Expert360 - why we do what we do at Australia’s 5th most innovative company

At Expert360 we believe that work is an inseparable part of the human experience.

In fact, there are few things more important to a person's well-being than work (obviously things like health and personal relationships top the list). Why? Well to start, we spend a lot of our time there.

If we consider that the average working week is 40 hours and most people receive four weeks of leave, that’s 1,920 hours a year at work. For someone who begins working life at 21 and retires at 65, thats 84,480 hours all up - and this doesn’t even take overtime into account.

We also know that work provides us with a sense of purpose and achievement. It can make us feel like a big fish in a small pond, or a small cog in a big wheel; both of which can help improve self esteem and foster a sense of belonging.

However, the way we work is changing, particularly for white collar workers. Now more than ever, those who have in-demand skills and expertise are calling the shots. Rather than being locked into a full-time permanent position they want to work with their client of choice, in a format they want, at the price they want.

Instead of 1,920 hours of work a year sitting at the same desk they might choose to sit at 10 different desks, working with 10 different teams. Or they might choose to work 1,000 hours in between sabbaticals which are used to write novels or travel the world.

And it’s our job at Expert360 to make this as easy as possible for them.

As part of our mission to make ‘working for yourself, work’ we launched the ClientInReview feature, which earlier in the week saw us place fifth in the AFR’s Most Innovative Company Awards. While the award is an incredible achievement for our company, it’s even more important to us to be recognised for the value we are driving to our clients and professional freelance community.

With over 19,000 vetted freelancers on our platform, we’d received feedback that freelancers were having poor experiences in well known ASX companies (who otherwise had strong employee brands). Not only was this bad for the freelancer, ultimately, it was bad for the company who were damaging their ability to attract highly skilled on-demand talent.

The reality is that the human capital management software suite was set up to manage the permanent employee lifecycle. The Freelance Workforce cannot be properly managed by these pre-existing solutions and large corporations need to start thinking about how they can leverage FMS (Freelance Management Systems) along-side their core HCM tech stack.

Our ClientInReview feature is a step towards the end-to-end FMS. It’s a mechanism ensuring companies and hiring managers are better able to source, engage and manage their contingent workforce by collecting feedback from talent on the job and summarising the feedback for leaders to action.

While the technology feature might seem like a small solution, it’s one that tackles a big problem. With freelancers expected to make up 40% of the Australian workforce by 2020, a company’s success will depend on their ability to quickly and efficiently flex resources on-demand. A business that has slow on-boarding processes, consistent scope creep or delayed payment, is quickly going to find themselves blacklisted by the freelancer community.

It’s often said that a company is the sum of its best people. If this is true, then businesses need to make sure they’ve got the systems and processes in place to attract the best freelancers and complement their permanent full-time staff.