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January 27, 2016

Work Market Helps Companies Manage the On-Demand Workforce

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

We live in the on-demand society. Companies like Airbnb, Amazon, Apple (News - Alert), Rent the Runway, and Uber have put lodging, books and other consumer goods, movies and music, clothing, and transportation at consumers’ fingertips.



A similar trend is taking place for businesses as they seek workers. Rather than having to hire on full-time employees, organizations are increasingly using freelance workers.

Indeed, the number of jobs done primarily by part-time or contracted workers rose from 20 million to 32 million between 2001 and 2014, according to Economic Modeling Specialists International. And, according to Work Market, 53 million of Americans now do at least some contract work.

Leveraging contractors can save companies big on expenses, allowing them to be sure they’re paying only for work produced, and enable them to be more agile in attacking new market opportunities. However, recruiting, validating and verifying, paying, and rating the individuals in this ever-changing workforce can create whole new challenges.

Work Market caters to companies seeking assistance on this front and helps them automate these processes. In an interview today at ITEXPO (News - Alert), Glenn Nortman, Work Market director of strategic accounts, said in addition to recruiting and vetting the recruits, the company can help automate the rest of the onboarding and offboarding process.

Work Market compensates the contractors not by cutting checks, but rather by depositing funds into freelancers’ bank or PayPal (News - Alert) accounts. Work Market also weeds out less productive contractors by leveraging a rating system through which clients record whether workers are on time, have the skills they said they did, are engaged in their work, are meeting the required goals, and have good communication skills.

Work Market, which has more than 60,000 contractors in North America, focuses primarily on the technology vertical. That includes digital signage, networking, point of sale, and telecommunications work. Yahoo! is among its customers, leveraging Work Market to help manage its ecosystem of bloggers worldwide. As a result, Yahoo! has reduced its operating costs on this front by 40 percent and decreased the payment cycle from eight weeks to just eight days.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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