“Research shows that the No. 1 reason businesses hire freelancers is to scale their business up and down quickly,” Elance’s CMO Rich Pearson told
VentureBeat.
“Getting access to the best talent often takes time and the process can be very cumbersome for everyone involved. Freelancers are currently managed by disparate people and teams across an organization. Now businesses can bring all of their existing freelance and contract talent into their own private network, which operates much like a social network.”
Elance is a jobs site in which organizations post their assignments and freelancers can submit their bids. Managers can choose between price and quality, as the site offers a rating system for prior work.
Elance, which leverages the concept of crowdsourcing from providers all over the world, has grown in popularity as companies look for cost efficient ways to get short-term assignments completed. Job categories include IT, writing, sales and marketing, design, and administration.
The use of contractors, seasonal workers, and freelancers has grown in popularity as companies scale back on full-time employees due to Obamacare. Contractors also enable businesses to scale up and down their operations fairly quickly.
Private Talent Cloud[/url lets companies manage their contractors via a social network-type interface aimed at simplifying the processes of project management. Elance’s move should exert pressure on competitors like oDesk, Freelancer.com, and Guru to add functionalities that differentiate their sites.
“This is the most the most significant shift in Elance’s business since our relaunch in 2007,” Pearson told VentureBeat. “We are currently the only company offering a fully-integrated enterprise platform and we estimate that it will comprise more than 50 [percent] of our business in two years.”
