The Strategic Advantage of Tapping Freelancers

The rapid pace of technological change is making a big impact on hiring. Some organizations are dynamically securing freelance workers through platform apps like Upwork and Freelancer. Other companies are investing heavily in work enabled by artificial intelligence.

John Winsor and Jin Paik say these structural changes call for a reimagining of your talent strategy—one that is open to flexible, project-based work for talent inside or outside your organization—and they explain how to go about it.

Winsor is the founder and chair of Open Assembly and an executive-in-residence at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. Paik is a cofounder and managing partner at the AI consultancy Altruistic and a visiting research scientist at Harvard Business School. Together, they wrote the book Open Talent: Leveraging the Global Workforce to Solve Your Biggest Challenges and the HBR article “Do You Need an External Talent Cloud?“

Key episode topics include: talent strategy, competitive strategy, talent management, freelancing, gig economy, contractors, agile project management

HBR On Strategy curates the best conversations and case studies with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

• Listen to the full HBR IdeaCast episode: What the New Freelance Economy Means for Your Talent Strategy
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