The gig economy has irreversibly changed the landscape of today’s workplace.
This hasn’t just been a win for freelancers who opt for more flexibility and independence. It’s been a win for employers who are now able to scale their teams, accelerate innovation, and reach their goals faster than they would be able to if they relied solely on FTE.
That being said, I believe freelancers are still vastly underrated and underutilized by many companies today and they’re doing it at their own peril. A recent Forbes article called Eight Reasons to Hire a Full-Time Employee Over a Freelancer is a prime example of why. Instead of making a compelling argument for FTE, it highlights the kind of old-school hiring practices and short-sighted thinking that led Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski and me to start Braintrust in the first place.
So rather than me countering each one of their arguments, I reached out to eight executives at leading enterprises like Nestlé, Porsche, and Taskrabbit and asked them where they stood on the issue.
Here’s what they had to say about the benefits of hiring freelancers over FTE.
“I run our IT innovation efforts out of San Francisco and one of the challenges we have is finding highly skilled tech talent to help us build concepts, tests, and new IT products and services. Before we hired freelancers we’d have open recs aging away on our job board. Now we are able to plug into highly skilled talent immediately and get them deployed on critical projects. It’s remarkable how easy they make it.”
- Goran Kukic, Chief Innovation Technology Officer, Nestlé
“The ability to fit our needs...and the execution speed, plus the price point and flexibility of hiring freelancers–that’s a combination that I never had.”
- Steffen M. Haug, Managing Director, Porsche
“As the CEO of one of the fastest-growing marketplaces, I appreciate how difficult it is to align incentives between customers and workers and to ensure you’re delivering a high-quality service. Our freelancers have been a critical partner in scaling our business globally, helping us deliver increasing value to our customers and workers around the globe.”
- Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO, Taskrabbit
“So now this is a force multiplier for me. I was a military guy for the first 10 years of my career. So I look at freelancers as my force multiplier. Now I can take on more projects. I can do more things.”
- Jim Legeman, AVP of Corporate Innovation, Pacific Life
“As an accounting consultancy founded some 170 years ago, we’re constantly looking for ways to innovate, remain competitive, and best serve the needs of our clients who are trying to do the same. The freelance model has allowed us to quickly assemble teams of highly skilled technical talent and ship product developments in record time.”
- Gary Meltzer, Managing Partner, PwC
“People might not always perceive healthcare companies as innovation hubs, and yet it is absolutely imperative to make impactful changes in the future of healthcare. Plugging freelancers into our innovation process has enabled us to scale up highly skilled and hard-to-hire teams very quickly...”
- Tim Berendt, Director of Innovation, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
“At Cprime, clients look to us to help their teams achieve the extraordinary by fusing process and technology, and we’ve been delivering on that promise for decades. When we need to balance capacity with highly skilled tech professionals, we look to freelancers to quickly and efficiently help us with those hard-to-find roles…”
- Zubin Irani, CEO, Cprime
“When teams move as quickly as ZERO’s, it's important that anyone who supports our efforts can hit the ground running. Hiring pre-vetted freelancers ensures we find someone who can plug into the Zero team and our projects seamlessly.”
- Mike Maser, CEO, ZERO
This isn’t a zero-sum game by any means. In fact, if you take a look at the world’s most innovative companies today you’d have a hard time finding any team that’s 100% freelance or FTE.
Instead, you’d find leaders who are actively leveraging both the benefits of FTE and freelancers in order to reach their goals sooner.
If you want to join them and learn more about the benefits freelancers can bring to your team, download our free Distributed Innovation Playbook today. It will give you step-by-step guidance on how to develop high-performing remote teams that can work alongside you and your core team.