How can we promote freelancer diversity as adoption increases and project size grows?

Freelancing platforms have made a huge impact, enabling freelancers to find work regardless of gender, race, creed, disability or demographic, changing millions of lives across the world. 

For Companies or Individuals with a hiring need (let’s call them hiring managers), they enable anyone to go direct to talent and deliver with freelancers anywhere in the world.

As a Company's use of freelancing platforms increase, they tend to look at whether they can maximise the Time and Cost benefits by extending adoption into larger, more complex packages of work.

However, I have seen first-hand the frustration of hiring managers struggling with job briefs, hiring practices, global time-zones, generally using a Platform and interacting with Freelancers.

When the hiring need is more than a single freelancer can manage or requires multiple skill sets across traditionally different job types, hiring managers usually struggle and then default to their normal method of delivery.

Within Corporations, this tends to mean using an agency of record with fancy offices and hierarchical management structures, at a far higher cost than direct to talent with Freelancers allows (or the work is delayed until an overstretched internal team finally gets to it).

Many of the freelancer platforms have tried to find solutions to this issue, generally by encouraging the use of companies or agencies operating through their platforms. While this is a lower-cost alternative for the Hiring Manager and ensures (often more) revenue for the platforms, it defeats the benefits of using many of the diverse freelancers looking for work (especially those who are more independently minded!)

We have taken a different point of view. We look at our customer requirements as a project and stitch together teams of independent freelancers to deliver the subcomponents.

This ensures we continue to promote freelancer diversity and those who in a traditional Corporate environment, may be tagged as ‘doesn’t work well with others’. But as each of the team are focused on their own specific deliverables, these motivated and dedicated freelancers get an opportunity to shine, without being forced into companies or agencies.

If you are a freelancer and would like the opportunity to work on campaigns of work for global brands, or you would like to hear how this could be applied to your business needs, we’d love to hear from you.