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I’ve been fortunate to have three transformational business experiences.
In 2012, I started freelancing and was introduced to a world in which impact, outcomes and tangible ROI take priority.
In 2017, I worked for Silicon Valley startup Gigster. This Andreessen-backed talent platform leveraged a global freelance network to build custom software, introducing me to the power of a global flexible workforce to outcompete traditional teams and agencies.
In 2018, I worked at Microsoft as a product manager, helping to scale our internal freelance program and build the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit. By hiring over 30 freelancers across the product development lifecycle, we designed, built and deployed an enterprise-level product across 11 customers in under a year.
These three experiences taught me one thing — there’s a new tool for every entrepreneur: a flexible workforce. A flexible workforce is like the fuel to a rocket. Everyone sees the fire, the massive engines and the body of a rocket. But powering it through orbit is the fuel. And if the fuel is crap, no matter how beautiful the rocket looks, it won’t function properly.
In this article, I’ll lay out my process for getting started with a flexible talent strategy. By the end, you’ll be able to build the next rocket ship, unicorn or enterprise pilot that transforms your company.
Related: 3 Reasons Your Small Business Needs Flexible Talent
Flexible talent is an entrepreneurial cheat code
As an entrepreneur, your key skill is the ability to understand what’s different today that no one understands yet and to create a solution that bridges the gap between what’s possible and a scalable solution.
When it comes to talent, what’s true today that few leaders understand is that the world’s best talent is a click away.
Most leaders look at talent through two channels. Channel one is who they directly know. Channel two is traditional hiring. Traditional hiring defaults to full-time, in-person hiring and uses the same process or set of vendors everyone knows about.
There’s a third channel: the ability to directly connect with a flexible workforce through digital networks, collaborating through flexible contracts and matching an individual’s output with customer demand or your exact need rather than defaulting to a full-time, 40-hour-a-week contract.
This flexible workforce looks the same as your top employees or your fellow founders or executives. The difference is that their work with you will be as an external, independent contractor. I’m not kidding when I say they can do mostly the same thing they would do as an employee if you structure the contract correctly.
For leaders who understand how to access this flexible workforce, it truly is an entrepreneurial cheat code.
How do I know? When I was 26 and living in a San Francisco living room, I found, hired and eventually co-authored a book with an executive who was an expert in machine learning. Because of his expertise, of which I initially spent only $1,000 to hire, we were able to secure HarperCollins, a leading global publisher.
My message to every entrepreneur is that talent is no longer a bottleneck. No matter if you’re a poor founder on a shoestring budget 100 miles from a major airport, or a tech executive with an endless budget, knowing how to navigate a flexible workforce gives you access to the most talented experts in the world at whatever skillset you need.
How can you start your flexible talent journey? Start by adapting your mindset
The first step in embracing flexible talent is understanding the mindset shift between flexible talent and full-time talent. We’ve all been trained to default to full-time employment. Yet flexible talent uses a fundamentally different operating system.
The first principle that separates flexible talent from traditional talent is the contractual structure that you engage in.
Flexible talent is just that- flexible, meaning that instead of a full-time contract, the individual prefers flexibility. Beyond that, it’s largely a grey zone in how you further define the working relationship. Legal implications depend on your country, your state and your industry. For example, if you’re in California, hiring a flexible worker in California will have significantly higher constraints than hiring a flexible worker in Florida or Texas. But there are solutions to virtually every decision you want to make in terms of how you and your flexible workforce engage.
Other simple differences are that the talent is typically external, works on an outcome basis and is a business rather than an individual. One massive assumption that I always run into with leaders is that they assume the individual eventually wants to be a full-time employee. Most flexible workers never want to convert to full-time. To make it specific, European freelance platform Malt data shows that 90% of flexible workers aren’t looking for an in-house position, while Upwork data shows that 50% of flexible workers say they wouldn’t accept a full-time job no matter how much the pay.
The impact of this for you is that it’s easier to get started, it’s easier to measure the impact of each flexible worker, and there’s little to no risk of hiring the wrong flexible worker.
In my example above of hiring an AI expert, I was able to engage this expert through a scoped deliverable rather than a full-time contract. This initial contract was less than $1,000 and had a clear deliverable that tied to a business result on my end. Thus, instead of matching salary and benefits, all that mattered was the scope of work, which can easily be scoped up and down.
Related: Why Your AI Strategy Will Fail Without the Right Talent in Place
Once your mindset is set, adapt your talent pool
The second core difference is where you find a flexible workforce.
Your competitors are probably fishing at career fairs and traditional recruiting pools and expecting a 6+ month hiring loop. This is not only slow but means they have no access to a flexible workforce.
For you, finding the right flexible worker should be more like using a dating app or booking an Airbnb than the traditional hiring process.
The most common way to find and contract with this flexible workforce is a flexible talent platform. Flexible talent platforms help you find, vet and match your needs to the right talent. These platforms are proactively finding and building talent pools of the best talent. They excel at specific skill sets, industries and regions, with over 800 global specialized platforms.
Good talent platforms also excel at helping you scope the work. Rather than creating a 3-page job description that exhausts all possible job responsibilities, define your problem or skillset needed and let talent platforms handle the rest. In one recent example, a CEO came to us with the problem statement, “I have a big presentation on Friday, 15 slides with drafted content, but no idea how to design it so that it can be presented to this audience”.
By trusting the talent platform to manage the process from problem statement to hiring the right person, this CEO had the right talent working within 8 hours. After some back-and-forth, the presentation was done by Wednesday. Incredible right?
Depending on the size of your company, you might contract directly with a flexible worker or always work with a third party. Your situation will determine which, and I’ll address that in follow-up articles.
Now that you have your flexible talent cheat code, think big, not small
To recap, you now have a cheat code to access the best talent in a flexible capacity rather than a full-time contract at the exact time you need them. The last piece of advice I have for you is not to think small. Your knee-jerk reaction to the word “talent” is to think of HR, staffing, or a support function.
Flexible talent is more than talent; and it holds three opportunities.
First, it is a cheaper, faster talent acquisition strategy that provides abundant access to the talent you need. We estimate that a flexible talent resource can directly replace around 80% of job roles.
Second, it’s a productivity strategy for your teams. Rather than waiting until you can afford a full-time resource, the flexible workforce can augment and automate your teams. For example, Airbus created a custom bench of F1 designers who can create custom airplane demos in weeks. This augments their sales teams by enabling sales leaders to rely on this rather than spending hours creating presentations.
Third, the flexible workforce unlocks brand-new revenue opportunities. Intuit’s TurboTax realized that if they created a flexible talent pool of tax accountants, they could offer a TurboTax Live feature that brings vetted tax accountants into the customer experience within 30 seconds. This is game-changing, as is evidenced by the growth of the feature since they originally announced it in 2020. If you’re in the US right now, turn on the TV, and I guarantee that by the fourth commercial, you’ll see TurboTax Live.
You now know how to make your talent strategy a force multiplier for profitability, growth and innovation. The one question remains, how will you use this cheat code?
