Today’s and tomorrow’s organizations are run by people — and, increasingly, skills acquired or contracted through digital talent platforms. This opens up the entire world for talent that can be brought in, for targeted projects, from anywhere across the globe.
“There are over 800 digital talent platforms around the world, offering the services of an estimated 500 million highly skilled freelance professionals,” according to John Winsor and Jin Paik, both with the Laboratory for Innovative Science at Harvard University, in their new book, Open Talent: Leveraging the Global Workforce to Solve Your Biggest Challenges. More often than not, managers are hiring such talent under the radar, versus navigating their organizations’ more formal talent acquisition processes. Essentially, it’s their “secret sauce” for getting things done.
Examples of open-talent marketplaces include Bullhorn, Business Talent Group, FlexTal, Freelancer, Fiverr, FutureStarr, Guru, Kwork, Legiit, Twago, and Upwork.
This business model relies heavily on technology, and lately, AI. But their value proposition is all about people and the skills they can bring to organizations far and wide. Despite the potential and excitement of advanced technology, “final decisions still fall on human shoulders,” Winsor and Paik emphasize. “Real-world work scenarios emphasize the connection between AI’s data-driven insights and human judgment, an interaction that leads to a more accurate and reliable outcome.”
AI works both ways in open-talent scenarios. It benefits businesses, of course. Generative AI technology also enables open talent workers “to embrace their skills, streamline their workflows, and produce better results,” the co-authors point out. “Workers in the open-talent economy juggle multiple projects and clients, necessitating a high degree of adaptability and efficiency.”
Open-talent marketplaces aren’t limited to external talent — companies can, and should, build their own internal marketplaces as well. Winsor and Paik outline the possibilities now available to workers and companies:
- External talent clouds. “Companies can quickly acquire the highly sought-after talent they need to stay competitive by leveraging external talent clouds. In the future, external talent clouds will empower workers to become a part of more than just a paying gig and a rating on the platform. Think critically about what your company can offer in this space as you work with platforms.”
- Internal talent marketplaces. Internal marketplaces enable organizations to use their own on-hand talent to “pivot and at a moment’s notice and redeploy talent to where it’s most needed.” These may serve as complements to traditional HR departments —an important tool they can offer to employees. Such marketplaces give companies “another platform to tap into an ecosystem of talent to work on specific tasks. These marketplaces motivate and enable employees to develop new skills and help managers to tap skills, knowledge, and capabilities across organizational silos.”
- Crowdsourcing for talent and ideas. “Building an open innovation capability in your organization is all about mobilizing crowds to solve different problems — some of the most intransigent problems. Among other advantages, open innovation practices can result in shorter product and development cycles.” This can be run as contests, and “challenge the traditional notions of top-down, in-house ideation. Open innovation has become a go-to tool among organizations looking for novel ideas and dynamic methods of implementation.”
Successfully adopting and managing capabilities through an open-talent platform depends first and foremost on mindset. A “scarcity” or risk-averse mindset will limit organizations’ ability to tap into global talent markets, Winsor and Paik state.
Required to succeed are leaders with abundant mindsets who “recognize that chaos and organizational discomfort can be precursors to innovation,” they continue. They “believe that their talent, creativity, and knowledge can be developed through education, training, coaching, community, and most importantly, the learning that comes from constant experimentation and exposure to different viewpoints.”
Adopting open-talent platforms is easier for smaller companies than large organizations, they point out. “Most users of open talent today are small to midsize businesses, according to our research,” they write. “The average annual spend for businesses using direct self-service platforms is $8,000. That includes the cost to do project work on the platforms; this cost includes payment to the talent and fees to the platform.”
AI is also making it easier for both contract employees and businesses to connect and make their arrangements work. The contractor benefits from increased productivity for multiple clients, while the business can better target and match the skills it seeks with work at hand.
At this time, “most current open talent platforms operate with matching algorithms that are limited to user ratings and search terms,” Winsor and Paik point out. “As a project owner, you need to post a project that gets simplified on the platforms to draw new talent, who then sees the project and decides whether to bid or participate. The project manager doesn’t have much to rely on, except past ratings and the bidder’s user profile, with self-disclosed skills.”
Ultimately, AI-powered platforms “will be able to collect more information about the supply of new talent,” they continue. “The workers come to a platform to validate their own skills, not just through past history on the platform but through a series of assessments and gamified interactions that they take in real time. The rating they received is transformed from platform to platform. The future is about precision. You need to match the required skill with the best people with these skills. AI gets you there faster.”
