It’s clear that for many companies today, having a permanent, full-time workforce is fraught with growing peril as employees fail to keep their skills up to date. 

In our fast-changing global and Internet-driven marketplace, increasingly desperate organizations are turning to external and temporary workforces to fill their talent gaps. One of the things that the Covid-19 pandemic showed us was that organizations with large work forces were most affected as they were shut down for over 2 months. This was further aggravated by the fact that the majority of SMEs had less than 30 days of cash flow. Less than a month of cash on hand.

Now, whether you need to rebrand, design a new app, build a website, create a specific design or access specialised developers or data scientists, double-sided marketplaces such as Upwork or 99 Designs all assist organizations in finding talent rapidly, efficiently and most of the time, at a fraction of the cost compared to in-house human resources.

These companies, which represent just the first wave of this new way to access outside talent, optimize the concept of paying for performance and lead to a reduced customer risk. 

Kaggle, for example, is an interesting example of a data science company that hosts private and public algorithm contests. 

Algorithm specialists and students can join in the many open competitions whereby they compete for prizes and recognition whilst learning from each other in the process. 

Kiva, a crowdfunding platform that offers loans and other financial services to poor and financially excluded people around the world, turned to Kaggle to run a competition to find out where and how they could best grant loans. 

Kiva gave access to their data pool of $1 billion USD in loans that was granted to over 2 million people. This data was then used in conjunction with different public data sets in order to gauge and eventually maximise the impact of their financial offerings. 

The result was that Scientists at Kaggle were able to analyse the level of poverty in the regions where Kiva has active loans and use these new findings accordingly.

Here’s a list of the marketplaces you can go to for Staff on Demand:

• Upwork
• 99 Designs
• Task Rabbit
• Roamler
• Top Coder
• Fiverr
• Kaggle

Have you used any other alternative platform so far? How was the experience?

Learn about the attributes of exponential organizations, work through the exercises to develop your own strategy for scale and learn from over 20 hours of video tutorials and collaborative videos, 1500+ pages in over 30 presentation decks on the intersection of technology, leadership and personal development.

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