Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce

Digital talent platforms have matured, and many companies are using them to hire skilled gig workers. Now they need to get strategic about it.

by

and

Nithya Vaduganathan

by

and

Nithya Vaduganathan

From the Magazine (November–December 2020) · Long read

Paul Wearing

Summary.

As companies struggle with chronic skills shortages and changing labor demographics, a new generation of talent platforms, offering on-demand access to highly trained workers, has begun to help. These platforms include marketplaces for premium expertise (such as Toptal and Catalant), for freelance workers (Upwork and 99designs), and for crowdsourcing innovation (Kaggle and InnoCentive). Almost all Fortune 500 firms use such platforms. But most do so in an ad hoc, inefficient way, according to a Harvard Business School/BCG study. Companies need to get much more strategic about their engagement with talent platforms and fully embrace their ability to increase labor force flexibility, speed time to market, and facilitate business model innovation. That will require rewiring policies and processes and redefining working norms. Most important, leaders must inspire the cultural shift needed to realize the platforms’ transformative potential.

Idea in Brief

The Problem

Thanks to rapid automation, digital transformation, and demographic change, it’s harder than ever for companies to find people with the right skills at the right time.

The Response

Digital talent platforms now offer companies on-demand access to highly skilled workers. Almost all Fortune 500 companies make use of these platforms, but mainly on an ad hoc basis. The process is costly, inefficient, and decidedly not strategic.

The Path Forward

In newly strategic ways, companies need to embrace the full potential of digital talent platforms and the on-demand workforce. Doing so will allow them to create new business models and unlock new sources of value.

In this era of chronic skills shortages, rapid automation, and digital transformation, companies are confronting a growing talent problem, one that has the potential to become a strategic bottleneck. How can they find people with the right skills to do the right work at just the right time? The half-life of skills is shrinking fast, and many jobs now come and go in a matter of years. Not only that, but major demographic changes are under way: Boomers are aging out of the workforce, and Millennials and Gen Z are taking over, bringing with them very different priorities about who should do what work—and where, when, and how it should get done.

A version of this article appeared in the November–December 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Joseph Fuller is a professor of management practice and a faculty cochair of the Project on Managing the Future of Work at Harvard Business School. He also cochairs Harvard’s Project on Workforce, a collaboration among members of the faculty at the university’s schools of business, education, and government.
MR

Manjari Raman is a senior program director and a senior researcher for Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project and the Project on Managing the Future of Work.
Allison Bailey is a senior partner and a managing director at BCG. She leads the firm’s People & Organization practice globally and is a coauthor of several publications on the future of work, the bionic company, digital learning, and upskilling. She is also a fellow of the BCG Henderson Institute.
NV

Nithya Vaduganathan is a managing director and partner at the Boston Consulting Group, a leader in BCG’s People and Organization and Education practices, and a Henderson Institute Fellow on new talent models.

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Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce

Idea in Brief

The Problem

The Response

The Path Forward

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