer provides security of tenure, then the conditions of such working may no longer be worth tolerating.

Contingent (‘gig work’ or ‘freelancing’) working has of course always existed, but since the Industrial Revolution, the lure of life-long work security at a ‘company’ has been a deciding factor for many.  However, in recent years, employers have progressively given the lie to that notion, since well before the pandemic overturned the entire apple cart. 

Gig working and Freelancing are increasingly being seen as providing the work-life balance that compensates for uncertainty.  More importantly, such workers are increasingly confident that such work will be available in sufficient frequency to provide their income needs.

A 2021 survey by ‘Finance Online’ estimates that of the 3.5 billion global workforce, 1.1 billion or 35% may be contingent workers.  In 2018, the number of occasional independents in the USA jumped 42% to 14.9 million from 10.5 million in 2016.[i] Indeed, US statistics foreshadow that Contingent employees will increase worldwide. In the US they exceeded 40% of the workforce by 2020.[ii]

But, who needs Freelancers?

Companies turn to contingent workers to balance workloads when experiencing headcount shortages or have work that will eventually end, as in development projects which require specialised skills for their duration.  Of companies questioned in a survey in Singapore, 60% admitted to having hired temporary or contract employees[iii].

SMEs find it easier to upsize or downsize as needed with a contingent workforce, easing flexible workforce planning. The survey revealed that 66% of companies surveyed turn to a contingent workforce particularly to fill specialised roles, ensuring the availability of talent with specific skills on a short-term or a per-project basis, while 35% reported  compensating their contingent workers at the same rates that that they reward their full-time staff, to ensure availability and project fulfilment.

The Motherboard of Contingent Work: The Gig-Economy Marketplace

The gig economy is among the great democratizing fruit of modern technology. Over the past few years, gig work seekers have utilized various platforms to look for part time jobs, freelance projects or even full-time jobs online.

And as the business sector starts to fully embrace remote work, employers have the flexibility to draw on so much more of the expertise that they were previously compelled to develop or hire-in on a full-time basis.  Independent contractors can resolve tasks that require new perspectives in time-frames that do not require a full-time employee to be recruited.

That is the promise of these gig economy platforms.

Ride hailing and food delivery services have proliferated by offering workers flexible schedules and certain income. But, knowledge workers, who offer less homogenous though no less valuable energy and expertise, have struggled to find somewhere to hang their shingle.  Their marketing, while advanced from word of mouth to social media tagging, has struggled to find a one-to-many relationship with Hirers.

In recent years platforms like Upwork, Freelancer.com and Fiverr have proliferated, offering the services of consultants in one geography to Hirers of another.  This has been liberating, if your work can be delivered digitally and without the benefit of face to face interaction. 

But locally focussed platforms to facilitate physical service delivery are still rare, almost as if proximate human interaction has been relegated to the status of a relic.

Nevertheless, trust and persuasion are so much harder to develop across a glass screen. Humans crave interaction and much of services, advice and knowledge-intensive development can only be achieved by physical teams or at least hybrid ones.  Zoom remains a tool, not a substitute.  Trust develops when you can smell your interlocutor, so to speak.

Older Freelancers

A developing theme of recent years has been to shoe-horn under-studies into the boots of older workers as a way of rationalising cost ie. older workers are perceived as expensive.  This is attributable not just to ageism; other factors influence such decisions too.

To retain talent, younger workers must perceive a progression ladder laid against the future for them to climb, or they will leave; so the thinking goes.  Coupled with the economic imperative of the lower employment cost, the career ladder militates against older workers.  Witness the phenomenon of workers being laid off in their 5th and 6th decades, as a consequence.  Of course, retirement age legislation plays a part in that progression as well.

While outdated thinking and legislation pushes still vital older workers out of work, they remain healthy, eminently able and imbued with experience that, like a good vintage, only time can confer.  Many are thus compelled to join the contingent workforce as a consequence.  GreyGigz curates such workers to guarantee our hirers of a depth of knowledge and experience that the aspiring understudy continues to aspire to!

GreyGigz

Enter Greygigz.  We’re looking to tap the Freelancing trend and the ageing problem with our hybrid gig-work platform. 

Seek out our senior freelancers.  Their deep experience imbues their advice with value greater than their cost.  After-all, you are not committing to long-term employment, merely distilling the benefit of deep experience and talent for the duration of your project.

END OF PART 1.

[i] MBO Partners

[ii] PYMNTS Survey

[iii] https://www.humanresourcesonline.net/the-contingent-workforce-in-asia-pacific-2022-trends-and-insights-for-hr-to-note