Changing demographics, digitalization, wider availability of fast speed internet and pursuit for great professional satisfaction is really changing employment landscape. Globally, freelance driven employment models are gaining more acceptance. In Europe Union freelancers population doubled between 2000 and 2014, making hem fastest growing labor group. Similar trend is underway in US where freelance workforce is growing faster than the overall workforce.
Indian market is not far behind and is evolving faster. While flexible talent and work arrangements have always played an important role in certain skill areas, but now it is becoming more mainstream. There is clear trend in the employment markets that employers as well as employees, are preferring flexibility over continuity and deliverables over duration. In knowledge economy where employability is more on skills than education, workers are increasingly preferring quality of experience and work content over employer brand or designations.
One extension of this changing phenomenon is a move towards On-Demand talent. Industry is calling this with different names like Talent-in-Cloud, Uberisation of workforce. Resource as a Service (RAAS) or more simpler terms like Freelancing or Independent consultants. Irrespective of terminology, this trend is here to stay and is becoming stronger with every passing day.
Freelancers represent 35% of the total U.S. working population and could represent more than half of the country’s workforce by 2027.
Morgan Stanley
What We Do
Sourcing &
Onboarding
Developing
the Relationship
Enabling
Collaboration
Background
Verification
Invoice Processing
Expense Payments
Attendance
Timesheet
This freelance ecosystem is providing a tremendous opportunity for organizations to leverage these competence. While business benefits of this channel is clear; Challenge is to leverage the true potential and manage the operational complexity of dealing with this ecosystem. Typical challenges organization face is:
- Developing the freelancer ecosystem is not the same as permanent or contract hiring. As these are loosely coupled relationships, expectations setting and communication is important.
- Despite the fact that they are on-demand talent, but they expose organization to similar risks as any other employee. Hence background verification of this talent is no different than any other employment relationship.
- As freelancing capacity utilization is on-demand, interactions are ad-hoc with no assurance of continuity. In reality no one is investing effort in nurturing these relationships. In result, Organization run a risk of eroding these relationships leading to reduced reliability and increase cost of acquisition.
- Considering these relationships are not employee like, you can’t manage them through normal payroll and as transaction amount and transaction numbers are low and/ or ad-hoc, they can’t be managed like a vendor either. This leads to operational issues around invoicing, tax management and payment processing.
What Clients Can Expect
Orcapod is a liquid workforce expert. It has required tools, platforms, processes and experience to develop, manage and nurture these relationship with ease. Leveraging our strength, clients can expect the following
- Dedicated effort in developing and nurturing this ecosystem on behalf of client. This helps in scale up the freelance ecosystem.
- Acquiring new freelancers and boutique companies, completing their background checks, communicating with them on regular basis and checking their availability and interest for better predictability.
- Access to our existing ecosystem that is pre-evaluated and pre-validated. This reduces acquisition effort and improve service quality and predictability.
- Data management and help in reaching out to most suitable person for the task.
- End to end contract & compliance management with individual freelancer. This includes attendance, timesheet, invoicing and payment processing. What clients get in return is one single invoice backed by approved pay-slips for each service.
- Real-time visibility of available talent for seasonal demand surge, upcoming assignment, consulting/ advisory or any adhoc need. We plugin our developed ecosystem to your existing contingent workforce supply chain.
- Continues quality improvement by collecting timely feedback and taking performance improvement measures.
- Helping clients in internal communication, leading to improved adoption and better buy-in from business users.
Indicative Use Case When You Require a Freelancer
Some use cases when your need freelancers rather than a contractor
- Your front office executive is on some emergency leave for five days. You can’t leave your reception unattended. You need someone experienced for managing the high footfall reception desk, who is conversant with tools and is staying in the office vicinity.
- You are starting a project in a technology area, where you don’t have anyone who can interview the candidate. You need an experience professional who is conversant with the skills and is capable of asking right questions and evaluate.
- Your tech team is trying to install an application server and they are facing some technical issue. They are looking for someone who can come on the call, understand the issue and help them resolve.
- You are developing a new web application and you need 10-15 days help on UI/ UX design.
- You have some remote location where you need tech support; However needs are ad-hoc and rare. There is no business case for full time employee or contractor and situation demand for on-demand talent.
- Tech project is coming up with the next release and project leadership need expert testing professionals for 10-15 days.
- You are doing a project for a German company and you need translation help to translate their design documents in English.
- You are supporting a retail customer where customer support is required for a specific sale or seasonal surge. You don’t expect assignment to go for longer than 2-3 weeks.
- Your procurement team is buying or renewing product licenses in large number. They are looking for some subject matter expertise. Idea is to get commercial inputs which can help them negotiate a better deal.
Our Proprietary Tools To Manage Freelancers
Orcapod has proprietary tools to manage end to end processes related to freelancer management.
