As I have highlighted in Part I of this article, there is an increasing demand from corporations on having a more flexible and blended workforce. It often becomes more complicated when the projects at hand require a team of talents with many different skill sets, especially larger projects that pay more. For example, a mixed media project may involve a writer, a graphic designer, an illustrator and an art director working together to create the final piece. Another project may be to produce social media content requiring a videographer, a VFX/sound specialist and a marketer. This is called freelancing collaboration and is a growing trend since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Traditionally when selecting individual freelancers, employers tend to look for credentials including online résumés, reviews, ratings and endorsements which oftentimes can be subjective and biased, albeit informational. Selecting a team of freelancers is even more challenging than individual freelancers, especially when there are no objective metrics for assessing the candidates’ specific skill levels. Employers can certainly make use of our gamified scoring system to overcome this drawback. Alternatively, they can select freelancers from our Project Manager (PM) community who can hand pick their own team members based on the requirements of the projects. This might be much easier for employers as they only need to liaise with the PM freelancer without the daunting task of managing an entire team of talents in different locations with varying cultures.
PMs will also be able to form permanent teams and earn points at the team level to compete with other teams in bidding for larger projects. Eventually they may become online companies within our platform, having their own unique rewards and features to recruit new freelancers to their teams. In order to facilitate the PMs, we will have financial reporting, invoicing, scheduling, video conferencing and editing suites as well as plug-in capabilities for additional third-party applications. Dashboards will be available for them to view individuals’ points, badges, levels and other statistics in selecting the most optimal candidates and managing the teams. We will provide users with self-service, out-of-the-box experiences that scale across our other connected platforms, allowing them to work in a unique digital workplace.
Ecosystem of Freelancers
As we know from Part I, the percentage of full-time freelancers have increased from less than 25% to over 33% since 2020, with the majority of them being Millennials and Gen Zers. The continual supply of full-time freelance talents is key in keeping pace with the increasing demand in a blended workforce. One of the ways we can achieve this is to form partnerships with educational institutions or online educators for youth, providing students with a head start in becoming successful freelancers when they become adults. Students earn credits upon course completion and these credits can be converted into Alchemunity points. They can join our mentorship program and learn from our subject matter experts suitable for their current curriculum or in any skill communities they are interested in. The mentorship program will also enable them to earn points directly through entries into contests, quests and even mock projects posted on the platform. Opportunities to be placed in internship programs offered by employers are also available for them. This form of partnership will serve as a grooming ground for us in achieving the goal of creating a continuing supply of freelance talents. Not only can students become freelancers in the future, their teaching professionals can also help us design contests and tests or even create their own teaching contents and join our mentorship programs to potentially their career as freelancers.
As students will have real life project experience and mentorship from experienced industry participants, this should help attract enrolment for the institutions and online educators. Furthermore, we can provide useful statistics on their students’ progress as freelancers for their assessment and promotional purposes. They can engage with the mentors from the program and potentially engage them to teach on their platforms. They can also hire programmers, designers or freelancers from any of our skilled communities at partnership rates to help further develop or enhance their platforms. At the same time, freelancers who are engaged with our partners can receive bonus points and features as rewards.
We will also form partnerships with recruiters and ecosystem platforms like Payoneer and MybasePay. Recruiters can select from our pool of talents with the metrics they need for better assessment. They can also have their own candidates join our platform to better gauge their skill levels as measured against fellow community members. Partnering with ecosystem systems should help us attract and maintain full-time freelancers as their innovative finance applications and services such as health insurance, retirement saving plans, loans and mortgages can be offered on an individual or group basis.
We are extremely excited about this freelancing revolution and we want you to be part of this journey. We are currently doing our phase 1 launch (beta version) and are giving away free points and credits for early adopters for the first 3 months. Come and register with us now!
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