One-third of HR leaders plan to increase freelance budget in 2023

If you think hiring is going to get any easier in 2023, think again. As The Simpsons warned us: It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

The past two years have seen employers experience tremendous staffing challenges. At the same time, independent work has become more popular than ever. Flexible, cost-effective, and increasingly viable, thanks, in part, to the proliferation of remote work and global hiring, freelancers now make up 36% of the US workforce, according to McKinsey.

A new paradigm. While executives from freelance marketplaces Toptal and Upwork have told HR Brew that demand for independent workers is typically driven by department leaders, they said HR is starting to see value in freelancers as well, integrating them into their talent strategies.

Freelance use-cases rising. “Folks have been much more receptive to hiring high-skilled labor, in pretty much every category,” Taso Du Val, CEO of the freelance platform Toptal, told HR Brew in November.

Small and medium-sized US businesses, for example, are primarily hiring independent workers for administrative, consulting, and creative work, according to a recent report from HR software firm Gusto.

Patrick Pettiti, CEO of Catalant, a marketplace where private equity firms and large corporations hire strategy consultants, has noted a recent increase in hiring independent consultants for mergers and acquisitions, supply-chain management, and strategic planning.

What about 2023? We asked HR Brew readers how much they expect to spend on freelancers in 2023. Some 32% said they plan to increase their freelance budget next year, while 41% said it would be the same, and 26% said they plan to spend less. What are your freelancer budget plans for next year? Let us know.—AK

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