Although the jobless numbers remain stubbornly high, project-based work is not yet considered by many. This sector of the job market is changing the way companies are employing and has to potential to growing by leaps and bounds. New crowd-sourcing models such as UFOstart are taking the model even further through innovative work-for-equity models.
We all know what crowdsourcing is - soliciting contributions from a large group of people. The so-called "power of the crowd" can be greatly used to get jobs done in an efficient way. If a company has a number of short-term tasks, they can tap into a vast pool of freelancers and choose the most qualified and well-suited expert. With several projects running in parallel, the freelancers can focus on their specific tasks and defined KPIs. While this not only turns a job description into an action list, it also decreases the chance of a sub-project falling off the end of a to-do list.
Although there are certain downsides for the short-term employees (lack of health or pension benefits, f.ex.), many value the added flexibility and independence from an employer. It is a great way for people in between jobs to keep being productive and allows others to explore working across different industries or project types. Freelancing is a great way to broaden your expertise and experience different jobs while choosing the ones that fit your interest and schedule. Overall, it helps to keep the job market dynamic and moving, while ensuring a good match up of skills to project needs.
Also, crowdsourcing jobs is an ideal way for a business to reduce the fix cost of long term employees. If you are still in seed stage, with financial uncertainties ahead, you most likely aren't able to make long-term promises to your employees. While the core team of Co-Founders and key managers should not come and go, smaller tasks and projects can be ideally crowdsourced. In order to be lean and to get things done in the most efficient and simultaneous way, start ups should start living in a project based world and see who is willing to contribute to their success story.
To conclude: We are not yet living in a project based job world but we definitely should be. Conventional news outlets have not been very vocal about the potential of online job marketplaces outside of the bigger names like Career Builder and Monster. However, as small business owners begin to be aware of the potential of using freelancers versus hiring long-term employees, it is likely the economy will spur the growth of the project based job world. This may become more common as people start valuing the flexibility and dynamics of freelancing and short-term jobs.
Join UFOstarts Hangout on Air this coming Monday (04-22-13) to see how startups can launch their idea by crowdsourcing their job, asset, funding and customer needs!
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If you are interested in learning more about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, contact UFOStart for more information. UFOstart revolves around leveraging the power of the Internet to generate, filter, and escalate innovative ideas. In addition, we want to encourage the notion of project based work resulting in equity in a company for the worker.
