The gig economy is the term used for the labour market where skilled individuals offer services on a short-term, part-time, or freelance basis. Professionals who work in the gig economy take on projects that provide great flexibility, allowing them to work at their own pace anywhere.
The gig apps are digital marketplaces where freelancers find quick jobs, and businesses hire people to complete assignments with measurable results and are time-bound. Specialized professionals offer services to companies like Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, website development, and graphic designing through the best gig economy applications.
The gig economy offers a unique set of benefits for both the workers and employers. With more people preferring this working model over the traditional 9-5, companies now have a diverse pool of talent to choose from to take on different projects.
The gig economy suits a significant number of businesses, and this post will explain why. Read on below to learn more.
Hiring An Employee For A Defined Start And End Date Becomes Easier
One of the challenges that HR faces when recruiting full-time staff to help on a particular project is defining the new member’s permanent role. This is especially true for service-based businesses that work via contracts.
A software development firm, for example, wins a significant project wherein a particular programming skill is needed. However, their current in-house team lacks the skill that the project requires, so HR would move on to recruit a new team member who will fill the gap. This could be an excellent move for the company until the contract ends, and the next set of projects no longer require the skills that the new team member possesses. This will leave the HR in a strategic and moral dilemma of whether to keep the person or let go of him despite promising the long-term employee benefits.
The next few weeks would be horrible, not only for HR but for you as a business owner. If you want to avoid this kind of problem, you can try to delve into the best gig economy applications and find a gigger who has the skills that your company needs at the moment. The good thing about getting someone from gig apps is that you can be straightforward about the period of employment. Since freelancers are willing to take on project-based work, ending a project and the job of your new team member would become cleaner and easier.
Tap Gig Apps For Experts To Help Upgrade Your Digital Presence
It’s not enough that your business is doing great physically. As a business owner, you have to ensure that your prospects can easily find you in the digital space. Forming an in-house digital marketing team can be expensive, so you might want to check some experts from the best gig economy apps to help you carry out digital marketing tasks on an assignment basis.
A freelance web designer can help you make your website mobile-friendly. A freelance SEO expert can help you update your blog and make its content SEO-friendly. You can also hire a gigger to look into your online reputation. You can also look for a social media marketing freelancer to help you advertise your services or products on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Specialized professionals from gig apps can help keep pace with your competitors in this connected world.
Hire On-Demand Expertise
As already mentioned above, the best gig economy apps are home to individuals with specialized skills and expertise. You can work within your budget and hire them for project-based work. Expertise ranging from presentation designing, animation, video creation, to search engine optimization, gig apps has almost everything that you need for your business to thrive in the highly competitive market.
Get Things Off The Ground During Your Startup Stage
Small businesses are frequent customers of the best gig economy apps, and it’s understandable why. Small business owners don’t have the budget to immediately hire full-time employees to help them get things off the ground. Freelancers can help with your business growth initiatives since they can take on the smaller, one-off task, and continue working on more significant projects as long as your business needs them. No need to worry about spending hefty amounts onboarding a full-time staff when you’re only starting, freelancers have the skill set that will help you meet initial business needs and goals.
Lower Recruitment Overheads
Again, expect a costly affair if you’re employing full-time staff. While having a full-time, in-house team is not a bad idea, you have to make sure that you’re only investing in full-time employment in areas of your business where it’s absolutely necessary.
Minimal in-house staff, combined with a handful of freelancers to take on projects or work in your company, would mean far lower recruitment costs. This is going to be beneficial, especially to startup businesses that don’t have the necessary funds to maintain regular working staff.
Accomplish Round-The-Clock Work
Gig apps have freelancers coming from different parts of the globe. So, if you have projects that need some round-the-clock work, find gig economy workers from a different time zone, like the Philippines. When your day ends, these freelancers from other countries can continue working on the project, so when you reach your office the next morning, everything is done and dusted.
Enjoy Cost-Transparency When Hiring
Whether you’re hiring for a full-time employee or a freelancer, the cost will always be an essential consideration. Another good thing about the best gig economy applications is that freelancers can display their rates for various skill offerings. That said, it would be easier for business owners like you to find someone to work for you based on the current budget that you have.
Gig apps also have functionalities like filtering wherein you’ll have the option to filter your search results based on the skills, hourly rate, and work feedback of freelancers. Once you find several candidates who meet your requirements, you can then set up a meeting with them and interview each freelancer through an audio or video call.
Once you have identified your ideal freelancer, you can then outline the schedule of work and define the project deliverables so you’ll be on the same page and be in sync towards achieving the goals of the project.
