The hidden cost of a free agent talent pool

Posted by: Joel Capperella

With current economic conditions driving companies to cut staff, career options are limited for the quickly-growing pool of available talent. Few, if any, companies are actively looking to increase their full-time staff, thus driving a growing number of workers to engage in freelance and project-by-project contract job opportunities.

In her article in The Wall Street Journal today, Sarah Needleman profiles several individuals who are currently negotiating the freelance economy. What she doesn’t address, however, is that while the free agency model may be beneficial to workers struggling to find work otherwise, it contains an inherent risk to firms employing this talent. Without control mechanisms in place, it could lead to a fairly significant and often unrecognized uptick in cost for the firms employing such talent.

I’m eager to track this trend and see if it is yet another signal to the U.S. labor market that the composition of our everyday workforce is dramatically shifting and becoming more complicated. I suspect the change is here to stay, and that large, global firms will have to adopt more complex workforce planning strategies to manage the evolution of the workforce.