The “Future of Work” has been an area of interest in the tech world that has gained momentum in the past several years. This is largely shaped by two powerful forces: growing adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace, and the expansion of the workforce to include both permanent and flexible employees. The latter has continued to gain steam as the number of working class individuals who choose to work as freelancers is increasing as employees prioritize schedule flexibility and work-life balance.
There are several trends that have led to the rise of the flexible workforce. First, millennials, who continue to take up a larger percentage of the total workforce, prefer the lifestyle of working remotely from their homes or from other parts of the world. Moreover, they enjoy the possibility of working on new projects frequently as well as having more autonomy and independence by not being tied down to one company. Secondly, the rise of cloud-computing and real time collaboration tools such as Slack, Zoom, and Trello have enabled remote work environments to become more fluid and efficient even if not all of the team members are present in a physical office location. Next, as presented by DHI Group, the average time taken to fill a job vacancy in the U.S. was 31 working days, an increase of 80% from a decade ago. This time requirement is burdensome to many enterprises who end up hiring more freelancers that are much faster and readily available to hire. Finally, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the trend where alternative workforce has now become mainstream and the number of online freelancers in software and tech jobs has increased significantly. There has been an increased focus on companies to become more agile through on-demand workforce in hiring during today’s fast-moving, unpredictable business environment to survive turmoil on a large scale.
As a result of these macro trends, the freelance economy has ballooned to make up approximately 35% of the workforce around the world and is expected to compose more than 60% of the global workforce by 2030. These 55 million freelancers represent a variety of backgrounds ranging from data scientists and full stack engineers to graphic designers and content writers. Companies have also started to adapt to this trend as 59% of hiring managers indicated that they were leveraging flexible talent in some form. However, the companies hiring a flexible workforce continue to see issues that are quite different from recruiting and hiring a permanent workforce such as sourcing the right talent or managing and monitoring the freelancer’s tasks. Many companies have shied away from looking into the flexible employee pool as a result of these issues.
The freelance market is currently estimated to be an $8 billion market that has the possibility to expand into an over $50 billion market if the freelancer economy continues to grow in the current trajectory. In the current economy, online marketplaces for freelancers are the primary source of hiring freelancers. These marketplaces help locate talent but are primarily aimed at consumer and ad-hoc markets and not streamlined for corporate use. For medium and large companies, the process of hiring and managing freelancers is highly disorganized and difficult, managed through a combination of email and Excel spreadsheets. As working with on-demand talent is fraught with complicated issues that require a different set of tools and knowledge, more companies are looking for dedicated experts in this space to lead their on-demand recruiting efforts.
Kli Capital portfolio company, Stoke Talent, provides an end-to-end platform that allows enterprises to manage and monitor their flexible workforce, from sourcing to payments to offboarding as well as focusing on keeping legal, tax, and workforce classification at bay. Stoke’s talent-on-demand platform enables companies to find, hire and manage freelancers at scale by providing organizations with a management platform for their existing external workforce. Moreover, the company is also integrated with popular online freelance marketplaces, which gives the customers the ability to leverage these marketplaces using Stoke’s unified and intuitive interface. The company’s management platform creates a scalable solution that offers transparency, control and compliance assurance while equipping the customer’s recruiting team with all of the necessary on-demand recruiting tools such as sourcing, onboarding, conducting background checks, task monitoring and management, managing benefit plans, ensuring that the workers are compliant with company policies, payments, offboarding, and many more.
“We’ve directly experienced the challenges associated with recruiting and managing a flexible workforce and understand how limited the available resources are for recruiting managers to build out a truly flexible team,” commented Shahar, CEO of Stoke Talent, “We believe we have created an all encompassing platform that will give the tools to our customers to hire and manage their ideal workforce.”
Based in Tel Aviv, Stoke Talent was founded in 2018 by Shahar Erez and Hilik Paz who wanted to solve the problem of lack of on-demand recruiting platforms that can be easily used by companies at scale. The two entrepreneurs had experience managing departments in large technology companies that gave them first-hand experience of the challenges associated with hiring a flexible workforce. The Company raised a $4.5 million seed round in 2019, led by TLV Partners and had participating investments from former Google executive Bogomil Balkansky, Flatiron Health founder Zach Weinberg and Kli Capital. The Kli Capital team continues to believe that Stoke Talent provides an essential product to enterprise customers looking to build out and manage their flexible workforce and is excited to see where Shahar and Hilik will take the company next.
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