Will Freelancing Kill Jobs?

Call it on-demand economy, sharing economy, gig economy, freelance economy, peer economy, access economy, or instant gratification economy – sharing of resources accessible instantly is the fundamental change occurring that might well make the concept of ‘owning’ obsolete in few years. And specialized independent human capital aka freelancers are the main beneficiaries of this change, served on freelancing platforms that are democratizing the way businesses would engage with talent in 21st century.

- Sandeep Soni

The ‘uberisation’ of everything right from cabs to clothes including meteoric rise of freelancers in Silicon Valley, thanks to smartphone penetration and start-up boom, has cascaded onto the Indian ecosystem. Freelancing today is no more considered to be the poor cousin of a full time job, done mostly by people in the creative space or by those who are ‘unable’ to find a job for whatever reasons.

FLEXIBILITY FOR ALL

Freelancing is now being seen as a catalyst to micro entrepreneurship where people lend their skills and talent to businesses, (particularly start-ups and small businesses), grow their network, get more exposure, tap on diverse opportunities, and earn an equal handsome amount of money. Hiring freelancers for a specific project especially for start-ups help drive time and cost efficiency by avoiding multiple days of time taken to hire right employees and overhead costs in giving provident fund, training, physical office space, IT etc., particularly because their existence for initial few years remains uncertain.

“Cost is a big factor for businesses to switch to freelancing. It allows them experimenting with different things in business,” says Dipesh Garg, Founder, Truelancer. Garg started the platform in September 2014 after working as a freelancer for various start-ups in India and the US where “payment was inconsistent and there was no proper way to track how much work I have done. So, there was a necessity of a third party intermediary platform to ensure the truthfulness of both freelancer and the client since in freelancing, there is no formal work agreement.”