Freelancer.com CEO discusses what's in store for product creation

Most companies know there will always be the exceptional situation where a specialist will suddenly be necessary, whether its a tech factory, healthcare firm, designer, you name it. Sometimes you need an advisor, and sometimes you need an electrical engineer.

But there are often fewer engineers on the plan than are needed, a problem that becomes more acute as the projects become more specialized or larger in scale, says Freelancer.com CEO and Chairman Matt Barrie. Additionally, electrical engineering is an area where close isn’t good enough —  a firm needs exactly what it needs in terms of skill set and capacity, and any variation from that is going to have serious, and potentially severe, consequences.

Moreover, he said, access to talent is a competitive advantage.  The firm that can assemble the team they need can ultimately build and put their products into market faster than one that can’t, or can’t do so as quickly.

Which, Barrie noted, is how Freelancer.com ended up working with Arrow Electronics, the largest electrical component supplier on Earth, to build a specialized gig economy platform to connect electrical engineers to the firms that need them. Instead of searching through haystacks to find the needle engineer that can get the job done, Barrie noted, Freelancer and Arrow want to change the nature of the game entirely for both sides of field.

“The magic is in seeing something, a project, that has taken your firm some time to get going on tap into this marketplace and see how fluid and easy it is to get things going. The talent is all there and it is affordable and quick to get things done.”

Read more here.

Join us in Miami Beach, June 5-7 for the Global Online Marketplaces Summit.