A Wider Pool Of Talent To Pick From
It almost always happens, HR recruiting the wrong people for a significant project. The project fails or unable to meet expectations from your client, and it will cost your business a lot. Why settle with the wrong types of candidates when you can easily tap talents from gig apps using your mobile phone? Quality over quantity, that’s what you’re getting from gig economy workers.
Searching for the right person to work for you in a particular project using gig apps has never been easier with filtering features available. This means that you can easily find a freelancer based on rate, skill offer, reviews, and a whole lot of metrics.
Check Social Proof Before Hiring
In today’s connected world, social proof becomes the cornerstone of success for all kinds of businesses. You see social proof everywhere in the digital space. Freelancers strive to build positive social proof into their communication and services. As a business owner, you can take advantage of social proof before hiring to ensure that you’re getting the right person for the job.
Using the filtering feature of most gig apps, you can search for candidates and check their metrics, including star ratings, top seller tags, and comments from clients or people they have worked with previously.
Upskill Your In-House Employees By Hiring Coaches and Consultants
A full-time job leaves almost no room for development. With all the deliverables, bottom lines, and metrics that have to be met, it’s difficult for employees to stay ahead of the knowledge curve. As a business owner, you can help your in-house team grow through pieces of training and seminars that promote skill-building and motivation.
Things that hinder organizations from conducting in-house exercises for employees are cost and the difficulty of finding an expert to lead the activities. The good news is there are now coaches, educators, and even psychologists in the gig economy waiting for you to tap their services. And since they’re gig economy workers, you can negotiate with the rate and maybe onboard them for a much more affordable price if you get lucky.
Divert Internal Learning Budget To Other Important Areas Of The Business
If you want to ditch the idea of spending on the development of your in-house team, you can still benefit from the best gig economy applications by turning to gig workers and freelancers who are responsible for their development. That said, the cost of employee development and training will fall, and you can divert the budget to other essential areas of the business. In this setup, you need to trust that your chosen freelancers will do the necessary steps to learn more so they could contribute more to the success of the project. The best gig economy applications can help you ensure that you’re getting quality freelancers with their strict admission process, which means that only the best gig workers can sell their services in the app.
Experiment And Benefit From New Business Models
There’s nothing wrong with doing some experiments in your business and trying out new things. Creating new business models based on the current behaviour of consumers and your target market can be carried out with the help of freelancers from the best gig economy apps. A lot of companies have enjoyed success because of innovation, and these organizations employ many gig workers to be part of their team. New business models, when done right, would bring phenomenal growth, something that’s impossible to achieve with your in-house team alone.
Take Advantage Of Flexible Working Patterns For Project-Based Work
Does your business have a project with a tight deadline or needs some ad-hoc revisions? Use the best gig economy applications to call on a professional to work at odd hours to accomplish the project for you. Gig economy workers are open to flexible hours of work outside the regular hours of a working week. As a business owner, this may sound very new to you, and getting away from the 9-5 work setting can be alarming. Still, if you have projects that need overtime work, freelancers will always be the most affordable option to help you deliver everything to the client on time.
Use Technology To Your Advantage
The best gig economy applications are products of technological advancement. For business owners, these digital marketplaces are a great platform to collaborate with freelancers who offer a massive range of in-demand skills at affordable pricing. It only takes a couple of minutes for an employer to find the right fit for a project and start working with someone who has the expertise to help the business achieve its goals. Your competitors are using technology to their advantage by using gig apps, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t try it.
Save On Paying For Employee Benefits
While employers can provide benefits to freelancers, the gig economy is not expecting it. You are not required to pay for pension, medical, and other regular employee benefits, which can save you a significant amount of money.
Additional Opportunities for Your Business
The freelancers that you can find in the best gig economy applications can open additional opportunities for your business. They are not always the ‘hire-and-forget’ type of workers; these people have built their network through years of working with different clients, and who knows they can introduce you to a possible business partner. Gig economy workers also continuously skill up so they might have something in their arsenal that can help you take on new projects even if you hired them for a different skill. There’s a world of opportunity for both businesses and freelancers in gig apps; they are just waiting to be discovered.
The gig economy trend is continuing to gain traction, and business owners should be flexible, be open to innovations, and do their due diligence in research to take advantage of this entirely new workforce environment.
Final Thoughts
While the gig economy isn’t for every business, it’s hard to think of many companies where freelancers wouldn’t be a beneficial option in some form or shape.
The challenge for business owners is to accept the future of work, take risks, and allay their fears about the use of gig apps to find specialized professionals to help them take on new opportunities.
The information in this post should be more than enough to help you understand how can the best gig economy applications help your business, and it’s already up to you if you’ll be open to change or not.
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