The end of freelance marketplaces is here: how traditional gig platforms are putting businesses at risk

By Joseph Russell

As freelancing has become a more and more attractive option for workers, so have the platforms that help businesses find freelancers. They helped make freelance work accessible, for both freelancers and the companies that need to hire them.?

Because of these platforms, the?freelance industry has flourished . But with companies turning to freelancers more frequently, new challenges have arisen. Many of these companies are now realizing that the processes they had in place for managing freelancers weren’t very scalable — and some are even realizing that they never had a process to begin with.?

Here’s a look at the three main areas where traditional freelance marketplaces put your company at risk — and how to eliminate those risks so you can work better with your freelance workforce.

1. Spend and management quickly get out of control

The biggest problem is that the more freelancers that work with your company, the more quickly freelancer spend can get out of control. How can you plan your resourcing strategically when you don’t even know how much you’re spending on freelancers at any given time? And it’s not just spend, you also?need oversight into billing, contracts, sourcing, and more . Since you likely have different teams managing different aspects of freelance management, it adds a lot of back and forth when trying to align on management and operations.?

Traditional freelance platforms won't offer you much help in this area, but alternatively, using a?freelance management system ?consolidates all of the parts of freelance management — sourcing, hiring, onboarding, contracts, and billing — into one system. This gives all of your teams a full overview into your freelance program and eliminates internal back and forth on freelancer operations.?

2. Lack of insight into the talent you’re hiring??

Gig platforms made finding work for freelancers easier than ever before and helped the businesses that needed freelance work find the talent they were looking for.?Well… they sort of did.

They promised to connect freelancers with the companies that needed them, but with little qualifications for those who applied, there’s never any way to be sure the freelancers you find are as qualified as they say they are.?Plus, these traditional freelance platforms are so oversaturated with people looking for gigs that it often means sorting through large amounts of unqualified applicants for each job, trying to find the small group of candidates that are actually a good fit.

Traditional freelance marketplaces are also only designed to match you with talent — they don’t offer the capability to easily manage a pool of your trusted freelancers (like Worksome does!). Wouldn’t it be helpful if anyone in your company could easily re-hire a trusted freelancer whenever they needed someone with that particular area of expertise? Putting this in place would end all of the time you’re currently wasting sourcing new freelancers and instead give you more space to build better relationships with freelancers you already know and trust.

3. They open you up to the risk of penalties and fines?

With worker classification laws?becoming more common ?across the US and Europe, managing freelancers can be really complicated from a compliance perspective. Understanding how each worker should be classified and treating them accordingly helps reduce the risk that you’ll be audited and have to pay fines and back taxes down the line.?

And if you’re managing freelancers in multiple countries or states, trying to classify them all correctly gets even more complex. Traditional gig platforms help you find freelancers, but they don’t give you any support from the compliance side. This also means that most companies don’t think about worker classification until after the worker has already begun working.?

This can be a compliance nightmare trying to ensure that all your workers are classified properly and you have all the correct documentation when it comes time for an audit. A management tool that classifies each worker from the moment a contract is created?helps minimize risk ?and lets your compliance teams feel confident that you’re operating correctly from the moment a worker starts.?

TL;DR: It's time to upgrade how you manage your freelance talent and extended workforce.

And Worksome can help — book a demo today!

_____________________________________

Worksome makes managing an extended workforce fast and painless by automating payments, billing, and compliance processes ? Our all-in-one solution not only saves companies time and money, but also reduces risk—making the flexible future of work a reality for both businesses and workers all around the globe ?? For more information, please visit?www.worksome.com ????