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Tech companies have always relied on freelancers to keep up with change, but in 2023, the pace accelerated thanks to generative AI—and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.
LinkedIn’s latest “Future of Work” report, published in November 2023, suggests that 55 percent of LinkedIn members globally stand to have their work disrupted or augmented by generative AI. The skills required by the average LinkedIn member to do their job will change by 65 percent by 2030, the platform estimates. For those holding jobs in tech, the goalposts keep moving. Skills gaps are widening.
This is set against a backdrop of mass layoffs. Some 240,000 workers in the global tech sector have been made redundant since the start of 2023—a 50 percent increase on last year according to tracker Layoffs.fyi. Many laid-off workers have joined the freelance ranks, accelerating an existing shift toward self-employment driven by the Great Resignation and the reprioritization of work-life balance post-pandemic.
The net result is that tech firms of all sizes are adjusting to having a more blended workforce and are leaning on freelancers like never before. But they’re not just looking for contractors they can work with for one task or project. Instead, tech firms want highly skilled workers who can slot into teams and even lead them, and who might work with the company long term. Top-tier freelancers therefore now have the upper hand in a seller’s market. The growing availability of highly skilled and highly specialized independent workers marks a new chapter for the tech industry.
This shift in the market is being met by new freelancer-to-hire platforms that are serving as progressive intermediaries for the European workforce. With intense vetting processes and team-building tools, platforms such as A.Team, Malt, and Pangea.app are meeting the evolving needs of tech businesses while empowering top-tier freelancers. Provided that the prestige of freelancing continues to rise and company practices continue to reflect the importance of contractors, the current signs point toward a golden era for freelancing.
Mixing It Up
The tech sector’s reliance on self-employed workers isn’t new—startups especially have been reliant on contractual workers, using them to quickly assemble teams tailored to the specific needs of a project while reducing fixed labor costs. However, the contextual backdrop and sheer number of businesses currently embracing a mixed workforce marks an inflection point. The average UK company’s workforce is now made up of 58 percent full-time workers and 42 percent freelancers and part-time staff (21 percent each). Ninety-six percent of businesses say that they have engaged, or will engage, freelance support in 2023, according to workforce marketplace Fiverr.
Using freelance talent enables firms to bypass self-imposed hiring freezes or shortages of available full-time workers. Contractors can also be a way around claggy hiring processes—time-to-hire has increased year-on-year since before the pandemic, with tech role hiring times ranging on average from 29 to 66 days.
More importantly, though, freelancers can plug expertise gaps that are yawning open at breakneck speed. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, 41 percent of employers plan to expand their use of contractors for task-specialized work. According to data from LinkedIn, job posts mentioning AI have doubled on the platform in the past two years, and Fiverr data shows that searches for AI consultants and AI video editors increased by more than 625 percent between January and July 2023. Digital and cybersecurity freelancers are also in high demand.
Build It and They Will Come
Trawling for these sorts of highly skilled workers and teams can be hard work—which is where third-party platforms come in. But unlike crowdwork platforms like PeoplePerHour and Upwork—home to a saturated market of freelancers offering low-fee services—the new breed of freelance-to-hire platforms are designed for business use, and proffer the crème de la crème of freelance talent. Pangea.app began by connecting student workers with businesses, but has since specialized to bridge gaps for highly skilled software developers, often for longer-term relationships. Fiverr, itself a crowdwork platform, launched Fiverr Pro in August, aiming to support tech businesses in particular following major rounds of layoffs.
“Once freelancers submit an application, we vet and curate them—everyone has to offer the right quality and reliability, because businesses don’t have time to search thousands of profiles,” says Shai-Lee Spigelman, general manager of Fiverr Pro. Since launch, Spigelman says tens of thousands of businesses have used Fiverr Pro, including PolyAI, Similarweb, Unilever, and the Rainforest Alliance. Next up, it’s looking to onboard top talent in growing areas like AI, business consultancy, and 3D rendering for architects.
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The difficulty for these providers is stepping out of the shadow of gig economy platforms and their exploitative practices, so as to attract high-value freelancers. “We stayed in stealth mode for two and a half years because we didn’t want to be bucketed into the gig economy,” says Raphael Ouzan, founder of A.Team, a members-only network of top freelancers. “You go to the Upworks and Fiverrs of the world to earn a side income, not to self-actualize or find community—our challenge was building a platform for people who wouldn’t even describe themselves as freelancers.”
