In the gig economy the line between a freelance employee and a traditional vendor has become blurred. Smart companies are therefore increasingly treating their gig workers like employees to get more of them. Successful managers know that a star performer can be exponentially more productive than an average performer with the same credentials. For this reason, more hiring managers are obsessing about finding the right person for the job. Yet when it comes to finding gig workers, procurement teams still think of their services as a commodity, demanding that companies pay a standardized rate to service vendors and gig workers based on measurable credentials.
We are no longer living in the age of Ford or Wal-Mart; enter the “Uberization” of everything. Now, vendors are highly likely to be individual contributors, or a small team of loosely connected professionals. This sort of “gig work” is only expected to grow. An UpWork commissioned study found that 57.3M people in the U.S. freelanced in 2017, 36% of the total workforce. Moreover, McKinsey predicts that online talent platforms could boost global GDP by $2.7 trillion by 2025.
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