The answer to this challenge was pretty simple: Use a different term. A.Team instead uses the word “builders.” “How you see yourself shouldn’t be about how you get your paycheck, but more about what you do and what you did, with whom,” says Ouzan. “A big part of what we’re trying to is build status, because A.Team is for the unhireables—the people you wish you could hire.” With over 9,000 builders from all over the world on the platform, it’s clear there’s demand for intermediaries that can match freelancers to teams aligned with their values. Expertise sets are divided into areas like generative AI, health care, and fintech, with each sector arranged under a “guild” responsible for organizing that subject area. The nicher the specialism, the better, says Ouzan.
And the platform doesn’t just focus on individuals. Using AI and behavioral science, A.Team can assemble whole teams with the optimal skill set for a company's product mission. “As a knowledge worker, most of what you do is with a team—they’re what really matter—yet teams have never actually been productized in the world of online work,” says Ouzan.
Although founded in New York, since 2021 A.Team has seen a two- to three-times increase in signups from Europe. Ouzan believes this is partly due to Europe’s separation of companies and health care provision—European freelancers can work for global companies without having to worry about health care, as this is orchestrated through the state.
Many leaders are already reaching beyond the local talent pool to fill expertise gaps. “We couldn’t run just using people in the Norwegian jobs market,” says Sondre Kvam, cofounder and CEO of Naer, a VR platform that helps teams improve their productivity with fully immersive workshops. “For mixed reality, we’ve always needed talent from a global pool, and have been remote-first from day one,” he says.
Bringing In the Big Guns
While niche subject experts will be increasingly common and valuable as freelancers, C-suite roles are also being handled by fractional and contract workers. “Interest rates are going up, there’s not as much access to capital, and raises are taking longer, so founders have to be resourceful to make money go further,” says Emma Obanye, entrepreneur and CEO of OneTech, a UK-based nonprofit that works to increase opportunities and access for underserved founders and entrepreneurs. “We’ve got a fractional head of HR and fractional CFO, and lots of my network has shifted to use staff who aren’t actually part of the organization—it’s become a necessity.”
Although A.Team was designed at the outset for developers, product managers, and data scientists, soon they saw heads of product, founders who had sold their businesses, and C-suite executives joining. “We realized they have even fewer options for contract work, and now we have C-level executives from Fortune 500 companies, the chief product officer of Walmart, the former CTO of AFWERX—the US Air Force innovation wing,” says Ouzan.
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As the kinds of roles freelancers do, and the companies they work for, broaden out, perceptions will change. According to a 2022 survey by Upwork, 73 percent of freelancers who were freelancing before Covid-19 agreed that perceptions of freelancing as a career are becoming more positive, representing a 5 percentage point increase from 2021. The pandemic served as a rude awakening, as many full-time workers realized that being tethered to a company guaranteed nothing, and that a better equilibrium could be sought elsewhere.
In a poll of 500 US-based knowledge workers, conducted at the start of the year, A.Team found that 66 percent said that the recent waves of layoffs made them lose trust in the stability and security of full-time employment, while 62 percent said it made them feel less secure committing to one employer. In spring 2023, global HR platform Remote found that 72 percent of UK and US IT and telecoms freelancers felt they had a better work-life balance compared to their previous full-time role. Notably, Gen-Zers lean heavily toward working freelance.
Some experts worry about how the rise of highly skilled freelancers could impact DEI and hiring. “While roles might have once gone out on the open market, with an open recruitment process, the widespread use of freelance teams could inhibit that, which may see more inclusive graduate opportunities fall by the wayside,” says Obanye. “Lucrative opportunities at large corporations may no longer go to diverse candidates, because companies are doing this to be as agile as possible.” Indeed, DEI efforts have dropped massively in the economic headwinds of the past two years. Contractors, Obanye points, even long term, might not be counted within DEI figures. “Who’s going to hold companies to account for that?”
And if the workforce is made up heavily of permalancers, company culture has to involve them too. Kvam suggests seeing the commissioning of any contractual service as the start of a long-term relationship. As soon as Naer’s freelancers get through onboarding, they’re considered employees, and attend retrospectives, one-on-ones, and personal check-ins, just like any employee.
“Knowing in the back of your head that you're going to be moving onto something else changes your behavior as a freelancer, but also how you, as a company, treat the freelancer,” he says. “To have success with top-tier freelancers, we have to stop thinking of them as freelancers brought in to solve a specific problem and give them the same agency as any employee.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
